Feline Follies

Online forums are good sources of information and/or habitats for groupthink. Jean Valjean ignored the smell; so can you :-) forums are biased in various ways. for example, woodworkers' opinions about linseed oil are informed by wood finish products. in another forum, we might find a recommendation for finishing wood with linseed oil sold by an art supply store. sauce for the painter is sauce for the woodworker? Slippery when wet when i became interested in safety razors, forums were invaluable sources of information. they are still helpful, but i learned enough to continue on my own. at one point i bought cheap shaving soap thinking that it couldn't be as bad as forum contributors claimed. they were right, but the soap was/is still useful: it stays at th...

Once upon a time, upgrading packages was just downloading and installing files. after a while, it also entailed compiling source code because my operating systems no longer received first-class support. Descent Into Madness after a while, upgrading a package also entailed upgrading the tools needed to make it and their dependencies. i felt like i had installed every (meta-)build system. on one of my MacBooks, Homebrew maintained two versions of Python and two versions of llvm . as projects migrated from Autotools to CMake, library versions became inconsistent. these inconsistencies puzzled me, because the first test one should perform after adding support for another build system is determining if the result is the same. any differences should be eliminated/explained. in real life, most people didn't ...