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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Avoid clone() options _

    I don’t really like that as general advice. A lot of the time a clone is perfectly valid and fine thing to do. More often then not I will read for a clone rather then an Rc or Arc. Its fine, you dont need to be afraid of it. And it misses the more important advice - avoid allocating in tight loops.

    There are lots of ways you can allocate data. Clone being only one and not even all clones will allocate data. So it is a poor thing to get hung up on. If you have an Rc or Arc then clones are cheap. Stack only data is also cheap to clone (and is often copy). Some structs internally use Arc or Rc or are just simple wrappers around copyable types. And it misses other forms of allocations, creating Strings or Vecs, boxing data etc. All of these things including cloning are fine most of the time. But should be avoided in tight loops and performance sensitive parts. And when learning it quite often does not matter that much to avoid them at all.

    I have seen quite a few people make things way harder for themselves by trying to avoid clone at all costs in all situations and IMO articles like this add to that as they never explain the main nuances of allocations and when you want to avoid them or when they are actually fine to use.


  • You should not be struggling most of the time when using the CLI. Basic uses is just as easy as any GUI. Learning the commands might be a bit more involved and you need to be a bit more proactive about it. Anything you need to do 30+ times a day you should be over the learning curve of and can just execute them just as quickly if not quicker than using GUI. Especially when you look at tab competition and the reverse history search.

    But what using the CLI more often does teach you is how to lessen that initial learning curve. Making you quicker at finding the new commands you need and how they work slowly building up your tool belt of knowledge about the commands you do look up.


  • Blender is more of an artistic tool. Not great at creating precise geometry. Tools like freecad make it much easier to create functional parts where the geometry matters. They are also easier to edit and adjust things after the fact as they tend to be parameterized - letting you update a value to update the model.

    But they are terrible at more artistic things like miniatures or figurines or more organic shapes which is where blender shines.

    So it really depends on what you are trying to create. But for a lot of people using 3d printers (which I believe tend to create more functional than atheistic prints - at least from designs they have created themselves) tools like freecad tend to serve them better then tools like blender.


  • Or your example, how would we have processed ore into metal without coal (on any significant scale).

    We have been processing ore into metal with coal for thousands of years. It sounds like you are arguing that the industrial revolution has been happening for thousands of years. Which it has not.

    We also made bread in the industrial revolution which is needed to feed the workers. Without feeding the workforce we could not access certain advancements. Is bread a corner stone technology of the industrial revolution? No it is not. It in no way defines what the industrial revolution was. Just like coal or oil.

    You can run a steam engine off of coal, wood, oil, nuclear, basically anything that creates a lot of heat. Coal is more convenient in a lot of ways but it did not unlock anything special. If not for coal we could use wood or charcoal. That was the steam engine, not the fuel it runs on.

    And if the advancements were because of these fuels that why did it not happen 1000s of years ago when we had access to them?


  • I see nothing in this graphic that isn’t easy to do with a gui.

    I didnt say the GUI was not easy for the common stuff. But I think the CLI is also easy for the common stuff so there is not much advantage other than a bit of a learning curve with the CLI. But the big thing that GUIs make harder is automation of common things. For instance, when I want to create a PR I like to rebase to the latest upstream. In a GUI that is a bunch of button clicks. With the cli I just <CTRL+R>pus and that will autocomplete to git pull --rebase=interactive --autostash && git push && gh pr create --web and I am landed in a web browser ready to review and submit my PR. Doing the same thing in a GUI takes a lot longer with a lot more clicking.

    And that is a very common command for me.

    Like logging and diffing is just so much easier when I can just scroll and click as opposed to having to do a log command, scroll, then remember the hashes, and then write the command.

    Never found that to be a big issue. Most of the time when you want a diff you want to diff local changes or staged changes which is simply git diff and git diff --staged neither of those are hard or any real easier in the GUI (especially with bash history). For diffing specific commits I dont find that hard either just git log --oneline and find the commits (and you can use grep to filter things out easily as well here) - typically does not require scrolling at all. Then git diff <copy paste>..<copy paste>. In the GUIs you are often scrolling through commits you want to select at some point so I dont see how that saves you any real time here. I would not say the CLI or GUI is vastly easier in this case. And even in this case it is rare to need to do. Far more often is just branches which on a decent shell can be tab completed for convenience.

    And sometimes I watch beginners use the gui and I have to bite my tongue because I know it would be faster in the cli.

    This is why I prefer the CLI for common stuff. It is just faster.

    But, especially for a beginner, i strongly recommend a gui.

    And that is where I disagree. I think beginners should spend some time learning the tools they will need to use. IMO the CLI is critical for developers to learn and the sooner the better. So many things a vastly easier with the CLI than GUIs and a lot of stuff is near impossible with GUIs. Automation being a big one. I have not seen a good CI system that is GUI focused that you never need to know the cli for. Or when you have a repetitive task then it is quicker to write a quick script and run that then doing the same thing over and over in the GUI. Repeating actions is also easier in the CLI. All of these apply to more than just git as well.

    I have seen so many beginners start with GUIs that don’t really understand what they are doing in git. And quite often break things and then just delete and recreate the repo and manually make their changes again. I find people that never bother with the CLI always hit a ceiling quite quickly in terms of their ability and productivity.

    The only real thing that makes the CLI worst is that it has a steeper learning curve. Once you are over that hill I find it to be vastly better for more situations or at least not practically any worst than a GUI equivalent. So that hill is one well worth climbing.

    I can always use a GUI if I really needed to. But those that only know the GUI will have a very hard time on the CLI when they need to - which is required far more often than the other way round.















  • The known unknowns and especially the unknown unknowns never get factored into an estimate. People only ever think about the happy path, if everything goes right. But that rarely every happens so estimates are always widely off.

    The book How Big Things Get Done describes a much better way to factor in everything without knowing all the unknowns though - Just look a previous similar projects and look how long they took, take the average and bounds then adjust up or down if you have good reason to do so. Your project will very likely take a similar amount of time if your samples are similar in nature to your current task. And the actual time already factors in all the issues and problems encountered and even if you don’t hit all the same issues your problems will likely take a similar amount of time. And the more previous examples you have the better these estimates get.

    But instead of that we just pluck numbers out of the air and wonder why we never hit them.