tool

joined 1 year ago
[–] tool 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My condolences. And as much as I hate Posit/Workbench, some of that is on your IT department. If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're having issues because it needs admin privileges to update some things, namely packages. That's honestly a very simple fix, they just need to grant your user NTFS write permissions to the Rstudio/Workbench install directory locally (and maybe some registry keys, but that's not definite). That's it. It's a 10-second permanent fix and no more UAC prompts for you.

[–] tool 2 points 6 months ago

Sorry, I missed this comment. I actually love doing that kind of shit, I get some sort of weird pleasure out of fixing chaotic stuff like that. That tends to be my role almost all the time; I'll come in, stay a few years, fix everything and get bored, and then move on somewhere else to do it again.

My current job is the only place that I haven't done that, because it's probably the best company that I've ever worked for.

[–] tool 4 points 6 months ago (4 children)

What's nightmarish about the installation? Is it because medical stuff is still on like Win XP?

Anything more than the most basic bare-bones install of Workbench (formerly Rstudio) quickly turns nightmarish. Try setting it up on a Linux dedicated server with AD auth with auto-mounting of network shares per-user. Posit's documentation isn't great (or even agrees with itself across pages) even in the simplest best-case scenario, and if you deploy anything that's even slightly complicated, it turns into a Hellscape. There's a good chance you will end up on one of the Posit employees' blog to read an incomplete explanation of setting up a feature because it's entirely missing or incomplete in the documentation. This isn't some crazy off-the-wall edge scenario either, it's an (allegedly) supported configuration and would be a typical deployment scenario in a multi-user R environment.

Their support is absolute shit too, it's truly fucking atrocious. First-level support will not solve your issue, I promise you that, and you won't get anyone who actually knows WTF they're talking about until you're escalated at least twice. And even then, they are very much up their own ass and have a VERY snobby attitude about the product, and always assume that it's the user at fault, even when you provide absolute 100% proof that it's their product at fault. It obviously couldn't possibly be their Super Precious Perfect-in-Every-Way Golden God Product, because as we've previously established before, it is a Perfect Product Which Does No Wrong, Ever. They also love to try and shirk responsibility and say that X is not a supported configuration for literally everything, and then claim that the documentation must be wrong when you point out in their documentation that it is.

Don't even get me started on the Lovecraftian nightmare that is R package management. It's even worse than the essay I just typed out, and they want to charge you essentially the entire Workbench license cost x2 to make it usable. Their logging is useless too, it has basically two settings, one of which is essentially "nothing," and the other is "firehose of bullshit that you need to follow along in their source code to try to find anything useful." That's not an exaggeration, I actually had to do that to diagnose an issue and provide proof to them that yeah, it is your half-assed shit product that's the problem.

So yeah, if you're not just Click-Click-Click-Next installing it, it very quickly becomes nightmarish. Posit desperately needs competition in the space, because they're absolute shit, but they can be absolute shit with impunity since they don't have any real competition.

[–] tool 6 points 8 months ago

I'm in this comment and I don't like it.

I just finished up a ~700 line PowerShell script to send input/keep a login session from timing out due to inactivity, and prior to that was a Python script to format LetsEncrypt SSL certs in a way haproxy likes + an accompanying Bash script to make sure those certs are correct, check in the current good haproxy config to a git repo, and then restart it if there are new certs.

The only thing that I know is that I know nothing.

[–] tool 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I have tinnitus with two different frequencies constantly blaring in my ears from target shooting and loud concerts sans ear protection.

You'll be able to tell the difference in a quality pair of headphones, trust me.

[–] tool 2 points 8 months ago

Trust me, those Sennheisers will benefit from an amp. I thought the same thing about my HD 650s before I heard them with an amp in the audio chain.

[–] tool 6 points 8 months ago (7 children)

While those don't tell the full story, they can be useful if deciding to have your water tested at a lab.

Everyone should spend at least a few bucks to know what they will be drinking at home on a regular basis, IMHO.

Lab testing is going to be a waste of money for most people not using well water, unless you have a strong reason to suspect something is up aside from test-strip reaults. Especially seeing as how the water chemistry is going to change at least twice per year when the water provider switches from chlorine to the chloramines and vice-versa. And pretty much all providers will give you a report of exactly what's in the water on a monthly basis if you ask for it.

Lab results would be useful if you're serious about homebrewing beer and don't want to build up the water profile from scratch or really into baking, though. Just don't do it in the early Spring/Fall, because that's when the treatment chemicals switch and the results aren't going to be representative of what the water is really like for that time of the year.

[–] tool 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

SAME. I know without a doubt the brown cornucopia was part of the fruit logo.

There is zero doubt in my mind. It's literally how I learned what a cornucopia is.

I was in 6th grade and our school was going to have a Christmas play, which involved some kids dressing as reindeer. The teacher showed us an example of the kind of sweatpants we'd need to wear, and they were Fruit of the Loom, still in the package. I asked the teacher what the brown fruit was, and she told me to look it up and that it was a cornucopia, except she said it like "Cornycopia," which I couldn't find in the dictionary until she told me it was spelled with a 'u' and not a 'y'.

I didn't misremember that, I didn't confuse it with Thanksgiving, etc. The only reason I know what a cornucopia is is because of that and how she mispronounced it.

[–] tool 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Before I replace it with something that won't catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks "solutions" that users come up with and I don't know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

It's also why if I'm asked to implement something, my first question isn't "When does this need to be done?," it's "What exactly is the problem you're trying to solve?"

What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.

[–] tool 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I literally cannot tell the difference.

Source: am manager, and sometimes my underlings don't toil hard enough in the PowerPoint mines.

You should mercilessly berate them until morale improves, that's MBA 101.

You're gonna be back in the PowerPoint mines if you don't fix your soft-hearted attitude.

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