And if I don’t know the song at all?

I once tried Red Bull Cola.

I am very flexible when it comes to Cola. I have my strong preference, but I’ll drink other brands to when offered, with one notable exception: You’d have to pay me to drink Red Bull Cola again. They should’ve stuck to Energy Drinks. All their pretty flavours are nice, but that one product is an crime against my tastebuds.

Thank you. Funny enough, just today I chatted with a colleague that mentioned one of the tools was technically available to us, but actually not approved for use. Ordering it wouldn’t be an issue, but getting it signed off would be quite the chore.

The fun comes when there is no actual data model. All in all, I’d say being familiar with the data model is about 60% of my job. 35% is building queries and query scripts for people who need regular exports. 5% is running after other people’s fuckups.

Strap in, because this is a ride.

There is a raw database from a decade-and-a-half old app, which I get to access through a layer of views that does some joining, but not all, with absolutely no documentation on how the original database is structured or where things are pulled from or what anything refers to. No data dictionary, no list or map of key relations, some objects are mapped in two different views, no semantic naming of columns.

If you want to want to query order part delegations by who they’re assigned to (Recipient in the app) you need to use the foreign key RefAssignmentUnit. The “Assignment” unit that did the delegation is just RefUnit. If you have orders that were created by a salesperson on behalf of a customer, OrderingPerson (also a foreign key, but not named Ref-) is the customer, while OrderingPerson2 is the salesperson that entered the order. Don’t confuse that with Creator, which for orders created through the web form is usually a technical user, unless the salesperson is one of the veterans that use the direct app in which case it’ll be the salesperson while OrderingPerson2 is null.

Also, we have many-to-many relationships that are mapped through reference tables… whose columns are named object and reference for each and every one. Have fun trying to memorize which refers to which so you don’t need to look it up every damn time.

Create my own views to clean this up? Nope, only the third party service providers for the app can do that, and they don’t wanna. Our internal app admin (singular) can use some awkward tool to generate those views, but there’s no reverse lookup to see what a given column refers to. Also, they have no concept for what actually constitutes a good model because they’re not really familiar with the database, just with the app.

Get my own serverless DB to create views that query the original DB? No can do, you’d need to order a whole server and that’s pricy.
Get a cloud DB? Sure, but it will be managed by the cloud team and if you want to have or edit custom views, you’ll get to create a project request. They’ll put it in the backlog and work it into some future sprint.

Get literally any tool that allows me to efficiently create reusable data prep so I don’t have to copy & paste the base transformations needed for a given query every fucking time and if the source DB ever changes I need to update all my query scripts? If you can somehow squeeze the time to prepare a convincing pitch - a full Power Point presentation, of course - between all your tedious and redundant query preparation and script maintenance, find a management sponsor willing to hear you out and hopefully propose your request to their superiors. Best case: It becomes a whole project - alternatives will have to be considered first, implications, security, costs, and you’ll be the one having to assemble and present that information to management only to have some responsible person point out that it would actually be the remit of a different team… that also works in sprints, has a backlog and will give you no control over your prep.

And obviously, the app provider doesn’t give us any advance notice of just what will change in the DB with the next update. We only learn that when a view breaks. The app admin can use the tool to refresh the affected views then, while I scramble to determine all the scripts that need to be updated and copy&paste the fix. If a user has been granted their own access to the database, odds are they’ll come crying to me when their modified versions of my queries break.

There is a lot I like about my job, I acknowledge the difficulties of a historically grown system and service contracts, but the rigid and antiquated corporate culture can go take a long walk off a short pier.

You know it’s bad when even a two thousand year old gospel considers “rich people don’t go to heaven” to be divine wisdom. It has always been thus.

There’s no way the CEO of my last company - making a cool 6mil one year that I saw an article about the shareholders paying him a bonus of another few mil - works 125 times as hard as my 48k (gross) ass.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.

