Perhaps dumb questions inbound ;)

I use Arch because I'm strapped for time and my system is always moving.

• 2 minutes to install something? AUR probably has it.

• Ten minutes of free time to look for a software that fits a new need? Try random AUR things (auditing PKGBUILDs is just twenty seconds or so).

• If I need a tiny patch, I'll just add a sed or patch file to the PKGBUILD. (Super easy, you barely learn any syntax cuz it's intuitive shell.)

• make && make install/meson blahblah usually just works.

• Wiki does the thinking for me if I need something special (e.g. hw video acceleration)

Buuuut update surprises can be a pain (e.g. Pipewire explodes Saturday evening) and declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin' AWESOME, so I'm considering NixOS for my new laptop (old one's webcam broke). So I ask:

• How much can I grok in a week?
  • I need to know Nixlang, right? I have a ton of dotfiles and random homemade cpp commands in ~/.local/bin that I use daily
• How quick is it to make a derivation?
  • I make install a lot, do I need to declare that due to non-FHS? Can I boilerplate the whole thing with someone else's make install and ctrl+c ctrl+v? How does genAI fare? (Lemmy hates word guess bots, I know)
• How quick is it to install something new and random?
  • Do I just use nix-shell if I need something asap? Do I need to make a derivation for all my programs? e.g. do I need to declare a Hyprland plugin I'm test-running?
• How long do you research a new package for?
  • On Gentoo I always looked up USE flags (NOO my time); on Arch I just audit the PKGBUILD and test-run it (20 seconds); on Ubuntu I had to find the relevant PPA (2 minutes). What's it like for Nix?
• Can you set up dev environments quickly or do you need to write a ton of configs?
  • I hear python can be annoying. Do C++/Android Studio have header file/etc. issues?
• What maintenance ouchies do you run into? How long to rectify?
• Do I need to finagle on my own to have /boot encrypted?
  • I boot via: unencrypted EFI grub asks for LUKS password -> decrypt /boot, which then has a keyfile -> decrypt and mount btrfs root partition. But lots of guides don't do it this way

Thanks for bearing with me ദ്ദി(｡•̀ヮ<)~✩‧₊

I know, I know, mostly just undergrads care about undergrad prestige (except resumé bots on LinkedIn scanning for "MIT") but I'm curious about the average Lemming, who might lie less often than Redditors and probably isn't a hyper outlier. Though I still expect selection and response bias :3

Let me start with my own wall of anecdotes.

1. An old American embedded systems mentor I once had had had like two master's degrees, but in his words,

Just get a Bachelor's and a good internship. If the company will let you do it on their dime, then get the Master's.

So the college-then-job thing wasn't quite cause-then-effect.

2. Another friend I had said "All of the higher-ups in the chip engineering dept I'm gunning for have a PhD. Wanna contribute meaningfully? Probably gotta have one too" (Somewhere in the entirety of Asia, exacts hidden for privacy). So grad school matters more in that case.

3. My old econ teacher told me that, if you want a job where undergrad is just a stepping stone, then your undergrad "prestige" mostly doesn't matter (e.g. pre-law, pre-med). And saving 50k in undergrad student loans to then dump into matching the S&P is a cheat code at age 18, worth far more than "initial salary". ~not~ ~financial~ ~advice~ ~lol~ In this case, the "get your job" isn't even that important.

4. An acquaintance I once had pipelined from Cornell to DeepMind. There, prestige and its opportunities probably/definitely/maybe had an effect.

5. A second acquaintance says his Canadian public school (iirc) only mildly helped him, so he went all-in on making his own networks outside of school to get into AI (Is he a hustler bro or something?). So he dodged the idea of college choice mattering.

6. A Harvard acquaintance I knew says both their dad and granddad agreed that going to Harvard played into getting their positions. (No need to believe me. I forgot what position tho -- finance/big business probably)

7. The managers and manager managers my parents knew often only had community/state school undergrads, sometimes with MBAs.

