!linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev for people who that link is not working for. (I, personally, get a couldnt_find_post error.)
Sometimes I have been told my links don’t work by some other people, but they work for me logged in and logged out. Wonder if it’s that we’re using different clients, and if your link would work for the people who cannot open my link successfully.
Privacy paranoia, after seeing someone get doxxed and part of the process was “hmm, these accounts all express interest in the same specific things”. If two accounts express interest in programming, they are probably not owned by the same person. Programming and swimming, still probably not be the same. Programming and swimming and winemaking and [insert 7 more hobbies here]? A lot more likely to be owned by the same person.
Yes, I am a little nobody. Unfortunately, some nobodies have had people stalk their comment history during a disagreement and send harassing messages, or have had to get a restraining order against a crazy ex—does not take being a celebrity to want to be careful and wall off information about me and what I’m doing in case I get one of those types in the future trying to find me. And it makes me feel safer and doesn’t add much extra friction to my life.
I have expressed this sentiment before which I worry could be identifying (really, I should worry more about what else I’m leaking: smart enough to not say “Jane Smith from 842 Street” but reading my comment history might still give away more than I want) and I regret the fact human courtesy and a niggling worry you are judging me (come on, you’re an online stranger, I should not even care) is convincing me to reply, especially since I am worried you’ll just say my worries are unfounded and my reason is stupid and bad, but in a more polite manner. I tend towards wanting to explain the why of why I do things but purposely left out the explanation this time for that reason, until you specifically asked for it.
I could maybe understand someone arguing "I don’t want to be connected with only one instance, to avoid putting all my social presence in one basket, but then this is still not about identity anymore, because we could do that by using different “generic” instances.
Is it about keeping different personas? Having different styles of writing and interacting with others based on the audience? I could understand that, but it feels a bit weird, as if we are not allowed to be ourselves.
I don’t want to be myself, Jane Smith from 842 Street, age 32, with a specific social presence and identity online. I want to be another anonymous person in the void. Of course, I do realize I do technically have a presence, my username and post and comment history, I am not fully anonymous. I guess I want to be closer to anonymous than a specific person with a specific social presence, or at least I want to have my social presence segregated from Jane Smith. I don’t mind if people notice I tend to contribute to X community or make Y kind of comment, if they recognize my username. I do mind if people go explicitly digging to try to figure out that I am Jane Smith. Some people might and this is part of how I try to deal with it.
I fully understand I can just use Subscribed to only see what I want, and that I can subscribe to many different communities with different topics with it. I splinter my identity off per instance as a choice, which is why I brought it up, not as lack of knowledge on how to use Subscribed.
Curious what topics those instances are, then, then, unless you do not want to share that.
You know what you’re getting into when you go in (a programming forum),
Are you sure about that? [picture with non-programming topics]
Notice that your picture is set to All, which gives you all the communities people on programming.dev subscribe to so naturally it will not be restricted to just programming topics, because as you mentioned, a lot of people use one Lemmy account for a lot of different interests. Setting to Local will give you only the communities hosted here, all of which are programming-related. I browse by Local here and my feed is gloriously full of programming to the exclusion of all else. I feed my other interests on other accounts, which leads to…
that you use one account to talk to your friends from school and another to talk with your friends from the swimming club and another to send pictures to people you went camping last summer.
For my real life identity, I am definitely more on one account. But for talking to strangers online, my approach is a lot closer to one-thing-per-account. And because of that…
perhaps more people will be interested in using the dozen topic-based instances that I created last year.
What are they? I might sign up.
This feels like me wanting to learn Hare because I like rabbits, which I bring up because someone left this reply for me and I think it applies to you too:
That is such a sweet reason! Whimsical decisions like this can be some of the best. Life demands a bit of whimsy every now and then.
Reddit post’s content:
Hello all,
My team and I have been working on this platform for a while now and we wanted to share it for those who might be interested.
The goal of GIGO Dev is to offer a learning platform that addresses all the challenges we encountered when we first learned to code.
The repo consists of all parts of the platform from the lib models to the frontend code. We wanted to open source our platform for people to be able to see how it works, provide feedback on what we can do differently, or even contribute!
We continue to work on it everyday and strive to always make it better.
Here is the link to the repo: https://github.com/Gage-Technologies/gigo.dev and here is the link to the actual platform: https://www.gigo.dev/
I figured it would look more professional, and it would also let me separate the contributions I made with my more anonymous GitHub out—not too sure how closely they investigate your previous contributions and how good your code was.
I am guessing this was not a good choice, and I should have just continued using my more anonymous GitHub, or made the account as JSmith instead of JaneSmith.
Your comment made me curious, so I looked around the website and found this.
Our dataset documents Texas death row inmates executed from 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, to the present.
On one level, the data is simply a part of a mundane programming book. On another, each row represents immense suffering, lives lost, and in some cases amazing redemption and acceptance. In preparing for this dataset, I was deeply moved by a number of the statements and found myself re-evaluting my position on capital punishment. I hope that as we examine the data, you too will contemplate the deeper issues at play.
