this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

this is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake

it’s still mostly red hat even for arm, though Cray (who still supply a lot of machines here in the UK) ship a horribly butchered version of SLES

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

updating packages in kde neon is like playing russian roulette, it’s worse than pop os in my experience

pointers are fine, but when you learn about the preprocessor and templates and 75% of the STL it goes negative again

c++ templates are such a busted implementation of generics that if I didn’t have context I’d assume they were bad on purpose like malbolge

last time I signed into my Microsoft 365 account for work I got two separate 2fa prompts and two captchas, it was like being in an episode of the crystal maze. the mere act of signing into something is now tedious and difficult

I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.

I love kde, I love the file picker, I love window management, I love dolphin, I love the panels, I love Kate, etc… but every time I have to switch to a new tty to restart kwin, part of my soul dies

when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

I think I’m a bit of a dinosaur, but I’ve been making all of my notes in Zim for over 10 years. It’s not much to look at but I find the hierarchical wiki structure easy to navigate, and most of the functionality (todo lists, equations, version control integration, etc) is implemented by simple plugins.

in my opinion, a lot of these programs are too complicated - I tried Joplin for a while but I ended up spending more time organising my notes than I did making them.

the same organisation makes both, they just release a subset of their work as the open source version of WordPress. it’s a pretty standard business model for this kind of software

I love XLR and mini-XLR. Durable connector, nice locking mechanism, satisfying click. Also very easy to wire yourself.