At least with pip and env, you'd have a hard time doing general tasks in python without getting to know them anyway.

You can also shortcut a lot of that with a hosting service like Heroku, which takes on a lot of the mental overhead for you.

You've made me curious to ask, what programming environments don't have a significant learning curve when you get to the hosting portion, short of a "no-code" hosting solution?

PHP. Deploying small-to-medium PHP projects to production has historically been "move these files to your web root, initialize/seed your database if you have one, and that's it." It's really easy to underestimate how valuable that is in certain contexts, and how much that's contributed to PHP virtually owning the low end of the market.

My assumption was always that other languages would find a way to get closer to that model -- never quite to that level for various technical considerations, but close. I'm not sure any really have, save, as you noted, through dedicated hosting services. Fortunately, though, modern PHP frameworks have come to the rescue by becoming far more difficult and fiddly, to the point where both Symfony and Laravel's online tutorials begin with installing Docker.

> You've made me curious to ask, what programming environments don't have a significant learning curve when you get to the hosting portion, short of a "no-code" hosting solution?

With java you can deploy a "fat jar" - a single executable that contains everything it needs, including the web server. You start the jar, it binds to a port, and you're done.

Just to clarify. The concept of words having an origin and evolving over time is nonsense?

I have so many more questions if that's what you're trying to say here.

Maybe the point was that a lot of proposed etymological theories are inaccurate? (which also seems wrong but at least slightly defensible)

Standard rule of thumb for the non-linguistically inclined: if a layperson tells you an etymology for a word and it involves a 'flash of inspiration' type moment of synthesis then four out of five times that etymology will be false.

For example, 'Council House And Violent' => chav (British slang for an anti-social lower-class person)

It's wry but it doesn't pass the sniff test. People don't tend to sit around making up words like this and even when they do other people don't adopt them. Words are nearly always born through analogy and common ground, not out of whole cloth.

There's a Wikipedia list of false etymologies in English here [1] (fair warning - a lot of unpleasant words here). A quick read of it should help train ones priors as to whether or not an etymology is likely to be true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_false_etymologi...

I completely agree with this. I find that any etymology that has a neat little "just so" story behind it to be very suspect.

In real life words generally get made by pretty obvious metaphors (it's gotta be obvious enough for someone hearing it for the first time to get it), combining two words together or shortening an existing word.

Just today I heard that the etymology of swag is "secretly we are gay". It's hilarious and obviously not true. Backronyms are fun though

I assume (generous interpretation and not much of a stretch) that that's exactly what his father meant, and if so, his father was right. It's funny that it would even "seem wrong", but it's not wrong.

Recently published dictionaries do a much better job than they used to, so you will often see "origin unknown, poss. related to X or Y", where an older dictionary simply proclaimed the etymology. So, was the truth recently lost? Or did the lexicographers recently find evidence that their confidently proclaimed etymology might just be poppycock?

So if there are lots of cases where etymology is disputed, and there are, then not all claims can be right. Many must have been wrong, and it stands to reason that not all errors have been discovered. Hundreds of thousands of words, place names, personal and surnames, passed from mouth to mouth by mostly illiterate humans for whom X sounds like "eggs" in a game of telephone ("Chinese whispers") lasting centuries, repeatedly crossing dialect and language boundaries, multiplied by the number of human languages, and does it really seem wrong that "a lot of proposed etymological theories are inaccurate"?

If the claim were really that there are no correct etymologies, that would certainly be wrong, but if "poppycock" meant the confidence of the old dictionaries was not justified, I would say that time has vindicated his claim.

Huh, maybe I am too young and used to the recent style! Thanks for the information.

Questions like how does etymology argue that a word in said dictionary is "wrong"? Or what are your thoughts on dictionaries that go to great lengths to include good etymology on their entries, such as the OED?

I think he's referring to a specific etymology of OK (specifically, one that was in a dictionary he had).

Geocities, Angelfire, and Maxpages. GIFs everywhere. Backgrounds tiled with GIFs. If it didn't sparkle in some way that distracted from the content of the page, you weren't doing it right.

What a time to be alive.

I have no experience with modern variants of Latin, but wouldn't that be akin to trying to read Portugese when you know Spanish? You might get the general gist, but you wouldn't really get the full underlying meaning. You'd certainly miss more complex ideas like idioms.

I'd imagine it would depend on your goal. Do you want to be able to work your way through a text, or do you want to be able to appreciate poetry in the language? I'd say it might work for the former, it almost certainly wouldn't for the latter.

And focuses most of their time and energy into brown nosing. Zero respect in either direction and an adversarial relationship by design any time you need resources from the company/higher-ups. /shudder

As many people learned last year, it's easy to gloss over the parts of someone you don't like when you're both actively working towards a goal. When you start spending too much time together, it's easy to have the relationship die from a thousand cuts.

I would add "...if you weren't a good match in the first place". Your statement kind of tries to make itself universal.

I absolutely will never subscribe to the BS notion of "couples love each other more when they don't spend much time together".

I'm with my wife for 7 years now and I already worked remotely by the time we met. Our relationship is actually getting better with time.

So what you say mostly applies to people who are, let's call them, good roommates, not two people loving each other.

You take exception to their generalizing and then generalize yourself which I'm taking exception to. I love my wife deeply, but work time apart makes our time together better. It takes all sorts.

Not at all, I said what I don't subscribe under and cited my anecdotal evidence. My "generalization" is actually putting people in groups, which by itself admits that a generalization is impossible.

But it could possibly be offensive to some people that I call their couples "good roommates" which is a fair reaction -- I still have the right to my opinion however.

That's fine, but I believe I'm still allowed to take exception to it and express my opinion.

I said it was an easy thing to have happen, not that it would happen. I'd argue that you took my statement in bad faith, looking for a flaw in it, and generalized more aggressively than I did.

Possibly. Sorry if it felt like it, there was no ill will.

I agree. I did it towards the end of 2019 and completely torpedoed my life.

Because of COVID I didn't even get to do much actual hiking or backpacking as I planned; I went out to the west coast and everything shut down basically as soon as I got settled in.

Then I had a couple of deaths in the family due to COVID. The nest egg I had built up for the trip would have been really helpful, but I essentially wasted it to sit in an apartment. Now I'm searching for jobs nowhere close to where I was at because my industry took a massive hit.

Life's a dice roll. Hedge your bets.

I've been voicing this for years since I found out about it working for the company that manufactures leaded fuels in the UK.

Even here, I got quite a bit of dismissal. It was jarring, really reminded me how little most people understand outside of their area of expertise.

I'd look into more project based "classes" instead of a rigidly taught curriculum. As more of a guided process than explicit steps, with the student getting to pick the direction they'll go in.

That's what taught me the most. It's a shame there aren't more opportunities like that in classes in general. Could be a question of teacher hours available, or because we can't effectively measure progress between wildly different projects. Still, I think it's more in-line with the way a workplace functions now.

How's the latency on BT?

I've always avoided using it because of the horror story from early models, but I might pick up a used PS4 controller for PC gaming if BT works well.

Latency is fine, I don’t use the Xbox controllers with Linux for the reasons I mentioned but I do use them in BT mode with the Steam Link. Never had any problems with input lag. PS4 controllers are BT only and absolutely no problems with those with either PS4 or Linux. In terms of versatility and support the PS4 controllers are my favorite, but I slightly prefer the ergonomics of the Xbox One S controller.