Cleaning other people’s mess is okay for a while. But making a career out of it is too much for me.

Oh yes. I feel that, too. I’ll give them maybe a year of help, for the right price. Two years if the price is very right. Haha.

Slop is the embodiment of that on steroids and it will get old pretty fast.

So true.

If I wanted to clean other people’s mess, I would be a janitor.

I’ll take your share of the slop cleanup if you don’t want it. I wouldn’t mind twice the slop cleanup extortion salary.

Not say it out loud. Not stupid… Just proud.

And every new update you get more crap running in the background, stunting your performance and draining your battery

That’s one way to describe it. Alternately, we could call it an opportunity to upgrade to a new Windows laptop or PC soon. (This is meant as sarcasm, and a guess at what some internal slide deck might say about committing to keeping the operating system lean and efficient…)

I speak to fish, and can confirm.

Although, I must admit that the fish words for “flee to safety or face my wrath, pitiful human!” and “oh! I think that’s a crumb of cracker. Yum!” are very similar in most fish dialects.

Narrator: They weren’t searching for pie.

At least there’s a kind of happy ending when we walk past the old boss and don’t toss a dollar into his pan-handling hat.

Honest question: would an LLM be able to write useful comments in code like this?

It can be better han nothing, but not really. The LLM faces the same challenge that any competent coder does: neither were present to learn the human, business and organization context when the code was first written.

“Fix for critical issue.”

Followed by an equally large set of files in a commit with just the message:

“Fixup”

And then the actual fix turns out to be mixed in with “Start sprint 57 - AutoConfiguration Refactor” which follows “Fixup”

This might have gotten me to buy a PS5 - a decade ago.

This thread is largely just basic computer skills advice that is necessary on Windows and Mac as well. (And that is great!)

So I’ll add the ones we skipped that have nothing to do with OS at all, but are the usual issues for new PC users:

• Give a quick overview of what the mouse is for.
• Talk about or just disable the CAPSLOCK key.
• Show them where to find and how to read the “do I have Internet?” icon (usually in the lower right, regardless of OS)
• (If not a laptop) Teach them that the monitor and the PC have separate power buttons. Maybe leave a sign out that says “Push both buttons to turn on.”

And as others have said:

• Show them how to search for and add software using the software center, (rather than download from random websites)

That it is another OS. It’s not Windows.

I used to feel that mattered, but today websites will detect my OS when it matters and just pick the right page (i.e. downloading something).

Then I double click the download to install it.

I, a tech nerd, forget what distro I’m running and eventually have to look it up, when I’m doing something weird enough that it matters.

For day to day stuff, I’m not sure that knowing my OS comes up anymore.

What version of Linux are you talking about?

I haven’t been recycle bin free in…any recent distro or desktop environment that I can remember.

Same here. I already use ADB for each new phone setup because it is so much faster, anyway.

Oh, that’s good to know! I’ve always installed KDE on Debian before, but I thought it was only because I just really liked Debian. Thanks!

Cinnamon is a great choice. It’s the default on Linux Mint for good reason.

If she’s a Mac refugee, fuck if I know.

She could consider Linux Mint with KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma feels very like modern Mac, only nicer, to me.

I declare this very good.

We’re are joking here, but -

If I filled a bar with veteran web developers, and I loudly said,

“no one deserves to die for their browser failing the ACID2 test!”

I expect the room would go silent while everyone stared pointedly at their drink glass.

And the next night, try doing it again with Sony Walkmen.