Ah, had not heard that before, but I’m willing to believe it right away.

That just sounds like a very Google thing to do, like how they tweaked the video algorithm, so that longer videos would get more visibility, not long before TikTok took off and they had to introduce a separate category for short-form videos.

I think, it comes from a general frustration, because the YouTube comment section is practically unusable for actually discussing a video.

Every so often, I watch something and want to see what people are saying about a particular section in the video. Like, maybe I was hoping for some info in the video and expect someone to have posted it in a comment instead.

But then I have to scroll through tons of comments like:

• “First!” (Followed by people telling them they’re not actually first.)
• Various comments about how they’re watching the video shortly after its publication. Or long after its publication.
• “What an inspiring video! Blah blah blah…” (with a profile picture of a half-dressed lady, because it’s actually just a bot)
• A verbatim quote of a funny sentence in the video with nothing added.
• “Just commenting for the algorithm!”

Like, I don’t want to hate on people commenting what they like, but it’s just frustrating in that situation, because you do have to read every comment, to make sure you’re not missing something. You just become acutely aware of every repeated joke and every single comment you had to read, which did not actually say something.

In ‘proper’ software development projects, you (ideally) want all information checked into the repo for what is needed to run the software:

• which dependencies you need,
• what particular versions of the dependencies,
• as well as which runtime/compiler version to use.

And then you’d use a package manager which can automatically install all these.
Python projects are currently heavily moving towards uv for this. Traditionally, you’d use pip + virtualenv + sometimes pipx for this.

Using nix develop with flakes is also valid for this, if your team agrees on it: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Development_environment_with_nix-shell#nix_develop

Whichever way you solve it, the idea is that:

1. You can check out a commit from months ago and just run it right away. Well, or just a commit from yesterday, which is on a different Git branch, where you haven’t yet started your big dependency upgrade. As soon as upgrading a dependency requires changes in your code, you want the dependency version change tracked together with the respective code change.
2. Your different team mates can all work on the repository, even though one of them might be on Debian, the next on Arch and the third is on macOS. By defining all your dependencies in the repo, you can avoid “works on my machine” scenarios, where a bug occurs on one PC, but not on the dev’s PC where you try to reproduce it.

Could imagine that working at the scale where PeerTube is currently at, where you can actually get to know folks and it’s not just about broadcasting to as many people as possible…

I imagine, the problem comes in from there being wildly different sizes of both, dogs and chocolate.

I once heard a story, where a small dog had eaten chocolate, so the owner called the vet. And at first, the vet told them that it’s probably fine, but wanted to know how much chocolate the dog ate.

And when they then told the vet, that the dog had eaten a full-size chocolate bar, suddenly it was treated like an emergency. As in, they had to bring the dog to the vet immediately, got treated before everyone else still waiting, and the dog was given a drug to make it puke out all the chocolate.

I mean, it could most definitely be better, but I really don’t think that it’s worse on Linux. Error handling is one of the hard problems in computer science in general.

And well, at least you do get easy access to logs and error messages on Linux, which makes it infinitely better in many ways, but is also at least partially why this post exists.
On Windows or such, you’d instead put a vague description into a search engine and hope someone had the same symptoms before…

Hmm, interesting. I always write Markdown unformatted, so where I put the asterisks in myself. So, that’s a decent reality check, I guess.

If they wanted to make a specific part of the command bold, that still wouldn’t work.

Could underline the part, I guess, like this:

ls -la
   ###

(# starts a comment in shell syntax, so doesn’t get run, in case someone pastes the whole thing.)

I mean, Markdown was specifically designed to be convertable to HTML. So, it is structurally rather similar. It’s basically just a bunch of aliases for a subset of HTML tags.

Having said that, it is also designed to be plain text. You don’t have to convert it, and even when you do convert it, there’s a good chance that what you’ve written in plain text will look fine in converted Markdown as well.
For the purposes of this meme, I would certainly group it with plain text.

Nope, it is quite a literal Fallout 3 reference: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-whats-happening-inside-fallout-3s-metro-train/

One time I was in the next town over where they have a grocery store chain that I can’t normally shop at. So, I figured I’ll get the big shopping cart and grab everything that looks interesting.

Went through the whole store and in the end, I stood at the checkout with a pack of cookies and some vitamin tablets. That almost felt worse than walking out without buying anything. It felt like I was insulting their product selection.

Although, to be fair, it was absolutely terrible.

Apparently, both ways of doing it exist:

To make chunky peanut butter, peanut pieces approximately the size of one-eighth of a kernel are mixed with regular peanut butter, or incomplete grinding is used by removing a rib from the grinder.

https://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Peanut-Butter.html

Personally, I figured, it could be bad when you don’t grind them fully, because you might end up with very large peanut chunks still left, but I guess, that’s kind of answered just before the previous quote:

Peanut butter is usually made by two grinding operations. The first reduces the nuts to a medium grind and the second to a fine, smooth texture.

So, I guess, you just do an incomplete grind for the second grind…

Hmm, yeah, that is interesting. I’d say every native German knows “nix” (as in nothing). Maybe 10% would be aware what a “Nixe” is (female water spirit).

Personally, I wasn’t even aware that there’s a male version. I could’ve guessed what it means, when used in a sentence, but if you asked me without context, I probably would’ve been too thick to figure it out. 🙃

I’ve always seen fans call it “cutting edge” or “leading edge”, as it’s somewhere between other distros with it shipping most feature updates once every six months.

Personally, I prefer something more up-to-date, but at least you don’t typically get stuff in the Fedora repos that’s so out of date, that it’s actively broken.
For example, for $DAYJOB, I need the reuse CLI, which states in its documentation to install it with apt install reuse. On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, that’s just a dumb idea, because the version in the repos is 3 years old and crashes when you go to use it, producing subtly wrong results. That cost us half a day of debugging this week, for no good reason…

“Nix” is in the dictionary. It’s a colloquial version of “nichts”, not a misspelling…

Oh, hmm, no idea. I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to choose even more confusing naming, though…

You’re doubly confused. You’re thinking of GitHub Copilot, when this is about M365 Copilot. Last I heard, they have 78 different products called Something Copilot, so confusion is understandable.

But then what you’re actually thinking of is the “GPT” series of large language models, developed by OpenAI.
GitHub Copilot is merely a GUI and a harness for large language models. It defaults to the GPT models, and is probably somewhat optimized for them, but it can use other models as well.

This harness can influence the quality quite a bit, as it decides which source code files to feed into the model for context. I’m not aware of people saying that GitHub Copilot is particularly good at that, but it’s available as an extension for IDEs, so it automatically knows which files you’re editing, which can be useful.

And yes, the GPT models have fallen quite a bit behind since the start of the year.

A flork of cows? I hear, you have to license their works…