Witness you, adulting so hard after the end of the world.

Of that I’m sure.

Keep sharing the tapes.

I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.

Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.

So many pipes…

It’s like, their whole thing!

By any chance are you a fan of Strong Towns? If not they are very active in trying to kill Stroads

You sound like you mean well, but this is not helpful advice. You are essentially telling someone who is obviously a conscientious person and struggling that they have a character flaw.

Whew, thanks for not being a knee-jerk about my ‘mental prosthetic’! It takes real skill and understanding, I think, to even write the pseudocode or plain language description of a working script. After all, describing the problem and the outline of the solution is usually the hardest part. Pecking out the syntax takes the bulk of the time, but if you can avoid that step, what is lost? Very little in my experience.

I’ve begun collecting an assortment of custom python and shell script utilities to accomplish routine or one-off tasks for which system utilities don’t exist. You bet you are still learning when doing it this way. After all, you have to understand the code well enough to tell if the output is what you need.

Gwynne Shotwell deserves quite a lot more credit for SpaceX than Musk. Someone has to keep the place running until the ketamine clears his system.

I agree.

Does it count if one uses an LLM to help compose the shell script? I mean, I can and have written gnarly scripts by hand but it can take half an hour to work out a single line sometimes for a simple task versus 10 minutes describing it in plain language.

This is sad news. He was deeply influential and at the same time a somewhat obscure author. At least, in my experience, he didn’t have the name recognition other - dare I say lesser - authors had.

One lesson I learned as a young person from reading A Fire Upon the Deep was to never believe anything just because it was on the internet. That alone makes his legacy worth remembering.

Move over bacon. Now there’s something meatier!

You are correct. People these days are idjits.

‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.

For reference this is the Mormon Jesus. I see the resemblance

That’s exactly right, you have to know enough about the subject to smell a bullshit answer.

It’s great as a mental prosthetic. When I am tackling a new complex topic like say a new cloud platform I’m learning, i can test my understanding of the implications of a change to the console settings. I tell it what i think and ask it to check my understanding. Really speeds up my learning, but I don’t rely on it exclusively. I will write my own dang emails, thank you.

So empowering! 🤗

Thank you for the pointers. It was a sincere request and the literature somewhat scattered.