Just to second that, the model series is Latitude, not Inspiron. and yeah, the i5 processor options I got over the years beat the i7 on processing power. The Precision models are a step up, but not any kind of low cost and seem not quite as tough.

Bash is always there, and bash scripts and snippets are precise. Describing gui manipulations when the GUI keeps changing is also quite hard… what if the person you are interacting with has a 2-yo system and you have the bleeding edge? Even knowing which menu the settings are in can be frustrating for the helper.

Windows users (e.g. me at work) get grumpy when Microsoft starts changing the menu structure after keeping it consistent for 20 years and start thinking of powershell scripts to create consistency between our engineering workstations.

Oh! I know! I would have to first install them, roght?

They are text files. If there is anything weird about them it is that they are indented with spaces and if you are inconsistent with indentation they won’t read into the yaml import function, but I can’t imagine why vim or nano would have a problem with opening them. Maybe the ones you were using were not actually yaml.

Totally lost me. Why the hate on YAML?

If you want the job, go back. If they don’t want to deal with a fragile person then it is up to them to fire you. Next time just say “I don’t know” and keep flipping burgers.

This is a false equivalence. The content of the art discussed here has no labels or logos. As soon as you posit the existence of such content, IMO you are in a different conversation.

Mint.

General pickyness: Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. For example, Android and Mint are both operating systems that use Linux, but the way you interact with Android is dramatically different than the way you interact with Mint.

Thanks for the helpful response. The BC looks like a potentially very useful anti-bugging tool.

Well, I suppose the DoD association probably turned off a lot of people… but the language lived up to its promise of being a strict schoolmarm so if that is what people are looking for these days it is still an option. It can link with C, not sure about C++.I am not sure what being in the Linux or Windows kernels says other than reinforcement of the popularity contest… Windows is proprietary, and Rust being in Linux is hardly controversy-free.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. I also found this:

https://blog.adacore.com/should-i-choose-ada-spark-or-rust-over-c-c#%3A~%3Atext=Rust+pushes+memory+safety+very%2CThese+are+just+two+examples.

I have only skimmed the surface of learning Rust, but I am wondering what it has over Ada. The memory safety features that Rust emphasizes have been standard there for 40 years, and just as unglamorous compared to C++.

I tend to focus on scripting nowadays… R and Pyrhon… with the odd C++ for high-speed algorithms because it is popular. But is Rust merely a new face on Ada?

Don’t all these foodstuffs end up getting converted to carbon dioxide eventually anyway? Whether people eat them or microbes rot them they are in a carbon cycle.

I think having people eat is good, but this seems misleading.

I think you meant “propagated”.

How do you monitor your email functionality? How long would it be before you noticed it was offline? What about paying for and configuring the new email server?

Sure it is, if you don’t understand economics, which few Merkins do. The evidence is right in front of us.

Read other people’s code… particularly code by experienced developers. One good way to do that is to single-step debugging through the test code in a well-known package, stepping into the code being tested.

I suppose if you don’t know how test frameworks like pytest work, tackling how they work and how to do single-stepping with some toy example code will be a prerequisite for the above, as will spending some time studying how packages are made. (The latter may seem unattractively tedious, but the knowledge will pay off even if you never become an expert at making your own packages.)

These exercises are very likely to expose weaknesses in your understanding of all sorts of things. Be patient and keep studying!

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

bit of a cutthroat way to characterize what you “like”. Might actually make the interviewer downvote you for threatening their position.

I stopped buying phones from carriers 15 years ago for this very reason.

Stumped? This [theorem]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem) is a contender for most different proofs.

Noob question?

You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.