Headphones offer the only escape. They're also a sign that you are trying to concentrate to discourage those "just a quick word" moments which could easily be covered by an instant message.

For you I'd recommend some ear protectors that one might use when operating power tools :-).

I actually think ear protectors with some bluetooth headphones built in might be the ideal solution :-)

They also make boring work bearable. Terry Pratchett is a huge favorite :-)

I was unemployed for about half a year recently and I got a much less stressful job after that. It's strange because I felt and still feel humiliated about it all and yet actual life has become much better. My behavior at home improved - as noted by my wife. I've got some DIY projects done at home which were pointless (could have paid for them) but very satisfying.

My kid is delightful and although nothing has changed I realised that I am living through one of the golden periods in life - where one doesn't think too much about it but the important things are really good. Stressful work wasn't allowing me to see it and I was numbing life out to try to cope. There have been some very very un-golden times in the past and it is unfortunate not to be able to enjoy the good when it is there.

That was almost what we should have done on the installer project I was working on because it was just too difficult to dance around it.

> The symlinking trick for .so files often breaks on Linux. Method parameters change, structs get altered,

I think its roughly orthogonal - any C/C++ based project is a huge pain in the backside when it comes to ABI compatibility because as you say changes that appear tiny can break everything. My major beef with DLLs is the way that they have a table of functions such that adding a new function can shift the indices of everything in the table. If they used symbols all would be well. But as you say it's incredibly easy to break compatibility and not realise it even without that.

It's not the fault of MSI per se, although its concept seems utterly frightful to me, but the way DLLs work and are registered and where you have to install them etc. When your app requires an older or newer MSVCRT etc. Also...the registry...something else that makes good old UNIX text file editing seem good to me.

I always thought that libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION.MINORVERSION with symbolic links from libsomelibrary.so.MAJORVERSION and libsomelibrary.so allowed one to create dependencies that made sense - more or less specific as you chose. It also allows different versions of the same library to exist in the same directory such that one is less likely to break existing software when installing something newer (or older).

To be fair it might just be the way Windows tries to keep compatibility for the ages that makes it super difficult. I do think that you tend to get similar outcomes from similar assumptions/requirements and compatibility was indeed very very important till the internet became good enough to offer everyone easy upgrades.

I'm not a big snap or flatpack fan but DMG seems rather in their class - making things simpler. It might be easy to run an MSI after someone has burned many hours testing it to get it to work everywhere but to me it's a non-simple architecture that is made to work by extreme effort. I'd rather a simpler architecture that open source packagers could manage more easily.

As an example, I tried creating an Ubuntu package recently - a plugin for GNU Make that adds some useful functions.....that was SO hard - worse than any MSI experience I ever had - and I gave up. There were millions of confusing instructions and none worked properly. I couldn't work out which way was up or down - I don't know how people do it.

On Artix (an OS which is a little harder to install than Ubuntu) it is an absolute dream to create packages - exceedingly so. It might be that they aren't the greatest packages in the world but something that can be developed easily and got working can also be improved easily.

One usually doesn't have to fall back from these too often because so many machines have them and its the fallback that I find so tiresome - having to get some other muscle memory going for a tool I haven't used in a while.

Level 2 would be strace - because it's so incredibly useful when trying to find out why something isn't working as you might expect.

I don't claim to be highly productive though - just old. Productivity for me comes from making up my mind what to do and being able to visualise it. Usually there's a massive period of unproductivity before every brief bit of decent work. If I was more decisive then people might know my name :-) but I'm obscure like most of us I presume.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7w6YXaNvt8

  { # code that generates one item/filename per line of output }  | { while read ITEM; do # do something with "$ITEM"; done; }

  enum() {
    local source=$1; shift; local action=$1; shift  
    { eval "$source" ; } | { while read ITEM; do eval "$action"; done; }
  }

  $ enum "find /tmp" "echo found: \$ITEM"

  found: /tmp/.XIM-unix
  found: /tmp/.ICE-unix

This means you need to see your strengths and understand how you are motivated and try to come up with ways of making the best use of those characteristics. There's no point feeling sad that you aren't X or Y. If you're Z then how can you make best use of Z?

I suggest that it's important to stop thinking that other people are idiots because this lack of tolerance or understanding of other people seems to extend to yourself. You have to understand and accept yourself as having flaws. Then you may see that other people are the same - their apparent idiocy always has reasons behind it and you should take some time to understand them even if you still don't agree with them.

I notice that depression is something I feel the ghost of when my image of myself is damaged by some real world situation. The only real solution to this is to stop thinking about yourself so much and think about other people more. Help people do what they want rather than what you want for a bit.

Also as someone else noted, bad family situations, relationships etc, create a lot of weight. Try to avoid people who make you sad and find ways to hang out with people who interest you enough that you forget about yourself for a while.

The whole point is to rewrite everything in a language you don't understand and then ignore whether it's better because you can't tell.

That language, of course, must be Rust.

Then you don't have to litter all of your if/else clauses with hundreds of memory frees and cleanups - you just "goto"

The fact that this is controversial to some people just shows how rules like "Dont use goto" become stupid - if one is trying to make code simpler then there are cases were not using it is the more confusing and error prone choice.

As for "can we now do anything" well if you don't ever need to debug "anything" then yes and if you have any small doubts about your LLM then no.

There is no direction of travel for them other than the nirvana of selling you nothing for something.

Competition obviously seems not to have fixed that. Food standards seemingly don't quite do it yet.

I wonder what we could do to them to take the pressure off somehow?