Thank you. Funny enough, just today I chatted with a colleague that mentioned one of the tools was technically available to us, but actually not approved for use. Ordering it wouldn’t be an issue, but getting it signed off would be quite the chore.

The fun comes when there is no actual data model. All in all, I’d say being familiar with the data model is about 60% of my job. 35% is building queries and query scripts for people who need regular exports. 5% is running after other people’s fuckups.

Strap in, because this is a ride.

There is a raw database from a decade-and-a-half old app, which I get to access through a layer of views that does some joining, but not all, with absolutely no documentation on how the original database is structured or where things are pulled from or what anything refers to. No data dictionary, no list or map of key relations, some objects are mapped in two different views, no semantic naming of columns.

If you want to want to query order part delegations by who they’re assigned to (Recipient in the app) you need to use the foreign key RefAssignmentUnit. The “Assignment” unit that did the delegation is just RefUnit. If you have orders that were created by a salesperson on behalf of a customer, OrderingPerson (also a foreign key, but not named Ref-) is the customer, while OrderingPerson2 is the salesperson that entered the order. Don’t confuse that with Creator, which for orders created through the web form is usually a technical user, unless the salesperson is one of the veterans that use the direct app in which case it’ll be the salesperson while OrderingPerson2 is null.

Also, we have many-to-many relationships that are mapped through reference tables… whose columns are named object and reference for each and every one. Have fun trying to memorize which refers to which so you don’t need to look it up every damn time.

Create my own views to clean this up? Nope, only the third party service providers for the app can do that, and they don’t wanna. Our internal app admin (singular) can use some awkward tool to generate those views, but there’s no reverse lookup to see what a given column refers to. Also, they have no concept for what actually constitutes a good model because they’re not really familiar with the database, just with the app.

Get my own serverless DB to create views that query the original DB? No can do, you’d need to order a whole server and that’s pricy.
Get a cloud DB? Sure, but it will be managed by the cloud team and if you want to have or edit custom views, you’ll get to create a project request. They’ll put it in the backlog and work it into some future sprint.

Get literally any tool that allows me to efficiently create reusable data prep so I don’t have to copy & paste the base transformations needed for a given query every fucking time and if the source DB ever changes I need to update all my query scripts? If you can somehow squeeze the time to prepare a convincing pitch - a full Power Point presentation, of course - between all your tedious and redundant query preparation and script maintenance, find a management sponsor willing to hear you out and hopefully propose your request to their superiors. Best case: It becomes a whole project - alternatives will have to be considered first, implications, security, costs, and you’ll be the one having to assemble and present that information to management only to have some responsible person point out that it would actually be the remit of a different team… that also works in sprints, has a backlog and will give you no control over your prep.

And obviously, the app provider doesn’t give us any advance notice of just what will change in the DB with the next update. We only learn that when a view breaks. The app admin can use the tool to refresh the affected views then, while I scramble to determine all the scripts that need to be updated and copy&paste the fix. If a user has been granted their own access to the database, odds are they’ll come crying to me when their modified versions of my queries break.

There is a lot I like about my job, I acknowledge the difficulties of a historically grown system and service contracts, but the rigid and antiquated corporate culture can go take a long walk off a short pier.

Oooh, I missed that. Nice!

Agreed. The more we argue about the “how” of the protests, the more we’re distracted from what they’re actually protesting about. The most effective way of stopping people complaining about something isn’t to shut them up, but to fix the thing.

If someone’s poor and can’t afford to buy food, no amount of fines or jail time will prevent them from going back to stealing food the second they get out because - guess what - they’re still fucking poor. There’s a food bank near where I lived a while ago that notoriously had long lines. Slowly shuffling forward in a queue that screams “I’m poor” must be uncomfortable, but they’re still not stealing food while they have an alternative.

If you want people to stop vandalising shit in their outrage over exploitation and greed, fucking do something about the exploitation and greed. I’m sure those people could have thought of more pleasant ways to spend their time than creating their cornflour pigment, driving out there and getting arrested to make a point without leaving lasting damage.

