QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.

Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).

Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.

Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.

Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks

It was a mixture of factors.

Data was to be dumped into a S3 bucket (minio), this created an event and anouther team had built an orchestrator which would do a couple of things but eventually supply an endpoint a reference to a plain/txt file for analysis.

For the Java devs they had to [modify the example camel docs.](https://camel.apache.org/manual/rest-dsl.html) and use the built in jackson library to convert the incoming object to a class. This used the default AWS S3 api to create a stream handle which fed into the OpenNLP docs. .

The Python project first hit a wall in setting up Flask. They followed the instructions and it didn’t work from setup tools. The Java team had just created a new maven project from the Intelij but the same approach didn’t work for the Python team using pycharm. It lost them a couple days, I helped them overcome it.

Then they hit a wall with Boto3, the team expected to stream data but Boto3 only supports downloading, there was also a complexity issue the AWS SDK in Java waa about 20 lines to setup and a single line to call, it was about 50 lines in Python. On the positive side I got to explain what all the config meant in S3.

This caused the team anouther few days of delay because the team knew I used a 350MiB Samsung TV guide to test the robustness and had to go learn about Docker volume mounting and they thought they needed a stateful kubernetes service and I had to explain why that was wrong.

Basically Python threw up a lot of additional complexity and the docs weren’t as helpful as they could have been.

If you have the freedom try Typescript.

The tsx files are almost identical to jsx except for the need to define the field types your ingesting.

While thats a little extra work, it allows Visual Studio Code to perform deeper analysis and provide much more helpful contextual hints.

I grew to love JSX and tried TSX out of interest and you couldn’t convince to go back to pure JS

You do, but considering the scales they process data I suspect Google would be better building Go tooling (or whatever the dominate internal language is).

A few years back I was trying to teach some graduates the importance of looking at a programming language ecosystem and selecting it based on that.

One of my comparison projects was Apache OpenNLP/Camel vs Flask/Spacy.

Spacy is the go to for NLP, I expected it to be either quicker to develop, easier to use, better results or just less resources.

I assigned Grads with Java experience Spacy and Python experience OpenNLP.

The OpenNLP guys were done first, they raved about being able to stream data into the model and how much simplier it made life.

When compared with the same corpus (Books, Team emails, corporate sharepoint, dev docs, etc…) OpenNLP would complete on 4GiB of RAM in less than a second on 0.5vCPU. Spacy needed 12GiB and was taking ~2 seconds with 2vCPU. They identified the same results…

Me and a few others ended up spending a day reading the python and trying to optimise it, clearly the juniors had done something daft, they had not.

It rather undermined my point.

Nah Linux Mint is a Kia Ceed.

Ubuntu is a Ford Focus, they successfully stole the volvo estate market (Debian). The car was fun, good value and very practical. It was everywhere. Then Ford started increasing the size, weight, price, etc… killing the point of the Focus.

So along comes Kia trying to make a competitor in the Ceed.

In theory the Ceed is a great car, its super cheap, lots of cabin space, nippy, the inside has every modern convenance, but…

• It plays engine noises via speakers that aren’t aligned with what you are doing
• The boot space is rubbish, so 5 people can happily travel in the car you barely fit a suitcase in it
• There is an steering sensitivity button that stays on at 70 MPH with no indication on the display
• A Vauxhall Nova just out accelerated you

Your left wondering why anyone is bothering with hot hatchbacks these days as you climb into your volvo

Debian would be a Volvo Estate, its the boring practical family choice, the owner is soneone boring like an architect or a financial advisor.

Arch is a Vauxhall Nova, second hand battered owned almost exclusively by teenage lads who spend a lot of time/money modifying it (e.g. lowering so it can’t go over speed bumps, adding a massive exhaust to sound good but destroys engine power).

Fedora is something slightly larger/more expensive like a Ford Focus/VW Golf/Vauxhall Astra owned by slightly older lads. The owners spend their time adding lighting kits and the largest sound systems money can buy.

Slackware is clearly a Subaru Impreza, at one point the best World Rally Car but hasn’t been a contender for a while. Almost all are owned by rally fans who spend fantastic amounts of time tinkering with the car to get set it up an ultimate rally car. None of the owners race cars.

OpenSuse is a Nissan Cube, its insanely practical. It should be the modern boring family choice, but it manages to ve too quirky for your architect while not practical enough for van drivers.

I don’t know the other distros well enough.

I run Debian btw

Lays is called Walkers in the UK and the Sensations brand is still sold.

Here there are in my local supermarket. Personally I prefer the Sensation Thai Sweet Chilli nuts, they are the perfect thing while you wait for food to cook on the BBQ.

Every big UK company I have worked for doesn’t own its building. They will typically agree to rent a building for 5-20 years at a fixed rate (longer times if its being purpose built for them) .

So I would expect this is paying out the rest of the rental agreements for a building to escape the building lease.

