expr
@expr@programming.dev
- Comment on Anon watches Jurassic Park 1 week ago:
Erm… You might be confusing millennials with Gen Z or something. I was 19 when annoying orange first showed up, and I’m on the younger end of millennials. Me and my friends found it pretty obnoxious.
- Comment on n o u g a t s 1 week ago:
Flossing must be a bitch.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 2 weeks ago:
www.visidata.org is way, way, way, way better than excel and it’s FOSS.
As for the rest:
- I don’t really miss Word because WYSIWYG editing is just kinda bad across the board. Much better to write with markup rather than fighting an auto-formatter all the time.
- I thankfully have not needed to make much of any PowerPoints, but I think I would probably feel similarly about them and want them in some kind of markup language as well.
- Teams just sucks ass compared to many other alternatives, though I’m admittedly not familiar with good FOSS ones
- Outlook is basically just a dinosaur and there’s a million ways to do email better. Frankly, FOSS has it beat by a huge margin
The rest of Office isn’t really even worth talking about tbh.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 2 weeks ago:
For excel stuff, www.visidata.org is way, way better than excel assuming the data is tabular (which, frankly, it should be anyway). Like it’s not even close.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 2 weeks ago:
Way, way better than excel for working with tabular data. Excel is child’s play in comparison.
- Comment on Trump revokes collective bargaining rights at TSA to crush union 1 month ago:
Just sounds like a win-win. The fascists no longer have their travel cops, and people no longer have to deal with the useless bullshit of the TSA.
- Comment on Infinite Hotel Paradox 2 months ago:
It has to do with countably infinite sets.
The analysis on Wikipedia does a better job of explaining the concept: …wikipedia.org/…/Hilbert's_paradox_of_the_Grand_H…
The whole point is that it’s something we can prove mathematically that is highly unintuitive.
- Comment on "Captain America: Brave New World" has received a B- on CinemaScore, the lowest score for an MCU film. 2 months ago:
The writing in the second season was much worse, too, unfortunately.
- Comment on If you shop by unit prices, double check the math! 3 months ago:
It very well could be typical corporate fuckery, but that makes me wonder if it’s actually a bug and that it’s computing the per kg price based on the single until price but dividing by the total weight of the pack.
Or perhaps it’s a “bug” that’s left intentionally until called out.
- Comment on Is there anything my girlfriend and I have to consider when traveling to America based on our skin differences? 3 months ago:
There’s plenty of racism around, but I wouldn’t worry about it as tourists. What you read about is the general systemic problems related to living here in the day to day. That’s pretty different from visiting as a tourist. As a tourist, you’re pretty unlikely to experience anything like that.
- Comment on The cost of college in USA makes no sense anymore 3 months ago:
The system has a lot of problems for sure, but IME as a senior software engineer, people without degrees are often lacking in core CS skills and are much less comfortable with the more conceptual aspects of the field like graph theory, systems design, DSLs, etc. Usually database skills aren’t quite as strong either due to not having studied relational algebra and other database concepts.
None of this is to say that someone without a degree can’t be a valuable part of the team, but at the higher levels of seniority, you do want people who have really strong foundations so you can ensure that you actually are building strong foundations. Not saying someone without a degree can’t possibly achieve this on their own, but it’s quite rare and requires much more self study than most actually do.
- Comment on The cost of college in USA makes no sense anymore 3 months ago:
First off, videos on tiktok aren’t really worth taking seriously. There’s just too much fake garbage on there.
But anyway, the cost of education is absolutely a huge problem. It should be free or very low cost.
That being said, it’s simply demonstrably false to claim that a degree is useless or doesn’t help you get a job. There are many fields where a degree is an absolutely a requirement, like medicine, law, engineering, etc. The specific degree does matter a lot, though, and there are other important job hunting skills that you need to develop in order to actually get a job.
Speaking from personal experience, every job I’ve had thus far (as a software engineer) has listed a 4 year degree as either a hard requirement or strongly preferred. I do not believe recruiters would have given me the time of day were it not for my degree, because they are looking to match as many requirements as possible and are filtering people out. And when applying for jobs, ATS programs routinely filter out job applications with resumes that don’t list a degree.