I made it to two. It just keeps going.

hehe funny sex number

(69 Flatpaks)

Right? “Oh look, country with huge population has more downloads than country with small population!”

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that’s one of those cases where you either add support yourself (provided you have the time, know-how - which most already don’t - and commitment) or wait until hopefully someone else does. Or - like me - you curse and go back to X11 until something gives you enouhh confidence to try Wayland again. I think I read somewhere on this platform that there will be (or was?) some Nvidia driver update that should help with Wayland support, but I haven’t looked into it.

I don’t have much experience with laptop hardware. I did have one elderly laptop running Ubuntu, though it probably would have been served better with something more lightweight (I just didn’t know much about anything at the time). But that wasn’t doing anything intensive, just some Uni exercises. I think a simple neural network was the most challenging thing it ever had to handle.

I’ve got working Nvidia drivers without any tinkering. Gaming on my 3060 without issues. Never had microphone issues either. This isn’t supposed to be “You’re wrong”, more a “I wonder what I’m doing differently”.

ASUS TUF GAMING B550 MoBo, AMD Ryzen 5600x, some Gigabyte version of the RTX 3060, running the Nvidia version of Nobara (Fedora-based gaming oriented distro).

What distro did you try?

I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.

Good on him for giving Linux a platform. Bad on google for coercing him to do so in a clickbaity manner.

Fair enough, I guess that nuance got lost then

I might be the minority, but I’m more inclined to click a video that says “Plasma 6.1: Release, features and my opinions” than one that proclaims it THE BEST THING (unless it’s from a creator I already know and like anyway, they get a pass as long as the content is good)

Sure, but the common consensus seems to be that you shouldn’t be annoyed at the constant updates when that’s an explicit feature of that system. Maybe that’s just a misreading, but I assume the expected reaction would be “Not now” rather than “Not again”.

(I’m not taking a position, as I’ve never worked with a rolling distro and can’t really comment on either stance, just trying to navigate the confusion here)

Shame is, I kinda like the tool (Microsoft Power BI) for its graphical interface and capabilities. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of complaints too, and its promises of empowering users to find their own insights come with a lot of conditions. But I’ve also not found any comparable FOSS alternatives.

I’m far from OG, unless you count my dad’s SUSE that I “used” as a child for a while. I fondly remember SuperTux. But I didn’t really interact with the system much beyond starting games or a browser.

Later (about six years ago, I think) I started dual-booting Ubuntu as a side piece for productive stuff while gaming on Windows. Gradually tried gaming on Linux too, then made the jump to Linux (Ubuntu) exclusive late 2021.

Since a recent PC upgrade, I’ve used an additional disk to try Nobara and am happy with it so far. I’ve now got a spare disk and more time to try new distros, so I plan to explore the distroverse some more, but all in all I’d consider myself more of a newcomer or at best a resident than an OG.

I had the opposite once, years ago: I don’t know the cause anymore, but somehow Windows disappeared from my grub.

By the time I had finally secured all my data with the intent to make that absence permanent, it did reappear (again, no idea why), but I was committed. Steamrolled the entire drive with a new Ubuntu install and haven’t used Windows privately since.

I did need to use tools that don’t run on Linux (even with wine - believe me, I tried) for uni and used a windows VM, my work laptop is Windows because I need the same tools and get no say in it anyway, but haven’t had a direct Windows install on my system since 2022.

My private OS of choice is by now Nobara, though I also intend to use an obsolete SSD to try more distros with.

Thank you for the details! I find the different properties of metals fascinating but rarely have the time to read up on it (which isn’t made easier by having to first read up on and understand a bunch of terminology and underlying concepts, which my ADHD just doesn’t have the patience for), so comments like yours giving a bit of insight are perfect.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Unless you’re trying to get a movie or game to get a teen-friendly rating, in which case you might not want to make the sex scenes quite as explicit.

Speedcubing or racing games? That’s where I know that term from