Yeah - I’ve even seen people recommend switching distros just because another has a different default DE without understanding that most distros let you install multiple DEs…

The differences between distros aren’t as big as people make them out to be*. Mostly just installer, how packages are managed, what versions of packages you get, etc.

• Unless you’re on an “immutable” distro in which case - yeah - shit is different.

I guess? It’s it a shame that lfs uses C code instead of the “less abstract” x86 assembly?

(I like having it in my daily driver, but it’s sad LFS had to drop support for a “lower level” init system)

It’s not lower-level, it’s just worse.

You’re not changing much when you’re changing distros

This needs to be a pinned comment on every distro-hopping post.

Sounds like you haven’t taken the time to properly design your environment.

Lots of home gamers just throw stuff together and just “hack things till they work”.

You need to step back and organize your shit. Develop a pattern, automate things, use source control, etc. Don’t just file follow the weirdly -opinionated setup instructions. Make it fit your standard.

What do you mean by “corporate?”

You could look at higher education, non-profits, research, etc.

I don’t want a lot of money

Do you want to work full time? I’d never hire a programmer who wants to work less than 20 hrs/wk and I’d even be very unlikely to hire anyone for less than full time. It’s a pain to coordinate with somebody on a team who isn’t there most of the time.

Maybe small non profits would be interested, but

I’d like to work with REAL programming, not devops, not cloud, not managing containers, I want to write code as a living.

Small businesses will need someone who is flexible and can “do everything”. Typically only large organizations allow people to specialize.

Maybe “bug hunting” or contributing to larger oss projects that have budgets to pay for contributions?

basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions

That’s 99% of what most people do.

Neat.

Having to make a decision isn’t my primary issue here (even though it can also be problematic, when you need to serialize domain-specific data for which you’re no expert). My issue is rather in that you have to write this decision down, so that it can be used for deserializing again. This just makes XML serialization code significantly more complex than JSON serialization code. Both in terms of the code becoming harder to understand, but also just lines of code needed.

This is, without a doubt, the stupidest argument against XML I’ve ever heard. Nobody has trouble with using attributes vs. tag bodies. Nobody. There are much more credible complaints to be made about parsing performance, memory overhead, extra size, complexity when using things like namespaces, etc.

I’ve somewhat come to expect less than a handful lines of code for serializing an object from memory into a file. If you do that with XML, it will just slap everything into child nodes, which may be fine, but might also not be.

No - it is fine to just use tag bodies. You don’t need to ever use attributes if you don’t want to. You’ve never actually used XML have you?

https://www.baeldung.com/jackson-xml-serialization-and-deserialization

Yes, which needs to be supported by your parser.

I mean, yeah. But people don’t just do things randomly. Most people put data in the body and metadata in attributes just like html.

Neat. That’s going nowhere. Less formatting than even markdown… Hey kids you like plain text files right?

They’re siblings. They both derive from SGML. There is a version of HTML that is also XML conformant called XHTML but it never caught on…

JSON is super easy to read and write though. Just needs a parser that allows comments…

Fuck yaml. TOML or literally anything else.

This is your confusion, not an issue with XML.

Attributes tend to be “metadata”. You ever write HTML? It’s not confusing.

The last thing I want to see when I clock out is another terminal screen.

I’m reacting to this mostly. Self-hosters are a bit of an obnoxious blend of people who want turnkey-but-not-Google solutions and people willing to learn how to do things. People whining about “having to use a terminal” are generally in the former category.

Then don’t self host?

Utter clickbait drivel.

…it answers from the attached KBs only. If the fact isn’t there, it tells you - explicitly - instead of winging it.

So you’ve made a FAQ with a LLM interface? I could see that potentially being useful for cooperate “let our bot answer your questions” tools.

But the usefulness of AI isn’t just in “tell me a fact”. Like what would your AI give for "what functions would I use in Python to convert a utf16 string to utf8? Would the answer need to be in the KB already?