8. I don't care about CEOs. All outliers anyway.

So what have you empirically found? And where? (inb4 "American elite school obsession bad" and "CS is skill-based, not school-based, thread over" -- heard all of that already)

You can be vague if needed c:

It can be a small skill.

The last thing I learned to do was whistle. Never could whistle my whole life, and tutorials and friends never could help me.

So, for the last month or two, I just sort of made the blow shape then spam-tried different "tongue configurations" so to speak -- whenever I had free time. Monkey-at-a-typewriter type shit. It was more an absentminded thing than a practice investment.

Probably looked dumb as hell making blow noises. Felt dumb too ("what? you can't whistle? just watch"), but I kept at it like a really really low-investment... dare I attract self-help gurus... habit.

Eventually I made a pitch, then I could shift the pitch up a little, then five pitches, then Liebestraum, then the range of a tenth or so. Skadoosh. Still doing it now lol.

(Make of this what you will: If I went the musician route my brain told me to, then I would've gotten bored after 1 minute of major scales. When I was stuck at only having five pitches, I had way more longevity whistle-blowing cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-running-around chromaticisms than failing the "fa" in "do re mi fa".)

So, Lemmings: What was the last skill you learned? And further, what was the context/way in which you learned it?

I had a teeny pet project using GNU assembly that was going to target two platforms.

Instead of keeping my handwritten worst-practices Makefile I decided to try GNU Autotools for the educated reasons of:

• Text scrolling by looks pretty
• Vague memories of ./configure make make install tarballs

I got hit with mysterious macro errors, recompile with -fPIE errors (didn't need this before?), autotools trying to run gcc on a .o file w/ the same options as an .s file, "no rule for all:", and other things a noob would run into. (I don't need a bugfix, since my handspun Makefile is "working on my machine" with uname -m.) So there's a bit of a learning curve here, inhibited by old documentation ~and~ ~more~ ~quietly,~ ~genAI~ ~being~ ~shittier~ ~than~ ~normal~ ~in~ ~this~ ~department~

With this I ask:

Do people still use Autotools for non-legacy stuff? If not, what do people choose for a new project's build system and why?

edit: trimmed an aside

This site is so cool!

             ／＞　 フ
            | 　_　_| 
          ／` ミ＿xノ 
         /　　　　 |
        /　 ヽ　　 ﾉ
        │　　|　|　|
   ／￣|　　 |　|　|
   (￣  ヽ＿_ヽ_)__)
    ＼二)

But how do people make these? I searched online and the best I could find were small Japanese communities still using MS Gothic (which is metrically incompatible with Arial/more-used fonts) and halfhearted JPG-to-ASCII-bitmap converters.

Further, how do people manage these? I'd imagine an emoji search, but these millionfold emoticons don't have names; and the other alternatives are "I've got a meme for that scrolls down infinite camera roll" or searching them up every time.

⠀/\_/\
(˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) thanks lol
/ >🌷<~⁠♡

I saw a post recently about someone setting up parental controls -- screentime, blocked sites, etc. -- and it made me wonder.

In my childhood, my free time was very flexible. Within this low-pressure flexibility I was naturally curious, in all directions -- that meant both watching brainteaser videos, and watching Gmod brainrot. I had little exposure to video games other than Minecraft which ran poorly on my machine, so I tended to surf Flash games and YouTube.

Strikingly, while watching a brainteaser video, tiny me had a thought:

I'm glad my dad doesn't make me watch educational videos like the other kids in school have to.

For some reason, I wanted to remember that to "remember what my thought process was as a child" so that memory has stuck with me.

Onto the meat: if I had had a capped screentime, like a timer I could see, and knew that I was being watched in some way, I'd feel pressure. For example,

10 minutes left. Oh no. I didn't have fun yet. I didn't have fun yet!!

