For me it’s less about fear and more about having a limited budget of time and effort to spend on learning things, so CSS and front end generally gets deprioritized. But that’s cuz I’m a back end kinda dev in my soul, lol.

I’ve seen the good points you’ve made elsewhere in this thread - I would indeed react very poorly to willy-nilly back end changes and I think you’re right that people don’t give CSS and visual styling the same degree of professional respect when making changes. And that sucks.

Sounds like a certain lake troll is agitating to improve his lake-dwelling experience, if ya ask me.

So I think I was wrong, but you are too lmao.

10¹²⁰ is the number of valid game-trees, or valid ~80 move games.

The much smaller number I quoted above, though, IS the valid positions, I was thinking it was actually the trimmed down “truly valid” game-tree sequences.

Isn’t math fun? Limitless ways for us to be wrong!

valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10⁴⁰ to 10⁴⁴

Lol, big board you’re playing with…

I enjoy and appreciate nature in nearly all its forms. Even mosquitos just tryna live, they’re born required to bite somebody 🤷‍♂️

Fuck the Canada goose.

Fuck em as a group, fuck their whole flocks, fuck a flying V of Canada geese. Fuck em as an entire grand, branching lineage of this strange fractal miracle we call life, get rid of the Canada goose and our timeline returns to the more harmonious path it had been on before everything stopped making sense.

Canada is cool, fuck that goose tho.

Sounds like Copilot pulled their programming socks WAY UP that day

This is hilariously autistic sounding for a machine.

That’s a useful way to look at it, as verbose / extended documentation (amounts to exhaustive usage examples, if you’ve got thorough tests).

I don’t have a metric that’s quick to relate, but for me the…attractiveness or value in testing relates heavily to:

• Project lifecycle - longer and slower -> more tests
• Team size (really more like 1st derivative of team size…team “churn”?) - larger, changing faster -> more tests

Both of these are influenced by your description of tests as docs. Onboarding new engineers is way, way easier with thorough tests, for the reasons you’ve mentioned. Plus it reduces that “gun shy” factor about making changes in a new codebase.

But it’s not always better. I’ve been writing less (few, honestly) the last year or so, sadly.

This should be the standard :)

Someone was posting a week or two ago having done something kinda like that. Something to do with magic circles or similar, looked rad.

Yeah I’ve been hearing about it and meaning to dive in. Been learning some infra stuff lately though.

Any particularly strong selling points you want to convey?

Yeah, not trying to dunk on other commenter, but these don’t sound like complaints I experience with Python at all. Setting up the environment is a breeze with venv, package installation couldn’t be easier with basic pip, and I really like having a diverse ecosystem of multiple (often high quality) approaches to solving similar problems.

I would love that! I do think there are probably interesting underlying personality factors / preferences for a lot of this stuff as well.

I do think that many of Python’s characteristics map to my own personality and I bet there’s something to that. Things like syntax of course, but not strictly syntax, also things like “The Zen of Python”, and the way its a “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none”. I also really kind of need the freedom and accompanying responsibility to break any “rules” on a whim (Python will happily let you overwrite its own internals while running, for instance), but I almost never do anything that uses it…

I could probably keep going lol. Feels like a “people looking like their pets” scenario, lmao

Everyone’s welcome to their opinion of course, but I find Python more readable than anything else and I resent the visual clutter required to make intentions plain in other languages. Feels like having a conversation where people say the words “comma”, “period”, etc.

I also spend more time with Python than anything else and I suspect these two facts about me relate, lol

Sounds much like PowerBI, which I can’t say I’ve used much directly. But every time we use it, because the client likes the idea and it can theoretically do “all the business intelligence” natively…we eventually find it can only do 80% of what they actually want, which completely removes its single advantage and forces us to go custom anyway. We’ve stopped offering it, to be clear.

Couldn’t agree more. Field service is one hell of a drug. Money’s good, variety is fun, the chaos and travel are fun too, and you learn a lot quickly. The latter often because some or all of the mfg. plant you’re visiting needs you to fix your stuff so they can run, and no one is coming to BFE to help you, lol.

But that all wears off, in time, and it starts to take a huge toll like you described. Never met a long term field service engineer with a healthy home life, or with their health in general. I got out because both of mine were crumbling, for real.

Ah, alcoholic then

I really credit my present strength with Python, in at least a small part, to PyCharm. Really a great IDE for Python projects. It irritates me, if anything, how much more flexible VSCode can be for non-Python stuff. I end up using VSCode.

Yeah, it’s certainly not a perfect model :) and I will absolutely acknowledge that some folks seem to delight in their own smugness and knowledge and seem to enjoy opportunities to shit on someone. The way the platform works probably amounts to a certain “gravity” pulling those personalities in, TBH.

It’s mainly a different model, but I totally sympathize that it’s the opposite of welcoming or encouraging.

SO recognizes that many, many questions are really just rephrasings of the same underlying question, and the aim is to find and provide the best answer to those. It explicitly does not want to repeatedly answer the same question, and given how few people find out how it works before simply asking, they have to be pretty ruthless about it. The result is that usually the most active and fleshed out questions and answers are very informative. So there’s a big upside in trade for those downsides. Answers are meant to be durable, ~singular, and authoritative.

Reddit is basically halfway between that, and Discord. Discord is the polar opposite, questions and answers are naturally ephemeral, duplication happens constantly, and quality of responses is all over the map.

I greatly prefer the StackOverflow model, and - to be very clear - I have never once asked (to say nothing of answering) a question of my own there, lmao.