Figuratively, Street kids do tend to be.

And it’s Wednesday, so it’s Bismuth Time

Chips every day!

It took me an embarrassing number of decades before I realized they were called (silicon) chips after American snack chips. I always thought it was a weird thing to call something that was plainly a carefully sliced thin sliver and not a piece chipped off anything.

As I did with potato chips too, but that was an established term in American English and it took me a very long time to realize one was named after the other.

I’ve used ThinkPads for ages and it’s very true they have become more and more ordinary as the years go by, but I recently got given a high spec Dell for a new job and it’s been very disappointing. In particular the keyboard is terrible to the point that on business trips I bring an external keyboard with me. I also sorely miss a trackpoint, but to many people that is not an issue.

I was also surprised that I miss the ThinkPad ability to open up 180°.

Though if you’re good with using Ubuntu then new ThinkPads and Dells and some others generally work well as you get the enablement patches before they’ve rippled through to the mainline kennel. However you still often have a happier time waiting for others to iron out the kinks, not to mention better hardware prices by getting clear out deals for outgoing generations.

After years of ThinkPads I joined a company that gave me a Dell Inspiron and I am unimpressed in various minor ways. Crap keyboard is the big one.

Yes it’s trivial to host a repo, and then you have achieved approximately 2% of a forge.

Gnome’s was very inferior last I looked. No brightness factor and it was sunset or fixed time.

If I went back to the vi interface for some reason I’d at least use ctrl-[. I dislike lifting my hand more than I dislike using modifiers.

I used vi for a few years so have the muscle memory and the sole advantage in my perception was that everything is simple typing with hands remaining in the home keys position (except Escape, ironically).

So it’s more relaxed if you find using modifiers onerous, but I don’t find Ctrl or Alt significantly worse than Shift, and I don’t find it any worthwhile advantage.

Pretty bizarre if people do this. I’ve never heard it to mean anything but linoleum.

But a lot of people in the US use the word “turf” to specify not turf (i.e. artificial turf), so there’s no reason for words to mean things.

What? One of linoleum’s benefits is not off gassing and not being made from fossil fuels. Are you thinking of vinyl?

why is there no switch to enable type checking at runtime?

Have you got problems this would solve? I’ve done a lot of type annotated Python at scale and I can’t think of an example.

Edit: given nobody in their right mind allows code that’s not checker clean.

Exactly. I don’t know that it’s just that, but it is that. It’s not like the people are fundamentally different raw materials - a generation is defined by it’s circumstances. And those were the gen x circumstance.

(Edit: except resources. There were fuck all resources compared to today)

Not at all. It allows you to install and use whole suites of tools and libraries without any pollution of or dependencies on your host system. It also allows you to define the whole setup in a file so it’s trivial to recreate on another machine

Is it though? I’ve found it rock solid for years on end - been using it for 14 years, and Debian before that.

I don’t recognize this myself. I’ve never had trouble with incompatibilities or degradation etc.,

Especially these days my OS can remain very vanilla, as many complex things can be containerized. E.g. I run syncthing and an nfs server and sometimes torrenting over vpn, through docker-compose; I’d never install all that on the host with all the extensive dependencies. Same with some heavyweight apps like darktable - spin them up from Flatpak.

Ubuntu does it very well with minimal fuss. I see little to dislike.

It’s hilarious how uncool it is to suggest Ubuntu but it often just works, including very recent hardware if it’s from Canonical partners like Lenovo or Dell. And the kerfuffle about things like snaps are way overblown.

Different usage model isn’t it? Sway’s mostly manual while hyprland is more dynamic with a focus on eye candy.

Well aerosols are tiny particles, but often created and propelled using pressurized glasses.