The first time I tried this was the last time I tried. It was ca. 2012 on an Acer laptop that I personally configured to dual-boot. My memory is not to be trusted but

- the biggest problem for me was that it asked for a core dump/logfile, which I agreed to, but for some reason or another it could not produce/extract said debug info and I got stuck in a loop of whoopsie trying and failing.

- smaller grievance (I might be wrong) is that I had to create some account (Launchpad?) in order to report the bug. Why can't it be anonymous?!

Everytime I turned this Acer laptop on, there will be 2-3 such prompts from Ubuntu that something report-worthy went wrong. You learn to blend it out like the cookie consent dialogs but still annoying. Plus, everything is still perfectly usable so it does seem like the OS is just making a mountain out of a molehill.

I started off with Ubuntu in the 2010s because I wanted to try out Linux but was sure as hell didn't have the patience nor resources to make consumer conveniences like WiFi just work. The local LUG was also heavily promoting it; that's even more inertia.

Then I got fancy and started really customizing my configuration---I got a dotfiles repo. The oldest commit touching a top-level file in my dotfiles is 11 years ago (almost unthinkable to me!). I haven't really tried it out on any other distro but I'm pretty sure I've written some shim or personal bash command relying on something Ubuntu-specific.

I happen to be in the market for a new laptop right now. I'm looking at Starlabs but unfortunately they do not ship with Debian. Today, however, I saw a random woman in a cafe with Linux Mint so that might be my sign to investigate that ecosystem.

Also, "fear of heights" is a totally valid excuse. Fear is a gut reaction and may have nothing to do with one's justified true beliefs. Eg., I know spiders on probability won't harm me but there simply won't be any amicable co-existence between me and any arachnid.

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

From my experience in Home Improvement and Bicycles, I almost always get in some form of contention with the mods over the boundary between "broadly applicable" and "too specific". I'd do the esr-minimum[1] of showing my homework by posting pictures of my WIP and citing Youtube videos I'm trying to follow but, apparently, this is already toeing the line. I honestly don't know what the mods expect of a good question there. Of course, there will be an appreciable degree of case-specificity in my questions because if the YT tutorials could already answer my problem, I would have no need to ask for help and advice!

Then we have sites like Literature SE which has been languishing in their sandbox since literally forever. Like most SE sites, the guidelines bid you to "avoid asking for opinions or open-ended discussions" and "be specific" but I find that untenable in a Literature site. Notably, sister site SF&F is comparably thriving but there is a fair amount of open-ended speculation going on in there.

Lastly, IMO, it just suffers because at its core its problem is human and social, not technical. In an effort for better curation we ended up with Computer Science, Theoretical Computer Science, and Computational Science. For some posters, finding the right SE site already introduces a huge wall to overcome for posting. This hampers a lot of the out group: students who might be seeking homework guidance or looking to supplement their own readings and lectures, amateurs who are just curious about something in the field. I've had a question in one of the Science SEs outside my field that was well-received by the community but one mod kept "tagging to delete" (I forgot the exact term) almost every year. This mod action has a prescriptive period and, boy, he kept at it. Honestly, I don't care in the end. I asked the question out of sheer curiosity and got a satisfactory answer. Yet I wonder how exactly they expect to foster a community this way.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I feel similarly blessed nowadays. I did try to play the fame game with my Github projects but I could never find a problem that enough people cared for to get any kind of traction. Or maybe I really just suck at marketing. Either way, I find myself still fulfilled when doing my personal projects. They are not "side hustles" or a "home lab" or a "software factory". They're really just small projects that solve a problem for me. A lot of it also has to do with my very specific decade-old daily personal driver running Linux; my reticence to guarantee support for Mac and Windows (beyond what Node or Python ships by default) could not be helping my case.

And that's fine! Software with an audience of 1 but really fits in seamlessly with my lifestyle. Plus, if I want to change something, I can do so with zero consideration for other platforms. The reason why I wanted to learn to program in the first place is because I wanted the computer to do what I want it to do. Bend to my will ye golem of bits!

I think statement from TFA basically boils down to "stop enforcing maxlengths on passwords, neither in the form field nor the DB". I'm no security expert but I'm a `correct horse battery staple`-adherent so if anything, password fields should have a minimum length, not maximum. Short passwords should be what's considered dirty.

Unlike most other people here, I wouldn't really say I've developed a radar for "the vibecoded webpage design"; I thankfully don't dabble as much with FE nowadays so if you told me this is default Bootstrap 4 or something, I'd have believed you. But as I scrolled through the claims, my AI-generated text radar pinged hard and I was caught in a moment of dissonance between the sleek design and the AI-cadenced copy.

Suddenly, I would've had more confidence if this was a black default font text on a white webpage, served from a .edu domain.

> The nightly is rebuilt from every push to main and published as a pre-release on GitHub. Unsigned, so the first launch asks you to confirm.

But with only two commits within the hour this really reads more like a concept of a release plan than an actual regimented/automated release process.

My problem with vibecoded projects was never whether if it was going to work but whether if the failure modes are known. And you can only know the failure modes if you check your work. Hence why, I realized that a history of alpha and beta releases for an opensource project is a signal of quality.

