I may or may not have done this haha. I’m a threat to any working piece of software, just enough knowledge to be able to break shit and too little knowledge to avoid breaking shit. I think after all these years I’ve mostly learnt my lesson though. The package manager is the boss, and if I don’t like it I have to work around it without upsetting the package manager

Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.

I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.

This made me struggle with anything that didn’t interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more “logic driven” subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I’d spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me

Autism definitely isn’t a “super weapon” like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.

All those with a known number attached (or when I’m expecting an unknown call). Probably 70-80%. But I rarely call, maybe like once or twice a month

The “Forgetting How Your Own Code Works” is real. I’ve looked at code, thought to myself “what fcking idiot wrote this garbage”, only to see my own name next to it. It’s a very humbling experience

I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.

Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.

Video games are honestly incredible. The prices have stayed relatively the same for a very long time, despite inflation, and yet the quality has shot up immensely. On the one end you have the AAA games like Cyberpunk, Jedi: Survivor, and RDR2 which look absolutely stunning. I’ve spent significant amount of time in games like those just being in awe with the graphics, taking screenshots. These worlds are so big and immersive, and there are so many tiny details.

Then you have the huge indy/smaller game scene. There are so many good games these days, it’s impossible to play them all. Factorio, Satisfactory, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Valheim, BAR, the list goes on and on. And all for a low price or even no money at all.

I always thought LibreOffice was shit and it always felt like I was using a “replacement”. However, after finally using Word again after many years I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not miles ahead and also quite shit. The docx format is bad, so Word is still better at dealing with it purely because it’s their format, but LibreOffice honestly has a nore logical but uglier design. The Word top bar is pure pain

Yeah definitely this. The improvements are insane compared to 10 years ago. It’s just annoying that techbro’s and CEOs have decided that it’s the next big thing and will shove it into anything. To too many people AI is a tool that’ll solve any problem, even if it’s usually a very wasteful and unpredictable solution.

Luckily we seem to be hitting the hype plateau and people are getting increasingly sceptical. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to another AI winter. There’s still plenty to gain and figure out, but we don’t need the insane hype that exists now.

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn’t it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: “Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves”, DnB: “Telomic & Susan H - Underwater”. I’ll be visiting the DnB festival “Liquicity festival” this weekend so I’m very hyped right now

Even better

I wish it were more acceptable, but personally I’d just rather not be touched by anyone.

I’m perfectly content with my current average life. Fame would only bring more worries and stress, even if it’d also bring more luxury

Awesome! Numpy has been such a useful tool during my data science study. Happy to see that they’re not afraid to make some bigger changes.

I might misunderstand what you mean with “implementing” an LLM, but unless you have a good understanding of deep learning and math I wouldn’t recommend to implement one from scratch. There’s a lot of complex math involved in these kind of topics. If you mean implementing an application around an existing LLM, for example writing a chat website that interfaces with ChatGPT or a local LLM, then it’s doable (depending on you current skills).

I have a license, but never use it. I’m Dutch. My work and the train station are less than 10 min by bike, the supermarket is a 5 min walk. I can do almost anything by bike and sometimes public transport and it saves me hundreds of euro’s a month.

I bought a ThinkPad new in 2014 for my study for like 1200 euro’s. She’s still happily purring today. Around 2019 I made the mistake of emptying a cup of tea into the ThinkPad accidentally and then holding it upside down to get the water out. I think I should’ve just let it leak out of the bottom since the laptop has holes for that, but I panicked. This broke the keyboard, but not the rest of the laptop. I got an official new keyboard for like 100 euro’s which came with a tool and the simple instructions, and since then everything has been working flawlessly.

So I recommend ThinkPads, although I can’t really say anything about compatibility of new models

Not American, but I think most other people will be in their database as well. Honestly, it frustrated me greatly, but ultimately I try not to worry too much about it since I can’t control it. Privacy is one of my main “pillars” when voting (here in the Netherlands we have way more than 2 choices). A party’s stance on privacy and encryption is a requirement for gaining my vote, and it’s lead me to not vote for someone in multiple occasions. It’s the most influence I can have.

Sounds cool. The types like Haskell’s data types or Rust’s enums compared with proper pattern matching are pretty much a requirement for a good language imo. And the process/message passing is interesting.