It is to do with financial reporting and the way asset and operational costs are reported.

Immutable distributions won’t solve the problem.

You have 3 types of testing unit (descrete part of code), integration (how a software piece works with others) and system testing (e.g. the software running in its environment). Modern software development has build chains to simplify testing all 3 levels.

Debian’s change freeze effectively puts a known state of software through system testing. The downside its effecitvely ‘free play’ testing of the software so it requires a big pool of users and a lot of time to be effective. This means software in debian can use releases up to 3 years old.

Something like Fedora relies on the test packs built into the open source software, the issue here is testing in open source world is really variable in quality. So somethinng like Fedora can pull down broken code that passes its tests and compiles.

The immutable concept is about testing a core set of utilities so you can run the containers of software on top. You haven’t stopped the code in the containers being released with bugs or breaking changes you’ve just given yourself a means to back out of it. It’s a band aid to the actual problem.

The solution is to look at core parts of the software stack and look to improve the test infrastructure, phoronix manages to run the latest Kernel’s on various types of hardware for benchmarking, why hasn’t the Linux foundation set up a computing hall to compile and run system level testing for staged changes?

Similarly website’s are largely developed with all 3 levels of testing, using things like Jest/Mocha/etc… for Unit/Integration testing and Robots/Cypress/Selenium/Storybook/etc… for system testing. While GTK and KDE apps all have unit/integration tests where are the system level test frameworks?

All this is kinda boring while ‘containers!’ is exciting new technology

You seem to be intentionally missing the point, but to reiterate…

You shower before entering a pool to wash the dirt from your body off (your cleaning yourself).

The more of your body covered the less effective that shower is.

Ideally everyone would be naked in the shower, but there are probably outfits which increasingly render the shower less and less effective (e.g. speedos are better than shorts, etc .).

It would not surprise me if a Burkina covered so much that the cleaning shower is rendered pointless

The shower before a pool is to ensure people aren’t entering the pool coated in dirt (e.g. sweat, hair, dead skin, etc…).

The chemicals in a pool are designed to bind to that dirt and kill any bacteria introduced.

There is a limit to the chemicals you can add to a pool (before it hurts humans) and once the amount has activated you need to drain the pool and refill it.

Swimming pools hold crazy amounts of water which is also really expensive to heat up, so pools want to do that as little as possible.

Clothing interfers with cleaning your body, so people entering near fully clothed (e.g. like a Burkina) will likely introduce more dirt into the pool.

That translates into increased costs for swimming pools or pools which maintain the old schedule and just operate unsafely.

This is all based on owning a hot tub and learning how to maintain it.

Hopefully this also explains why it doesn’t matter people enter the sea fully clothed

Uhh how?

The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

MBin is a fork by a group who tried to push into KBin but couldn’t. There seems to be at least 4 active committers and stuff gets merged.

You will see a number of the KBin instances moved over https://fedidb.org/software/mbin

The developer behind KBin seems to have issues delegating/accepting contributors.

If you look at the pull requests, most have been unreviewed for months and he tends to regularly push his branches once complete and just merge them in.

That behaviour drove the MBin fork, where 4-5 people were really keen to contribute but were frustrated.

To some extent that would be ok, its his project and if he doesn’t want to encourage contributions that is his decision but…

KBin.social has gotten to the size where it really should have multiple admins (or a paid full time person). Which it doesn’t have.

The developer has also told us he has gone through a divorce, moved into his own place, gotten a full time job and now had surgery.

Thats a lot for any normal person and he is going through that while trying to wear 2 hats (dev & ops) each of which would consume most of your free time.

Personally I moved to kbin.run which is run by one of the MBin devs

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Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory…

Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious…

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc… Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

It does but for the 90’s/00’s a computer typically meant Windows.

The ops staff would all be ‘Microsoft Certified Engineers’, the project managers had heard of Microsoft FuD about open source and every graduate would have been taught programming via Visual Studio.

Then you have regulatory hurdles, for example in 2010 I was working on an ‘embedded’ platform on a first generation Intel Atom platform. Due to power constraints I suggested we use Linux. It worked brilliantly.

Government regulations required anti virus from an approved list and an OS that had been accredited by a specific body.

The only accredited OS’s were Windows and the approved Anti Viruses only supported Windows. Which is how I got to spend 3 months learning how to cut XP embedded down to nothing.

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There will always be someone who is beating you in a metric (buying houses, having kids, promotions, pay, relationships, etc…) fixating on it will drive you mad.

Instead you should compare your current status against where you were and appreciate how you are moving forward

As for age

During university my best mate was 27 who dropped out of his final year, grabbed a random job, then went to college to get a BTEC so they could start the degree.

It was similar in my graduate intake, we had a 26 year old who had been a brickie for 5 years before getting a comp sci degree.

The first person I line managed was a junior 15 years older than me, who had a completely different career stream. They had the house, kids, had managed big teams, etc… honestly I learnt tons from them.