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So... it's actually a reasonable objection over bzip2? I mean, you explained why it does not work with bzip2.

I think their argument is sound and it makes using bzip2 less useful in certain situations. I was once saved in resolving a problem we had when I figured out that concatening gzipped files just works out of the box. If not, it would have meant a bit more code, lots of additional testing, etc.


totally agree with the statement though i feel its not an objection over bzip 2 rather than how it was implemented in programs that apply it. but i'm not really 100% since admittedly i did not personally reverse engineer bzip capable programs to see the current state of afairs. I am simply going by descriptions posted in comments and general system knowlesge.

how to compress data has little to no relation to how this compression can be implemented in programs. How its implemented, will reflect on how the quality of the algorithm is perceived, becaus e the two are not seperate from a user perspective.


Indeed, they are two separate concepts.

I write lots of automated tests, but almost always after the development is finished. The only exception is when reproducing a bug, where I first write the test that reproduces it, then I fix the code.

TDD is about developing tests first then writing the code to make the tests pass. I know several people who gave it an honest try but gave up a few months later. They do advocate everyone should try the approach, though, simply because it will make you write production code that's easier to test later on.


... hmm, just looked it up. According to some sites on the web, TDD was created by Kent Beck as apart of Extreme Programming in the 90's and automated testing is a big part of TDD. Having lived through that era, thinking back, would say that TDD did help to popularize automated testing. It made us realize that focusing a ton on writing tests had a lot of benefits (and yeah, most of us didn't do the test first development part).

But this is kind of splitting hairs on what TDD is, not too important.


I don't agree with this. In my view, there are plenty of cases where the product changes are shoved down our throats.

I think the problem is that the product folks don't actually listen to the market. They read Jobs' biography and are convinced that they will tell their users what product they will like and that they will see the light later on.

The sad reality is: they are not Jobs (and even he was not faultless). So, we get Mac like Windows interfaces, we get mail clients losing features, we get AI in every single app you see, etc.

Just my 2c.


Why do you buy things you don’t like?

And if you’re convinced that most people don’t like most products… why don’t you make a fortune building what people actually want?


> Why do you buy things you don’t like?

In my case, because it's the only option in some situations.

For eg, I wanted a phone that has an unlockable bootloader and a decent/Qualcomm CPU.

I'm immediately down to Motorola and OnePlus.

If I want future proof performance, I'm down to the OP 15 only.

Yes, I have RSI today, but with any luck that can go away. However, a Vivo will not get a BL unlock tomorrow magically.


Funny story: I once bought and started up Galactic Civilizations 3.

It looked horrible, the textures just wouldn't load no matter what I tried. Finally, on a forum, some other user, presumably also from Europe, noted that you have to use decimal point as a decimal separator (my locale uses a comma). And that solved the problem.


In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters.

I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.


There are lots of alternatives in Europe, just a little different, and smaller than the big 3

> companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe

I think it's pretty clear they can not guarantee that, see the CLOUD act.

Also, they could shut you out or turn your whole business off if you, or your country, offends the orange fuckhead


And why wouldn't this European equivalent do something that a lot of people in Europe dislike too, in the future? The entire model of large cloud companies is bad.


That's a different risk profile. Companies are governed by local laws, usually, and currently, that works here in Europe.


USA companies are subject to us laws, so any data will never be safe. Companies can be gagged, forced to seal their customer data and forced to lie about it, by law !


I'm not sure if it's accurate, but according to the summary on Wikipedia at least, the law "provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."[0]

If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's unlikely that they do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act


I think that's different because refactoring usually involves calling the same functions/methods albeit in a bit more readable way.

When not given a clear guideline to "just" refactor, I have had problems with LLMs hallucinating functions that don't exist.


I guess that's why nobody reads it. /s


You mean agents running other agents down? :)


Polly wanna cracker?


Yes, development was being done in SVN but it was a huge pain. Continuous communication was required with the server (history lookups took ages, changing a file required a checkout, etc.) and that was just horribly inefficient for distributed teams. Even within Europe, much more so when cross-continent.

A DVCS was definitely required. And I would say git won out due to Linus inventing and then backing it, not because of a platform that would serve it.


I was involved with bzr and Launchpad: anybody using pure Git hated it. GitHub, even with fewer features compared to LP, was pretty well regarded.

Yes, kernel and Linus used it, but he used a proprietary VCS before that did not go anywhere anyway, really.


> changing a file required a checkout

SVN didn't need checkouts to edit that I recall? Perforce had that kind of model.


As did cvs. But you are right.

I am not sure, it seems I did misremember. Though it's possible I was actually working with needs-lock files. I can definitely see a certain coworker from that time to put this on all files :/


And even in P4, you could checkout files only at the end, kind of like `git add`. Though this could provide some annoyance if someone had locked the file in the upstream.


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