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eamon

@[email protected]

Union data scientist and working parent. Interested in reproducible research methods (#r13y), #RStats, #JuliaLang, living sustainably (bicycling, walking, reducing, and reusing), being outside, and many nerdy hobbies (#TTRPG, #HamRadio).

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@eamon@social.coop avatar eamon , to random

Vibe check: is software getting worse? Or does it just feel like it's getting worse because more things depend on software (which has always been bad), and my exposure to software-being-bad has simply increased?

This particular post is prompted by a notification that the door code system at my child's preschool is glitching out, letting some parents in but not others. But this has been on my mind for some time.

Another example: the amount of times I find myself rebooting something just to get it working again is on an upswing, after reaching a local minimum several years ago.

eamon OP ,
@eamon@social.coop avatar

You might think you know where I'm going with this, but surprise! I actually think most of the blame lies with the widespread adoption of CI/CD pipelines, and the manner in which this programming philosophy has trickled down to non-website programming. E.g., every program that tells you to pipe curl output to bash or updates itself (rather than depend on a package manager or manually downloaded installers).

Making it easier to fix bugs in production has resulted in more bugs in production!

@eamon@social.coop avatar eamon , to random

Today's idiosyncratic opinion: I like physical calendars that start the week on Sunday (because they're what I'm used to), but Monday should be the first day of the week on digital calendars and week numbering systems.

eamon OP ,
@eamon@social.coop avatar

Also, I don't like the way Outlook and Thunderbird integrate calendaring with email. I want different apps to do different things! Yes I understand that calendar coordination is carried out by sending ics files over email, but calendars can still be standalone applications.

@eamon@social.coop avatar eamon , to random

Fate has delivered me a question that is MEANT for the Fediverse:

I have been asked to "wipe" a bunch of old laptops destined for e-waste. Is Mint the best distro to put on these if I want to distribute them to Linux-curious family members?

@eamon@social.coop avatar eamon , to random

Weird find of the day:
grepl(pattern, NA) returns FALSE and not NA.

Did everyone already know this? Seems weird.