I don’t think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

What are people ordering so much of from amazon? I apparently haven’t ordered from them since late 2024, and those were a handful of small orders.

may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Use a dedicated data type or library. Some languages also have something like python’s Decimal type

>>> .1 + .2
0.30000000000000004
>>> Decimal(".1") + Decimal(".2")
Decimal('0.3')

Yep. Open your browser’s console and do .1 + .2 and you get 0.30000000000000004.

One of the reasons not to use floating point when working with money.

That sucks. Glad I moved to Linux.

Fed up with Microsoft. I had a windows 10 computer they said couldn’t update to windows 11, and they said Recall was coming, so I said fuck it. Switched to mint, and now I’m trying pop!_os.

Way back like 10+ years ago I ran Ubuntu for a while, but I play a lot of video games and support was lacking. Wine, proton, and other tools have come a long way since then.

I used to try to explain to management that some debt is high interest.

Do you actually do work or are you one of those middle-men that add dubious value?

And, like, do you think I can read my coworker’s screen from across the room and be like “Ah yes, that is TransferProjectView.py. I should tell him that I am also planning on touching that file”?

And adults can learn to explicitly communicate. It’s not impossible. You just type into the box.

I don’t think microsoft understands shit. I think their leaders are out of touch, lying, idiots. They continue to exist based on inertia and past success.

It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”

Luck is a factor, of course. But moderation is also a big factor in creating culture. A poorly moderated space will tend to fill up with assholes, because the non-assholes will leave.

I remember years ago being very turned off by linux when I asked for help in IRC. (I’m old).

I think I was trying to get my cd-rw drive (I’m still old) to work, and whatever gui application I had was giving a weird error. Some guy said to use the command line. I said I didn’t know how to use the command line for this. He said, “You don’t seem to know anything”, or something to that effect, and stopped responding. Thanks, bro.

Forums and chats have been more helpful this decade, at least.

“”"

A worker is getting out of his car at the company parking lot when the company owner pulls up in a new sports car.

“Wow,” says the worker. “How did you afford that beauty?”

“I’ll tell you what,” says the owner. “If you work hard, put in some extra hours, hit all our numbers, I can buy another one this quarter.”

“”"

Wage theft is bigger than all other theft. Some people are happy to be a cog in the machine.

Oh that’s a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don’t have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.

Heh. Maybe “the trump line” should become slang, like the mendoza line

Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

Some strikingly high percentage can’t complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind

Yeah, that would help. There’s also the smaller risk of “I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse”

I think some applications also don’t accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.

Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement

I hate focus stealing so I might set mine to strict, now that I know that’s an option.

It’s an absolute nightmare to be typing, some dialogue box pops up, and I accidentally accept it by hitting spacebar without even seeing what it was.

I think most computer users now don’t know that file systems exist