Redkey

It's weird to me how GIMP and Krita clearly share a large amount of code under the hood, and even some UI design, but at the same time it feels so much less painful to draw illustrations in Krita than in GIMP. I'm glad I gave it a try.

Child's play compared to what you'd need to do on a modern chip.

I don't think it's the chips, but the operating environments. Modern CPUs offer dozens of multipurpose registers and many more instructions and addressing modes compared to those old, low-cost CPUs, which should make things easier, not harder. But no-one's building old-style dedicated systems around modern CPUs; our code now has to play nice with firmware, OS, libraries, and other processes, including resource management and preempting.

Compare a single-gear go-kart to an automatic sedan. Getting top performance out of the go-kart on a closed track is difficult and requires nuance. If we could drive the automatic sedan around the same closed track, we could easily demolish the go-kart, and not just with raw engine power. The improved acceleration, braking assist, and power steering are enough. But when we drive the sedan we're usually doing it on public roads with traffic signals, intersections, speed limits, and other road users. That's what's more difficult.

I didn't know that generative AI could do things like this now.

Node =/= JavaScript

"Hopefully it will help with shit. Let's talk to the originating author, Aasish Pokhrel."

I once saw a documentary about Bedouin tribes that were dying out. The problem was very simple, from the outside; they were killing virtually all of their female children.

The team interviewed an elder of one tribe, asking him about this practice. As expected, the elder said that parents wanted sons to continue their family names.

"If no-one in the tribe has any daughters, where will these sons find wives?" asked the interviewer. The elder confidently replied without hesitation, "They will get wives from other tribes." "But what if the other tribes kill their female babies just like your tribe does?" the interviewer persisted (In fact, they had met people from several tribes, and indeed they all followed this terrifying practice). The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. "They will get wives from other tribes."

"NPM install" isn't going to be the direct result of a race condition in JavaScript. And while I'm not familiar with Python, I'd guess that an "Indentation error" wouldn't be one either. A missing library or syntax error that's only discovered by executing a particular branch is still just a missing library or syntax error, not a race condition.

Also, while Node.js is popular, it isn't an integral part of JavaScript in the way that the other errors are integral to their respective languages.

For 2, one of the few pieces of Windows software that I haven't been able to replace in Linux is GetRight. Many HTTP servers support downloads starting at an offset from the beginning of the file, and GetRight uses that to allow download pausing and resumption.

It was a real life saver back when I had an extremely flaky Internet connection.

EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll definitely take a look at them. Simply resuming downloads is why I initally started using GetRight, but it also came with a bunch of other useful tools that I came to rely on. While I've been able to replicate some of the basic functionality with individual browser plugins or programs, I haven't seen anything that integrates it all so well, with such a smooth interface. I haven't looked for a long time, though, so maybe one of your suggestions will be the one!

A potential ley line blockage that's cleared by a ritual performed every winter solstice by a hobbyist spellcaster who lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere?

"... [it] isn't actually necessary... the whole spell falls apart without it for some reason."

That's peak cargo cult ~~programming~~ spellcasting right there.

I recently wasted multiple evenings going through this with my partner's photos on both OneDrive and Google. It was a nightmare, trying to disentangle their systems from the cloud, and delete stuff from the cloud (they were hitting the free quotas, which was causing problems) without also deleting that content locally.

I ended up doing a full backup from the cloud to an external drive and unplugging it just to be sure, then carefully using the awful web interfaces to delete a bunch of photos and videos from the cloud after deactivating all the auto-backup "options", which is apparently the only way to do it without also wiping your local media. There doesn't seem to be any way to do it while using the "service" normally on the device; any attempt to delete from the cloud will also delete your local copy.

People have called me paranoid for seeking out and removing/deactivating these "services" with extreme prejudice on my own devices, but this experience was even worse than I'd imagined.

Assembler, BASIC, Old C code, Cobol...

...Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Modern C code, PHP, Java, Python, C++, Lua, JavaScript, C#, Rust...

The list is infinite.

Show me a language in which it is impossible to write spaghetti code, and I'll show you someone who can't recognize spaghetti code when it's written in one of their favourite languages.