Similarly, most of the programmers skeptical about AI---me included---don't really do so out of a threat to a domain we've mastered. The problem is, models, to this day, need supervision so they understand requirements, so they know where to properly look for prior art, so that they "understand" the existing architecture. That includes you, Claude. Our kung fu has been six months away from obsolescence since roundabouts 2022 and in 2026 they even rehired a bunch of out-of-touch kung fu masters.

Eh? Martial arts has always been a mix of utility and cultural artifact.

Greco-Roman wrestling flourished in a/alongside of military utility. Greeks and Romans had swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Boxing also traces its history all the way back to the Greeks.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese arts developed in a society with, also, swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Notably these cultures often included weapons training ("kobudo" in Japanese) in their curriculum but that did not phase out the empty-handed aspect of the art.

Catch wrestling developed among sailors who would not be strangers to guns and rifles.

BJJ developed, well, today.

There has always been a component of sportsmanship and self-improvement in martial arts. Carmack misreads this introduction, methinks.

In Germany I don't think that counts. "Software Engineering" as a title isn't regulated (as kcexn is asking for). The German term "Softwareentwickler" more literally translates to "Software Developer" (as opposed to "Ingenieur") but I don't see companies having problems translating that in job posts and even contracts to "Software Engineer". I've never seen "Softwareingenieur" used tbf.

Getting into Germany as a Software Engineer (for app development) is also as relatively frictionless as it gets in comparison to more-traditional engineering fields.

Verdi is the German trade union so they have to make these kinds of distinctions about which professions they can represent. Don't quote me on this one but I think Verdi represents very little of the modern "app development" software engineers. I guess those who work for more traditional German industries like auto-manufacturing can fall under their umbrella.

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[LESS INACCURATE EDIT AND MY THOUGHTS IN LESS WORDS:]

In Germany "Ingenieur" (Engineer) is a loaded term with legal implications so "Software Engineer" is "Softwareentiwickler" (Software Developer) instead. But really this is an HR sleight-of-hand trick. At the end of the day, getting into professional Softwareentwicklung is the same in Germany as in elsewhere that calls it "Software Engineering" (and IMO is what kcexn was asking about anyway).

Anecdata time...

There was once a scrappy start-up who, like all scrappy start-ups, was taking on the heavyweight incumbent gorilla of the industry. They started poaching the small customers from the gorilla, just enough for the gorilla to notice. These customers often cited how "fast and lightweight" the start-up's platform was compared to the gorilla.

The claim wasn't really supported by Grafana. The numbers weren't bad; in fact they were very average. For some metrics, the gorilla was actually still the gold standard the scrappy start-up targeted. The engineers suspected "fast and lightweight" had more to do with the user experience (they had smoothly-animated loading screens) than actual server performance. Still, it's not a complaint so they took that as a win.

After a couple of years of steady growth poaching from the gorilla, they started getting bug reports of slow performance. The customers have been seeing more and more of the smooth loading screen animations and less of the data they actually need to work on. And this time, the claims were supported by Grafana! There was no way to massage the statistics to even claim the reports are outliers or to pass the blame on to the unreliable ISPs.

The problem, it turns out, was that they were sending emails as notifications for a bunch of user actions and at that point there were about 2-3 such user actions per minute. While they could async some of those, there were a bunch whose succeeding states assumed that the notifications have been sent.

After three weeks of profiling and going through the whole performance optimization playbook, the fix boiled down to a one-liner in SQLAlchemy that offloaded loading notification mailing lists to Postgres cursors rather than loading whole lists into memory in one go.

Moral of the story: no one is asking you to build a racecar but that doesn't mean performance is not table stakes. A good senior engineer knows just where the balance is to still deliver business value. That is the salary you are paying for.

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

Even if the authors died immediately after publication there is no way the copyright has expired.

"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.

From https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:

> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).

The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.

Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.

I was considering whether OP's complaint is an engineer's thing. My conclusion, based on my own experience is, the more your user base tends toward power-users/highly-skilled use cases, the more deterministic your search should be.

A random guy might try to look for a kid's novel series about wizards that sounds like "Happy Fathers". That's when you need Google-level fuzzy search to bridge that gap and suggest "Harry Potter". As a general search engine, Google encounters this a lot.

Same guy asks a librarian, the librarian would instantly know what he's talking about. The Librarian searches the catalog for "Harry Potter" but might misspell it "Harry Poter" or search for "the philosopher's stone" in a US catalog. These cases can be fairly covered by deterministic search methods/classic indexing.

I'd say close to 90% of my daily searches could be served with exact matching. The next 8-9% could be solved by a little more deterministic sophistication (e.g., edit distance, equivalence classes for synonyms). Then the last 1-2% is when I really need some fuzzy magic; mostly to give me an idea what to do with obscure programming-related problems.

Coaches get in the face of the officials already anyway. This just gives the action a chance at being productive rather than an opportunity to get a red card.

Yes, this is based on the derided review system of Olympic Taekwondo. It's horrible in a fight sport but football is a ball game; somebody tell Paredes and Paraguay please.