I appreciate you pointing this out. Today is literally my first day on the job after 5 months, but I’ll throw some cash their way after a check or two.

Idk. Been doing it for nearly 20 years and before that I was doing IBM’s take on VBScript for another 10. So I have my own perspective there. I’ve only ever had to parse massive xmls when doing web apps, and for web backends I really only like Java and NodeJS.

But everyone is entitled to their own take. I would imagine there is a streaming parser in other languages as well.

Maybe look into StAX?

I agree with you almost 100% (except the copyright stuff), but,

The biggest source of resistance is people fearing for their jobs. That said, a lot of them have never actually tried AI, so they don’t know the limitations and why I doubt serious businesses will replace any serious creative work for years to come

…the business owners are just as ignorant. They are trying to replace people with AI, which will disrupt our lives while the CEOs refuse to admit their error and force us all to deal with it anyway. It’s a lot like outsourcing. It’s not as cheap and effective as businesses hoped, customers largely hate it, and we’re still doing it anyway.

AI will be disruptive, but over the long term it will settle down to a small disruption. But the journey to get there might suck a bit.

What is your degree to you? A means by which to qualify for a job? Or the lens through which you perceive and shape the world around you for the better?

Because AI might some far-flung day make the former obsolete, but I don’t think ever the latter.

I was on vyvanse for years. And I slept about probably 4 hours a night on average. I had to go to adderall. It doesn’t work as well, but it does work, and usually I can sleep.

I should never be off meds.

Stop plagiarizing my life experience!

Sometime between 2013 and 2018. Had to answer it myself. It got at least a couple dozen upvotes and a lot of people finding it useful and asking follow up questions.

It’s deleted now. To be fair it was probably really outdated. But my account seems to be completely gone now. Maybe it got hacked. I haven’t been there in a long time.

Tricky thing is believing in something gives you commonality. Not believing in something really doesn’t.

“I don’t believe.”

“Me either.”

“Good talk. Same time next week?”

I wouldn’t call it ignorance. My bliss is based on considerable reading and contemplation. Way more than ought to be necessary, all things considered. I wish some of the understanding I’ve developed over the years would’ve been explained when I was young. There are things which, once explained, drive the logical mind to an inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been there. Posted my story, but I didn’t talk about the lifelong anxiety that comes with a lengthy layoff. Continually pursued higher pay at shittier jobs to try to get ahead of things for when the rug gets pulled out from under me again. It’s corrosive. Losing income and insurance when everyone is counting on you to provide makes you feel like your self-worth is completely tied to your job and ability to provide.

Which time?

First time happened after I’d been with my first real job for ten years because the business was changing and there wasn’t a role for me. I was out of work for 7 shitty months trying to have my own business starting from the few customers we had left when they let me go. It was right after I bought a house and had a baby. It was fucking awful.

Second time was after COVID. First we all took a 10% pay cut to avoid layoffs. Then two months later when federal assistance expired, they cut 1/3 of the company across the board. I’m a little fucking bitter about that to be honest, but I had a new remote job lined up within a couple of weeks that paid quite a bit better.

Last time was 5 months ago. Just got hired this week. Start next month. It sucked. Wiped out my whole retirement savings, so I get to start over at 51. But we made it through and potentially I won’t have to switch companies again.

I don’t remember after my first car. But I got a really big raise at work one year and bought the new Malibu the year it was redesigned. Black with leather interior. First song played:

Radar Love by Golden Earring

It’s a great fucking song to drive too fast to.

Yeah, I think I’m just going to repartition that space to grow /home and call it a day.

Completely agree. It’s getting very close for consumer grade. I just fall in the niche of Linux-novice-prosumer. But fixing problems is how we learn more.

I think maybe it was when I started installing things other ways? Like there’s apt and snap and … one other thing I can’t remember. But not all the software I needed was available through the GUI.

So it could be that’s related to the breakage. Or maybe not, but that was my experience. If it’s working well for others that makes me happy because I’d like to be able to recommend Mint to some of the less demanding users I know.

You can’t make a person understand anything. If the very simple explanation of “draft the unwilling and send them to die” doesn’t convince them, they don’t want to be convinced. I couldn’t name a single person who thinks that’s good, just maybe some folks who would say it’s sometimes a grim necessity. And I guess I’m in the latter camp, but shit would have to be dire.

I played with Fedora many years ago. That might be familiar enough to try again.

I’m a bit of a power user so if anyone can manage to break an immutable distribution, I probably can.

Anyway, thanks!

I’ve known for a while but Linux really isn’t newbie friendly. I’ve tried several times over the years. Most recently I tried Mint and within a week or two the GUI software update stopped working. I switched to Ubuntu because I have a little familiarity and quickly realized the only way to stay updated is apt. Firefox will work for a while and then have days where almost every tab is crashing constantly. Sometimes you can get a page to work with reload or two, other times not. So I installed chrome under protest as a backup. Mostly it doesn’t crash although sometimes it does the same thing as Firefox (but usually not at the same time). Those are really my only complaints at all.

I will say, though, that gaming has come a long way, especially with Steam. I don’t think SteamVR is there yet, but otherwise I haven’t found anything that wouldn’t run (but I play AAA on PS so I’m not really pushing it hard). I thought I was giving up gaming when I moved to Linux, but not at all.

I left a big partition free in the expectation of dual-booting windows, but I really haven’t had any reason to at all.

I could list a bunch of movies but it’s easier to say anything scored by John Williams. Superman, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws. I never caught Close Encounters of the Third Kind but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s good just on faith.

He scored some other things, but that’s what I remember off the top of my head.