I hate meta with a passion, but I don't deny they have some great infrastructure and engineers to enable the bad things they do to the world

In practice the data was well behaved enough and small enough that it was very doable.

There's probably a name for that cognitive bias, but I don't know it.

Being a musk supporter in this day and age isn't a simple difference in opinion, unless you're a good person who's been living under a rock, in which case a mention of musk being pretty awful could actually help you.

The people who like Musk are probably beyond help

A lot of the things they break are pretty minor cleanups and it seems they could easily not have broken things. Many other languages, even compiled languages where the explosions happen at compilation, are much more careful about these things. For a dynamic language like python it's an especially bad idea.

Python for example makes breaking changes in minor releases and seems to think it's fine, even though it's especially bad for a language where you might only find that out runtime

So if you OK the first step, I can touch a 2025/first-step file. If the script crashes or is interrupted and rerun, it can check for that file and skip the first step

If something has changed so the automation doesn't work, it's nice to be able to crash out without losing state, fix the script and rerun.

I usually have the script tell me just the next manual step and then exit, because that frees the terminal up for me to do other things. I can use the command history to rerun the script easily

So I built a script that tells me what the first step is. When it's done I run the script again and it tells me what to do next. Often the first few steps are "download this CSV from the bank" so the script can detect I've done than and go directly to the next step when I rerun the script

The reason I have a script I rerun rather than a "press enter to continue" is because it then only keeps persistent state, and I can easily do a bit every day until done

A common pattern is

    if ! [[ -e checked-all-the-receipts ]]; then
         echo "check that the receipts match the list of expenses, then"
         echo "  touch checked-all-the-receipts"
         exit 0
    fi

Or much technology at all. If you use anything that is 1000 years old, it's probably been maintained or cared for a lot during those 1000 years

It's a bit like asking why the army needs tanks when horses worked well the previous war

Are you talking about security updates?