It’s not really legal in the UK. It’s unenforceable on claims under 5k and for claims over 5k the courts will make a case by case decision if arbitration is appropriate.

https://www.herbertsmithfreehills.com/insights/reports/inside-arbitration/click-to-agree-technology-and-consumer-arbitration

However, lots of companies still add these bullshit clauses as a way to bully people out of seeing a lawyer.

That’s just what they want you to think.

I remember playing Max Payne. There was some battle in a bar against a guy with a shotgun. If you timed it right between reloads you could run up to the guy, stand on the bar so your guns were exactly level with his face and empty two Uzi clips point blank into his face before he could reload.

Then you would run out of ammo and he would one shot kill you.

It really comes down to what you’re used to. If you use Windows tools then you already know many of the workarounds for Windows and you don’t know the tools that haven’t been ported there.

For example, you know not to use Python directly, but that you have to install anaconda instead, or whatever the current problems with Python development on Windows are.

The big obvious thing that you can’t get away from is that you have to do things differently if you have develop for two different OSs with a view to deploying on Linux.

In particular support for shell scripts is crap on Windows. I could learn powershell or there’s workarounds using WSL and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need to care about, but I’d rather not bother.

I mean coding is difficult enough as it is, I wouldn’t choose to use an OS that makes it even harder.

I use Linux because it makes my life easier. It has better support for development. Some of the other stuff is maybe not as easy or polished, but the support for dev tools and the ease of deploying to from local machines to servers that are also running Linux makes up for it.

If I wanted more effort I’d still be using Windows. It would force me to work on cross platform development and deployment. The idea that there’s value in making things unnecessarily hard is just weird. I want Linux to be as simple as possible to use, so I can spend that effort on things that actually matter.

(Swiss)Germans are completely mad about food.

It’s their culture to complain about everything, except food. All they care about is that it’s as bland as possible and has big portions. If you manage that, they’ll give you five stars every time.

I spent 3 years living in Germany, and not only can you not get anything spicy for love nor money, they also don’t use herbs. It just blows my mind. They’re physically so close to France and Italy, but the food is so far away.

The way these big firms work is they make a bunch of almost contradictory arguments and you have to show they’re all false in order to win the law suit.

So it’ll look like:

1. I didn’t do it.
2. Even if I did do it you can’t prove it was me.
3. Even if you can prove it was me I wouldn’t be liable.
4. Even if I was liable this has to be settled by arbitration.

So you have to get through arguments 4 and 3 first, to show that it’s worth the court trying to find out what happened. Then they’ll fight you tooth and nail on points 1 and 2 later.

Yeah anything responsible that reports and corrects mistakes made in past reporting gets a low score for factual accuracy, when these should be getting the highest scores.

It’s completely backwards.

Lots of people still split latex documents into one section per file, because subversion used file locks and we only knew how one person could edit a file at a time.

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Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.

Yeah but they don’t use LLMs for this, they’ll use some other kind of machine learning mixed in a big pipeline of data processing. It makes it really hard to guess how much work it would take to fix. It might require retraining, might just require an easy patch of the rest of the pipeline.

My guess is that they’re just shitty jumpers and there’s nothing to fix anyway.

I’m at this point too. I think the next step is to just declare sock bankruptcy again and throw everything out and start over.

Pi is predictable and deterministic.

Computer programs exist that can tell you what the next digit is. That means it’s deterministic, and running the program will give you a prediction for each digit (within the memory constraints of your computer).

The fact that it’s deterministic is exactly why pi is interesting. If it was random it would typically be much easier to prove properties about it’s digits.

No. 1011001110001111… (One 1, one 0, two 1s, two zeros…) Doesn’t contain repeating patterns. It also doesn’t contain any patterns with ‘2’ in it.

But pi is believed to be normal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

So it should contain all finite patterns an infinite number of times.

Yeah, but a combination of this approach, and adding all compiled file types including .pyc to .gitignore would fix it.

Teams defaults are pure scummery.

No, don’t alert me on a Sunday night with notifications that I might have missed over the last two days.

the UI conversation around git has been going on long enough (here included) that there has to have been a significant global productivity cost due to the lack of a better UI.

I don’t think this is true.

Git is ugly and functional.

People love to complain about it being ugly, but it does what it’s meant to. If there was actually a persistent productivity hit from its interface, one of the weird wrappers would have taken off, and replaced it.

But the truth is, those wrappers all seem to be written by people learning to use git in the first place, and just get abandoned once they get used to it.

Work socks as well.

They’re socks that go with construction boots. Basically the same as hiking socks but cheaper.

It’s super hard to get involved as a UI person. If you’re a developer, you can just rock up to a project and fix bugs, and if you follow the coding style they’ll probably get accepted.

If you want to successfully contribute as a UI person you have to convince a bunch of developers that you know what they should be doing better than they do. It basically never happens.