This is called Dutch Disease and most often happens with natural resources, but also with natural stupidity.

The state of office desks has been continuously getting worse my entire career.

The very first place I interviewed had small private offices with a door for everyone. They weren’t any bigger than a decent sized cubicle but were real separate rooms and most of them had exterior windows. I didn’t get that job though.

My first desk at my first engineering job was in a cubicle with real six foot tall walls, a window with a nice view, big L desk, shelves, filing cabinets, etc.

Then I got the same setup, but in a fabric cube. Honestly, not really a downgrade. I had that setup three times, and the only difference was how good the view was.

Then the same but no windows.

Then a smaller cube with a simple 6 foot desk and a single cabinet.

Then a line of 6 foot wide desks with privacy screens on three sides.

Then privacy screen on left and right only.

Then no screens.

Then four foot desks.

My current office is four foot desks that are hotdesked for most people. But we are also completely remote if you want, so I use my nice desk that I built at home 90% of the time.

In my case, I use several different types of machines: Personal Linux desktop, personal low end Linux laptop, remote servers where I have sudo, work Mac, shared remote work servers where I don’t have sudo. I want my setup to be basically the same everywhere so that my muscle memory works, but there are some things that also need to be a bit different for each. Hence, a dot files manager that lets me run one command to keep my environment consistent in all those different targets. I use chezmoi + git for it nowadays.

I’ve been hearing that, but only from random comments here and there. Is there an authoritative article somewhere?

You mean meta-up, right?

This is it exactly. When I was using Npp, Windows didn’t have anything resembling a package manager. Does it even really have one now?

Are you implying that there are IC designers who aren’t lunatics?

That depends, do you want high or a low side switch? There are valid reasons for either depending on what you’re doing.

Fuck. I haven’t used Npp in a long time, but that’s awful. Glad they were able to get it fixed and their transparency is to be highly commended. But damn does it make me worry about other projects. Npp isn’t exactly obscure, but it’s also not exactly a massive target either.

Hmm, nope. A bunch of bank branches got remodeled after a merger and a local gas station is being torn down and replaced, but nothing new.

Yeah, the libraries are pretty great. I’m working on a kinda personal kinda professional project right now. Ideally it would support reading and writing about seven different sorta obscure file formats. For a bunch of reasons I’m writing it in rust and there is a good library for one of them, multiple half assed libraries for another, and none for any of the others. There is excellent support for all of them as a single Python library. My first step has become writing a comprehensive rust library for all of them.

Nope, not an IDE thing. I’ve never used a Python ide, and have the same issues as well.

It looks like that is Windows only?!? So there is yet another incompatible tool?

I have been using Python as my second language alongside whatever system language I was using professionally as well as for a variety of personal projects for about 20 years. I’m quite fond of the language for the sorts of things I use it for, which is either scripting glue or doing serious math because I hate dealing with Matlab licenses.

And you are so fucking correct it isn’t even funny. Not only is the tooling a disaster, but it seems like every few years there is a new tooling scheme that doesn’t work quite right with the old one and is a disaster in its own unique way. And

I know people get annoyed by rust evangelists, but I started using it six months ago and god damn does cargo slap. Want to initiate new project? One command gives you the complete boilerplate. Adding a new dep? One simple command. Want to pin or unpin a version? One simple command. Want to update all the deps to latest? One simple command. Want make a release package? One simple command. Want to update all your installed packages? One simple command. Want to keep every project tied to a different version? You guessed it.

I definitely have some issues with Rust syntax, but I want cargo to manage my life.

Really, the a Python project needs to take a look at the Zen of Python and apply it to the tooling. And then use cargo to do it.

Edit: And, all of those simple commands work across all platforms the same. None of this, “Everything is perfectly cross platform and is the same anywhere. Unless you’re using a Mac. Or Windows. Or the wrong Linux distro.”

Edit x2: There is, of course, an XKCD for that.

Edit x3: And it’s not just venv. I am constantly struggling with which pip to use on which machine. Is it pip, pip3, pipx, uv pip, conda pip?

And that reminds me of an old DOS game called “Rocky’s Boots”. You were a raccoon who had to build logic gate circuits to get out of some sort of maze.

Ah, that makes sense. I’ve never done any benchmarking and don’t have windows to compare it with. For me, it’s fast enough because I tend towards non-competitive patient gamer games.

I threw house parties every other week for years when I was just post college. There ended up being three rooms almost every time: People watching weird movies in the living room, people cooking and drinking in the kitchen, and people group surfing the internet in the computer room. It was amazing.

Fictional you say? Fuck it, I’m down.

What’s the nVidia issue? I have a 3070ti that I have been daily driving in my gaming desktop that only runs Linux since I built it. It’s never been an issue.

So my oldest is almost to the point where I’m going to want them to have something for schoolwork and writing. They use a classroom Chromebook at school, but I have no idea what would make sense for them here at home. I’m an engineer who daily drives Linux, so I’m probably overthinking it. I do have an old laptop that will easily handle a lightweight distro, and as long as I don’t give them sudo it will probably be ok? Though I haven’t looked at parental controls for Linux accounts.

What do you recommend?