Sure, but if the options are to watch something in low resolution or not at all, I’m picking up the novelisation instead.

Brian Lunduke is still around? Oh dear

I thought it had had that for twenty years?

That doesn’t sound like you appreciate the spirit of OP’s question. I’m not sure if I feel the social interaction will be worth it for me to engage further so I’m instead going to get some more sleep.

HENGE’s song about them is excellent.

That seems statistically unlikely. I’ve met plenty of people who aren’t normal so I do have lots of points of comparison.

I’ve met so very many of them.

I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn’t study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

For example statistics bored me. We’re working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

I’ve used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that’s always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don’t know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc…). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay…?

My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don’t really see what there is to like. I didn’t dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

It felt like being taught someone else’s complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.

My job isn’t this bad but has the occasional pointless company meeting and the like. I’m fine with it - it’s their money they’re wasting. I do not look to my employer for meaning - I like the team I work with but I’ve no love for the work. I’m good at it and try to find joy in it where I can, but it is not my primary source of personal validation.

It’s a pretty comfortable life. I’ve worked for myself before and it was much harder in every way with nowhere near the pay.

You met me at a very strange time in my life.

Every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose.

I started doing CS50 way back when and pretty much bailed when it got to C. I could understand it but it felt like I had to build the entire universe to do the simplest of things.

I like that with Python I can knock something together quickly enough to justify the time it takes. Having to do something manual and repetitious at work? Knock out a Python script to make it less error prone in future. If it took a lot of time I’d just have to suck it up and suffer through.

Fair enough, it read to me as a “gotcha” (as in “if python is do great then why can’t it…”). I’ve spent too much time on places like Reddit where every interaction is three seconds from becoming a knife fight!

…and people use MS Excel as a database, it’s not the fault of the tech that people force things to do things they’re not designed for.

That doesn’t sound like much of a “gotcha”. The requirements for small stuff and big stuff are drastically different.

I would argue it’s because it is Good Enough. The most popular solutions to things are rarely the optimum ones but the ones that are generally applicable.

For example, I could fight with bash’s unpleasant syntax or I could do it more easily (but less efficiently) with Python. Would it be as performant? Absolutely not - but the performance gains wouldn’t be worth the time and maintainability.

I generally go by either what the person I’m speaking to is likely to prefer or whichever is easier to pronounce, assuming I think it won’t cause confusion for the listener.

I’m sure both owners will be devastated.

Similarly I find it very useful for if I’ve written a tool script and really don’t want to write the command line interface for it.

“Here’s a well-documented function - write an argparser for it”

…then I fix its rubbish assumptions and mistakes. It’s probably not drastically quicker but it doesn’t require as much effort from me, meaning I can go harder on the actual function (rather than keeping some effort in reserve to get over the final hump).

Yeah, one of my colleagues leans on it too hard and it’s really undermining his actual talent.