Clearly OP has never used PC-DOS, MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11, MacOS, OSX, or AmigaOS, all of which do not come with a C compiler installed out of the box. Even Ubuntu does not have gcc or build headers installed in a default install (must install build-essentials package first).

Yen?

Scrubs and Stargate SG1 are my cozy shows.

My current workplace only allows whitelisted applications to run, and you must install them via the company portal. At my old workplace I used Linux with Kde Plasma, and Meld. New workplace has windows 11 only, and I was trying to find a replacement for Meld. When I started here, I noticed Beyond Compare is on the list. I’d heard of it before, but never used it. I installed it and it’s great! So happy that’s the one diffing tool they allow.

For those who don’t know the history, Servo was the very first Rust project to ever exist.

Back in 2012, Mozilla knew that their Gecko web engine was already getting old and unmaintainable. One of the engineers in their R&D department Mozilla Research was quietly working on a new programming language, so they adopted that to start work on their new browser engine, Servo.

Rust v1.0 was released to the public in 2015, and was much more popular than the new browser engine it was used to create. Mozilla Research eventually gave up the idea of a new browser engine, but they did merge some of the Servo features into Gecko. Mozilla Research was shut down in 2020, and the Servo project was taken over by the Linux Foundation.

Oh that takes me back. MUDs are still a thing?

I had the opposite. I played it about 6 months after release, I’d heard all the “the cake is a lie” memes, but somehow I hadn’t heard that song and it caught me totally by surprise at the end of the game. It was such a good experience.

The portal 2 song is good too, but nothing like the feeling of beating the first game and hearing Still Alive.

The example I gave with my wife was a superficial hypothetical scenario to illustrate my point. She usually doesn’t actually push back on it, she has been married to me long enough now to understand my neuro idiosyncracies.

I’m ASD and ADHD, so I’ve been told that decision fatigue is a common symptom. But I also know neuro typical people in my field who experience the exact same issue.

There’s a lot of factors that go into it, and everyone will have a different experience. There are some people who make an average of zero decisions in their normal day. There are some who are required to make hundreds of decisions per day. There are some people in highly stressful jobs who need to make very important decisions. Some people have naturally higher capacity for decisions than others.

Sometimes after a long day of work, my wife will come and ask me a simple question like “which of these two colours should we get for the new curtains?” And I’ll respond, “I don’t know, I can’t decide right now, I’m out of mental capacity”, she’ll push and say “just choose one”, and I have to explain “seriously. I physically cannot. I’ve spent all my decision making quota today. It’s not possible for me to make another decision”.

Lots of things. The main one is dust mites. Any clothes that I have in my closet or drawers that I haven’t worn for a while will make me sneeze uncontrollably for an hour if I pick them up. Same if I get a spare sheet from the linen closet, if it’s been in there for months, it will set me off. When I vacuum the house, I need to use one of those hypoallergenic HEPA vacuum filters. Dust mites are everywhere all the time, no matter how well you clean your house. Technically it is the shedded and disintegrated shells of dead dust mites that people are allergic to, it accumulates over time in places the mites live.

Other than that, I’m also quite badly allergic to black mold, and have a reaction to pollen and grass seeds.

I’ve never taken a proper allergy test, I’ve probably got others I don’t even know about.

I got the first Pokemon game (Pokemon Red) when I was 14 years old. I never watched the anime. Back then the game was revolutionary, I’d never played anything like it. The goal of collecting all Pokemon, gaining experience to level up, evolving to make new Pokemon, selecting and organising my squad, it really played into my young brain chemistry. I finished it multiple times. I got a game boy link cable to trade Pokemon with my friends and battle them at school. Thats exactly who the game is made for.

I also played and finished Pokemon Silver, and Crystal. But after that I stopped playing them. Too similar, too repetitive, too many different Pokemon to know and remember, mechanics got too complicated.

+1 for Gentoo

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Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.

Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed. All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.

I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.

Pypy is often considered the “best” alternative Python implementation. In some cases it can be much faster. But it’s often one or two versions behind, and not 100% compatible, and of course it doesn’t work with native Cpython extensions.

Man, you’re basically saying “I want to move to a new country, but I don’t want to lose any of my friends, I can’t change my job, I don’t want to learn a new language, I want to bring all my furniture and appliances with me, and we just had a new baby a month ago so I’m sleep deprived and don’t have any spare time. How do I do it?”

I’ve been in the tech industry for 20 years. I undertook an IT degree in 2004 (for microprocessor architecture) and another in 2014 (for software engineering).

Both times I observed three distinct styles of student. The first were those who heard they could make big money in IT. They didn’t have any interest in the field, knew little to nothing about computers, and massively underestimated the difficulty of the course work. Very few of these made it past first year.

The second group were the “enthusiasts”, the kind of people who ran their group’s local LAN party every month and own an ethernet hub. The kind who reformat their PC every 6 weeks to keep it running fast. They built their own PC when they were 16. These kind think first year is a breeze, and don’t even read the text book, but are quickly out of their depth in second year.

Finally are the autists. These are the ones who you can just tell they have a deep special interest in the field. You ask them a question about metaprogramming in Python, or database denormalization and they talk your ear off for an hour. These people read the whole textbook in the first week of class. They correct the professor when he gets something wrong (but politely, by email, after class).

My point is, in my experience, there are always some percentage of neurotypicals and those who are motivated by the money in every year, and has been for more than 20 years. I don’t think it’s getting more prevalent. Maybe now due to higher levels of diagnosis and increasing social awareness, it’s easier to spot the autists, and perhaps due to the AI boom, the money chasers are easier to spot too.

Do you have any favourite PWAs you use for work or at home?

I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.