Just a warning for folks who might not be in a good mental spot for seeing this in their SQL tutorial right now, or even just if it wouldn’t be to your personal tastes. It’s not your average school exercise but with morbid flavoring, the site really integrates its data. It provides a lot more information about capital punishment than you strictly need to solve the database problems. That works nicely with their intention of “Exercises should be realistic and substantial”.
Likewise, the exercises here have been designed to introduce increasingly sophisticated SQL techniques while exploring the dataset in ways that people would actually be interested in.
Article text:
Taking baby steps helps us go faster.
Much has been written about this topic, but it comes up so often in pairing that I feel it’s worth repeating.
I’ll illustrate why with an example from a different domain: recording music. As an amateur guitar player, I attempt to make recorded music. Typically, what I do is throw together a skeleton for a song — the basic structure, the chord progressions, melody, and so on — using a single sequenced instrument, like a nice synth patch. That might take me an afternoon for a 5-minute piece of music.
Then I start working out guitar parts — if it’s going to be that style of arrangement — and begin recording them (musos usually call this “tracking”.)
Take a fiddly guitar solo, for example; a 16-bar solo might last 30 seconds at ~120 beats per minute. Easy, you might think to record it in one take. Well, not so much. I’m trying to get the best take possible because it’s metal and standards are high.
I might record the whole solo as one take, but it will take me several takes to get one I’m happy with. And even then, I might really like the performance on take #3 in the first 4 bars, and really like the last 4 bars of take #6, and be happy with the middle 8 from take #1. I can edit them together, it’s a doddle these days, to make one “super take” that’s a keeper.
Every take costs time: at least 30 seconds if I let my audio workstation software loop over those 16 bars writing a new take each time.
To get the takes I’m happy with, it cost me 6 x 30 seconds (3 minutes).
Now, imagine I recorded those takes in 4-bar sections. Each take would last 7.5 seconds. To get the first 4 bars so I’m happy with them, I would need 3 x 7.5 seconds (22.5 seconds). To get the last 4 bars, 6 x 7.5 seconds (45 seconds), and to get the middle 8, just 15 seconds.
So, recording it in 4 bar sections would cost me 1m 22.5 seconds.
Of course, there would be a bit of an overhead to doing smaller takes, but what I tend to find is that — overall — I get the performances I want sooner if I bite off smaller chunks.
A performance purist, of course, would insist that I record the whole thing in one take for every guitar part. And that’s essentially what playing live is. But playing live comes with its own overhead: rehearsal time. When I’m recording takes of guitar parts, I’m essentially also rehearsing them.
The line between rehearsal and performance has been blurred by modern digital recording technology. Having a multitrack studio in my home that I can spend as much time recording in as I want means that I don’t need to be rehearsed to within an inch of my life like we had to be back in the old days when studio time cost real money.
Indeed, the lines between composing, rehearsing, performing, and recording have been completely blurred. And this is much the same as in programming today.
Remember when compilers took ages? Some of us will even remember when compilers ran on big central computers, and you might have to wait 15–30 minutes to find out if your code was syntactically correct (let alone if it worked.)
Those bad old days go some way to explaining the need for much up-front effort in “getting it right”, and fuelled the artificial divide between “designing” and “coding” and “testing” that sadly persists in dev culture today.
The reality now is that I don’t have to go to some computer lab somewhere to book time on a central mainframe, any more than I have to go to a recording studio to book time with their sound engineer. I have unfettered access to the tools, and it costs me very little. So I can experiment. And that’s what programming (and recording music) essentially is, when all’s said and done: an experiment.
Everything we do is an experiment. And experiments can go wrong, so we may have to run them again. And again. And again. Until we get a result we’re happy with.
So biting off small chunks is vital if we’re to make an experimental approach — an iterative approach — work. Because bigger chunks mean longer cycles and longer cycles mean we either have to settle for less — okay, the first four bars aren’t that great, but it’s the least bad take of the 6 we had time for — or we have to spend more time to get enough iterations (movie directors call it “coverage”) to better ensure that we end up with enough of the good stuff.
This is why live performances generally don’t sound as polished as studio performances, and why software built in big chunks tends to take longer and/or not be as good.
In guitar, the more complex and challenging the music, the smaller the steps we should take. I could probably record a blues-rock number in much bigger takes because there’s less to get wrong. Likewise in software, the more there is that can go wrong, the better it is to take baby steps.
It’s a basic probability, really. Guessing a 4-digit number is an order of magnitude easier if we guess one digit at a time.
I love and use Obsidian, but a FOSS alternative to it is SilverBullet.md.
I have been using some of the learning resources, specifically this one https://linuxjourney.com/. I hope the video recommendations are helpful to you but I am kicking myself for not adding “also I really hate watching videos and would prefer to read something” to my original post. I have not actually made the switch yet, I want to back up my files first. Bought a new external hard drive with enough space. It was nonfunctional. Had to send it back for a warranty replacement and am waiting on the new drive to show up. Will reply again if I remember once I actually manage to switch over.