billdueber's comments

Gopher came out of the U of Minnesota. Their teams are the “Golden Gophers.”

If you add in a call to “.lazy“ it won’t create all the intermediate arrays. There since at least 2.7. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.7.0/Enumerator/Lazy.html

You’re right, of course, and I apologize to GP for conflating what they were saying with what I, to be fair, do often see in these threads.

Like others in these comments, I can use it just fine right up until I can’t. Then it’s back to the mini, many, many posts and questions and tutorials, sprawled across the Internet to try and solve whatever the issue is. JJ has shown that a better chrome can be put over the underlying model, And it’s frustrating to me that we are all collectively, apparently, expected to put up with a tool that generates so much confusion seemingly regardless of brilliance or expertise

Sigh. Another git thread, another pile of posts telling me that if I would _just do the work_ to understand the underlying data structure I could finally allow myself to be swept up in the _overwhelming beauty_ of the something something something.

The evidence that the git UI is awful is _overwhelming_. Yes, yes, I’m sure the people that defend it are very very very very smart, and don’t own a TV, and only listen to albums of Halloween sounds from the 1950s and are happy to type the word “shrug“ and go on to tell us how they’ve always found git transparent and easy. The fact is that brilliant people struggle with git every single day, and would almost certainly be better served by something that makes more sense.

“Do you want to be a Writer, or do you want to write?” I think that almost any question of the form “Do you want to be an Xer, or do you want to X” is useful these days.

I keep telling people to think of Rails as a “ruby-like” language. Rails monkey-patches so much and has so much magic that it’s substantially a different thing.

I'm kind of interested in this space -- can anyone point me at an article that goes over why this is harder for python than it seems to be for, e.g., ruby? Is there something inherent about the way code is imported in python that makes it less tractable? Or is it just that the python world has never quite all come together on something that works well enough?

(Note that I can certainly complain about how `bundler` works in ruby, but these discussions in python-land seem to go way beyond my quibbles with the ruby ecosystem)

Reminder to everyone commenting here: you are not an average student. The hard part of teaching is not coming up with dynamite lessons for kids who are smart and want to learn and are capable of doing so and aren’t hungry. Anyone can do that. Well, almost anyone.

Way back in the olden times, 5 to 10% of people went to school, and it worked really well for them. Now everyone goes to school, and it works really well for about 5% of us.

No, it was a joint decision. I just figured I'd be more-or-less like my dad, who loves being a dad. It never struck me that it might be something I really struggle with.

Overall, it was the right decision for us. But there are definitely valleys along with the peaks.

A lot of parents really, really like having kids. The ROI on having children is, for them, so self-evident that they don't really think about it. But that's not true for everyone, esp. if you were old enough to be pretty fully-formed by the time you became a father. Kids come at a huge cost. You're exhausted from dealing with them, and in the meantime you're probably not exercising, and you're eating like crap, and, inevitably, just plain getting older.

Step 1 is to reconcile your ideal of who you'll be in the future -- what job, how smart, how influential, etc. -- with the resources actually available to you now. I had to downshift considerably.

Your kids aren't going away, and you're not going to be able to sustain what you're doing now until they get old enough. You need to make a change, and soon, because if you don't you're going to end up wondering how and why you mortgaged your life to your goddamn kids.

I have three boys: 5, 8, and 10. For my first six years of having kids, every time someone told me to "enjoy them while you can" I wanted to punch that person in the throat. I knew they were right, but there are days when that's just not even in the realm of possibility.

There are a lot of parents who are tired, and sick of walking on dropped cereal, and miss being able to pick an actual restaurant that serves actual grown-up food. But there's also a huge societal more to not talk about it, or to aways end with something like, "But it's so worth it," or "It's the hardest job I've ever loved," especially for women. But while it's almost certainly "worth it" for the majority of parents the majority of the time, there are going to be days when it's just NOT.

The cliché is that "The years are short, but the days are long." It's true. In hindsight, the fact that I have a ten-year-old seems insane -- how could it have been ten years? What the hell have I been doing for the last decade? Do I even remember life before kids -- what it was like to just have a wife, to set my own schedule?

At the same time, every night at 6:30pm I find myself asking, "How can it only be 6:30?"

I spent a good number of years just basically resenting the crap out of my boys, which is about as healthy as you might guess. I hated dealing with my kids, hating myself for hating dealing with my kids, and knew I'd hate myself later for not enjoying the young-kid experience while I could. I, my kids, and my wife all suffered.

Now I've got therapy and some drugs and a CPAP, and things are better. Not every day, but most days. Well, many days.

Kids completely take over your life, at least for a while, and it's almost impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Your job -- your JOB -- is to figure out how to enjoy them now so that the sacrifices are worth it to you.