I’ve got working Nvidia drivers without any tinkering. Gaming on my 3060 without issues. Never had microphone issues either. This isn’t supposed to be “You’re wrong”, more a “I wonder what I’m doing differently”.

ASUS TUF GAMING B550 MoBo, AMD Ryzen 5600x, some Gigabyte version of the RTX 3060, running the Nvidia version of Nobara (Fedora-based gaming oriented distro).

What distro did you try?

Aw shite, I’ve been pedant-baited? GG

Taken literally, that implies you do care.

(To mitigate the pedantry: Given it’s a rather dispassionate response in the context of a provocation, it is probably a very weak “care” though. Just because it’s nonzero doesn’t mean it’s significant.)

Last I heard, there were some issues about who owns the IP and copyrights? I’m not overly familiar, but legal jungle combined with corporate politics may be scary enough to navigate that Miyazaki would rather be careful around making explicit statements

Do you mean the individual .git repository tracking changes in a given directory? Or the remote repository server that you push your changes to and can pull other’s changes from? The first one is the fundamental requirement of using git at all, the second is where it gets less trivial.

It’s not that the software isn’t available. Off the top of my mind, Gitlab offers their community version for free to download and host yourself. I think they even have a Docker image. All you need is to figure out how you would like to do that.

It’s the usual question of self-hosting - where would you host it? A server at home? The cloud? Should others be able to access it? How? What about security?

Remotes already hosted by others are just a lot more convenient. You don’t worry about the infrastructure, you just push your code. People like me might get more excited about setting up than the actual coding. It’s the bane of half my projects - gotta get that git workflow in place, think long-term, set up the “mandatory PR with tests before merge” and shit until eventually I have everything set up… and the spark of the original script I wanted to do is gone.

If you want to focus on coding, the benefit of having a ready setup are hard to dismiss.
On the other hand, setting up and configuring a server can be a one-time job, so if that’s worth it to you, power to you!

Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.

I don’t have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.

Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.

It’s hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in… It can snowball either way.

There’s also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I’m not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split “some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app”. I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.

As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don’t want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.

POV is the commissar - look at the gloves

Survivor Bias - you only see the ones that “survive”, which may lead you to underestimate just how many tried and failed and vanished from attention.

Install the Musixmatch app, get the lyrics for free from the original service instead of Spotify’s embedded player.

I pay for premium, personally, but that shit is just scummy.

I’m not a native speaker, but somehow have a bigger vocabulary than my phone. Granted, I read a lot, but you’d expect my dictionary to, well, contain the entire dictionary. Some words, it recognises one form, but not others.

A chunk of their target audience aren’t really gamers so much as FIFA players. They don’t buy a lot of games, so they don’t mind splurging on the newest and most up to date installment of their favourite soccer sim once per year.

I have a draft that I will absolutely finisj some day about an Astartes chapter that primarily deploys alongside Guard and occasionaly Navy forces, not as separate force that comes in, wrecks shit, refuses to elaborate and leaves, but integrated (and to a degree intermingled) with their personell.

They’d serve not just as shock troops like the Astartes usually do, but also as defensive resources and morale boosters, zealously embracing the divinity of the God-Emperor and their own nature as His holy warriors. Besides Warfare, they’d be trained in rhetorics, the Ecclesiastical canon, their Librarians focused on divination and biomancy (particularly restorative) powers to further cement their perception as saints.

Their progenitor is unknown and the rumours that they’re sons of Lorgar are entirely unfounded and pure blasphemy.

My hope is that community-developed Proton forks reach a point where they can stand on their own without Steam and Valve, perhaps as a component of or a sibling to Lutris, to conveniently run games from other platforms too.

I’ll admit that I don’t have a clear idea of how that would look or come about. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having the compatibility tool built directly into the launcher like in Steam, with individual prefixes and settings for different games if they have different requirements.

A boomerang is a clip that plays and rewinds in a loop, like it’s flying to the end of the clip and returning like a boomerang.

I don’t even use Instagram myself, why do I know this