Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.

I see you too are a person of culture.

Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.

The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.

Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.

What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?

This is called Dutch Disease and most often happens with natural resources, but also with natural stupidity.

The state of office desks has been continuously getting worse my entire career.

The very first place I interviewed had small private offices with a door for everyone. They weren’t any bigger than a decent sized cubicle but were real separate rooms and most of them had exterior windows. I didn’t get that job though.

My first desk at my first engineering job was in a cubicle with real six foot tall walls, a window with a nice view, big L desk, shelves, filing cabinets, etc.

Then I got the same setup, but in a fabric cube. Honestly, not really a downgrade. I had that setup three times, and the only difference was how good the view was.

Then the same but no windows.

Then a smaller cube with a simple 6 foot desk and a single cabinet.

Then a line of 6 foot wide desks with privacy screens on three sides.

Then privacy screen on left and right only.

Then no screens.

Then four foot desks.

My current office is four foot desks that are hotdesked for most people. But we are also completely remote if you want, so I use my nice desk that I built at home 90% of the time.

If you take the tree of life showing the evolutionary branch, you won’t be able to pick off a branch that includes all of the things you would think of as “fish” but excludes all of the things you think of as “not fish”.

The reason for that is that all land animals with a four limb body plan, including reptiles, mammals, and birds dinosaurs evolved from a family of fish called tetrapods. But there are still tetrapods in the ocean that you would think of as “fish”, and I don’t mean whales.

Hank Green has a much more entertaining and complete discussion at https://youtu.be/-C3lR3pczjo

And almost all of these are fishes.

I joined a Canada based company in the last year. Every time we chat abooot non-work stuff I find yet another reason to be envious of them.

In my case, I use several different types of machines: Personal Linux desktop, personal low end Linux laptop, remote servers where I have sudo, work Mac, shared remote work servers where I don’t have sudo. I want my setup to be basically the same everywhere so that my muscle memory works, but there are some things that also need to be a bit different for each. Hence, a dot files manager that lets me run one command to keep my environment consistent in all those different targets. I use chezmoi + git for it nowadays.

I’ve been hearing that, but only from random comments here and there. Is there an authoritative article somewhere?

You mean meta-up, right?

That makes the most sense. It was probably set up the day she got it as part of the onboarding process and then she never used it and forgot about doing something that took 30 seconds several years ago.

This is it exactly. When I was using Npp, Windows didn’t have anything resembling a package manager. Does it even really have one now?

Are you implying that there are IC designers who aren’t lunatics?

That depends, do you want high or a low side switch? There are valid reasons for either depending on what you’re doing.

Fuck. I haven’t used Npp in a long time, but that’s awful. Glad they were able to get it fixed and their transparency is to be highly commended. But damn does it make me worry about other projects. Npp isn’t exactly obscure, but it’s also not exactly a massive target either.

Hmm, nope. A bunch of bank branches got remodeled after a merger and a local gas station is being torn down and replaced, but nothing new.

Yeah, the libraries are pretty great. I’m working on a kinda personal kinda professional project right now. Ideally it would support reading and writing about seven different sorta obscure file formats. For a bunch of reasons I’m writing it in rust and there is a good library for one of them, multiple half assed libraries for another, and none for any of the others. There is excellent support for all of them as a single Python library. My first step has become writing a comprehensive rust library for all of them.

Nope, not an IDE thing. I’ve never used a Python ide, and have the same issues as well.