Job seeking is an extremely gameified system and you have to learn the game in order to beat it. It sucks big time and I loathe doing it, but it’s what you have to do if you want to get high-paying jobs. That, or know someone at a company that can get you a job.
- Comment on WordPress leader Matthew Mullenweg exiles five contributors • The Register 3 months ago:
There are many other FOSS CMS systems, and WordPress has always been trash from a technical perspective. It just was one of the first options in the early internet and consequently developed an ecosystem early. Would be great if it would go away so it stops sucking all of the air out of the room and alternatives can pick up steam.
- Comment on Anon doesn't wash 3 months ago:
I’m American and have never washed chicken nor heard of anyone doing that. What a crazy thing to do.
- Comment on Anon discovers Japanese jazz 3 months ago:
So you’re just gonna sit there and ignore the vast history and tradition of Jazz, classical, and music education in the west, huh? Neat.
- Comment on Anon is SpongeBob 4 months ago:
SpongeBob first aired in 1999, so if you were born '81 or later, it was probably on when you were in high school. But yeah if you’re in your mid-late 40s you would have just missed it.
- Comment on Anon is a white hat hacker 4 months ago:
Uh, certs are a huge deal in cyber security. Absolutely useless in most fields, but cybersecurity is not one of them.
- Comment on Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name? 5 months ago:
My wife and I think it is. I took her last name since it meant more to her.
- Comment on For my fellow Americans, when is enough enough? 5 months ago:
In absolute terms, they aren’t the majority. 73m voted for him out of the 161m eligible voters in the US, or ~45% (Harris has ~43%). Still a frighteningly high number, but it also means it’s possible to find support for resistance, at least if things start to get bad enough. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Americans that like to think that politics don’t concern them and that we should just be apolitical. So they’re going to need a wake-up call first before they would lend their support. Trump will likely give it to them in short order as his fascist policies start to directly affect them.
Also, keep in mind that the total population (~334m as of 2023) is much larger than the population that is eligible to vote. There are many young people that are too young to vote now but still old enough to fight tyranny, former felons who are ineligible to vote but eager to fight oppressive systems, not to mention the scores of people not counted among eligible voters due to not being registered to vote, either through complacency/disillusionment (see above) or active sabotage and disenfranchisement by Republicans (and in many ways, you could say these are one in the same).
Fascists may have power and have won the popular vote, but it doesn’t mean it’s the will of the people. It means they’ve successfully gamed our very broken system. But real, average people living their lives will fight when the oppression comes to them. Maybe it will be too late, but maybe not. Revolution only needs a single spark.
- Comment on Are disabled people and the elderly going to survive another Trump presidency? 5 months ago:
Hundreds of thousands did die, fuckwad. Trump is directly responsible for the countless deaths from COVID.
- Comment on Wednesday it is, my dudes. 6 months ago:
How is that pronounced? wow-wow-rohn?
- Comment on Why am I seeing "plan your voting day strategy" so often? 6 months ago:
In Nebraska, I get my ballot by mail way in advance. I fill it out at my leisure, doing research on candidates as needed. I can then either mail the ballot back or drop it off at one of several locations around town (including any of the public libraries). I haven’t voted in person in years. This method is so much better.
- Comment on The Signal 7 months ago:
A synopsis for a great fucking movie.
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 7 months ago:
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 7 months ago:
Answer me this: are they or are they not consistently in support of Russia/China? Because I’ve seen it a lot from them (and blocked the instance soon after joining Lemmy when I noticed the pattern).
Is it just some big joke that went over my head?
- Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane? 7 months ago:
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like reddit 7 months ago:
It’s a toss up, for me. Both managed to capture all discussion on major open source projects.
- Comment on if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together. 8 months ago:
Obviously there’s a small handful of things that would require a reboot, but unlike Windows, the vast majority of programs in user space don’t require reboots on update.
There’s also the fact that restarting Windows to update is a much slower and more disruptive experience than restarting Linux.
- Comment on Please pick a password starting with ad and ending with min 8 months ago:
The manufacturer obviously also makes the app and can control the encoding.
- Comment on Please pick a password starting with ad and ending with min 8 months ago:
You don’t have to take arbitrary bytes. UTF-8 encoded strings are just fine and easily handled by libraries.