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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • It really comes down to what you’re used to. If you use Windows tools then you already know many of the workarounds for Windows and you don’t know the tools that haven’t been ported there.

    For example, you know not to use Python directly, but that you have to install anaconda instead, or whatever the current problems with Python development on Windows are.

    The big obvious thing that you can’t get away from is that you have to do things differently if you have develop for two different OSs with a view to deploying on Linux.

    In particular support for shell scripts is crap on Windows. I could learn powershell or there’s workarounds using WSL and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need to care about, but I’d rather not bother.


  • I mean coding is difficult enough as it is, I wouldn’t choose to use an OS that makes it even harder.

    I use Linux because it makes my life easier. It has better support for development. Some of the other stuff is maybe not as easy or polished, but the support for dev tools and the ease of deploying to from local machines to servers that are also running Linux makes up for it.

    If I wanted more effort I’d still be using Windows. It would force me to work on cross platform development and deployment. The idea that there’s value in making things unnecessarily hard is just weird. I want Linux to be as simple as possible to use, so I can spend that effort on things that actually matter.



  • As someone working and publishing in the field this is more a cyber jerk about American exceptionalism than actually true.

    Chinese universities and companies publish a shit tonne at pure machine learning conferences. They absolutely do a large amount of research into the fundamentals of machine learning as well as the applied stuff. They’re probably the closest to the US in terms of having large firms that are prepared to bank roll the training of the very large language models.

    Alibaba in particular has been constantly doing cutting edge stuff in terms of multimodal language models that are worth paying attention to.

    The actual truth is that China does both kinds of work. Broad foundational and applied work lead by independent research groups in companies and universities, and focused application driven stuff for direct application by the state.

    Google still stands out in terms of the amount of research it does, but this is because Google is different to everyone -other US research institutes don’t compare to it either.





  • Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

    I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

    Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

    Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.


  • It’s a consequence of parliamentary sovereignty.

    Parliament can always dissolve itself and call an election, and it’s an important mechanism for getting rid of the government.

    The problem is that the prime minister also has a majority in parliament, and that means he can make parliament dissolve itself when he likes.

    This was actually a problem for Johnson. Initially, he didn’t have enough of a majority and it wasn’t clear he could call an election without Corbyn’s support.



  • It’s very true on a Mac. Almost every time you click the green button, it jumps to full screen and then you can’t drag another window on top of it.

    It’s a pain in the arse because my workflow is to have a reading screen with documents and emails on, and a work screen with whatever I’m actually doing. But if outlook is full screen, you can’t drag any other windows on top of it.

    Don’t know why the first guy was saying this is a Windows thing though. I only run onto it on macs.