Oh no, I'm gonna get in so much trouble for watching another YTP...

and maybe that pressure wouldn't have made me into an independent, curious kid, to the person I am now. Maybe it would've made me fearful or suspicious instead. I was suspicious once, when one of my parents said "I can see what you browse from the other room" -- so I ran the scientific method to verify if they were. (I wrote "HI MOM" on Paint, and tested if her expression changed.)

So what about now? Were we too free, and now it's our job to tighten the next generation? I said "butthead" often. I loved asdfmovie, but my parents probably wouldn't have. I watched SpingeBill YTPs (at least it's not corporatized YouTube Kids).

Or differently: do we watch our kids without them knowing? Write a keylogger? Or just take router logs? Do we prosecute them like some sort of panopticon, for their own good?

Or do we completely forgo this? Take an Adventure Playground approach?

Of course, I don't expect a one-size-fits-all answer. Where do you stand, and why?

What was your last RTFM adventure? Tinker this, read that, make something smoother! Or explodier.

As for me, I wanted to see how many videos I could run at once. (Answer: 60 frames per second or 60 frames per second?)

With my sights on GPUizing some ethically sourced motion pictures, I RTFW, graphed, and slapped on environment variables and flags like Lego bricks. I got the Intel VAAPI thingamabob to jaunt by (and found that it butterized my mpv videos)

$ pacman -S blahblahblahblahblahtfm
$ mpv --show-profile=fast
Profile fast: 
 scale=bilinear
 dscale=bilinear
 dither=no
 correct-downscaling=no
 linear-downscaling=no
 sigmoid-upscaling=no
 hdr-compute-peak=no
 allow-delayed-peak-detect=yes
$ mpv --hwdec=auto --profile=fast graphwar-god-4KEDIT.mp4
# fucking silk

But there was no pleasure without pain: Mr. Maxwell F. N. 940MX (the N stands for Nvidia) played hooky. So I employed the longest envvars ever

$ NVD_LOG=1 VDPAU_TRACE=2 VDPAU_NVIDIA_DEBUG=3 NVD_BACKEND=direct NVD_GPU=nvidia LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia VDPAU_DRIVER=nvidia prime-run vdpauinfo
GPU at BusId 0x1 doesn't have a supported video decoder
Error creating VDPAU device: 1
# stfu

to try translating Nvidia VDPAU to VAAPI -- of course, here I realized I rtfmed backwards and should've tried to use just VDPAU instead. So I did.

Juice was still not acquired.

Finally, after a voracious DuckDuckGoing (quacking?), I was then blessed with the freeing knowledge that even though post-Kepler is supposed to support H264, Nvidia is full of lies...

 ______
< fudj >
 ------
          \   ‘^----^‘
           \ (◕(‘人‘)◕)
              (  8    )        ô
              (    8  )_______( )
              ( 8      8        )
              (_________________)
                ||          ||
               (||         (||

and then right before posting this, gut feeling: I can't read.

$ lspci | grep -i nvidia
... NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 940MX] (rev a2)
# ArchWiki says that GM108 isn't supported.
# Facepalm

SO. What was your last RTFM adventure?

I have a little helper command in ~/.zshrc called stfu.

stfu() {
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        echo "Usage: stfu <program> [arguments...]"
        return 1
    fi

    nohup "$@" &>/dev/null &
    disown
}
complete -W "$(ls /usr/bin)" stfu

stfu will run some other command but also detach it from the terminal and make any output shut up. I use it for things such as starting a browser from the terminal without worrying about CTRL+Z, bg, and disown.

$ stfu firefox -safe-mode
# Will not output stuff to the terminal, and
# I can close the terminal too.

Here’s my issue:

On the second argument and above, when I hit tab, how do I let autocomplete suggest me the arguments and command line switches for the command I’m passing in?

e.g. stfu ls -<tab> should show me whatever ls’s completion function is, rather than listing every /usr/bin command again.

# Intended completion
$ stfu cat -<TAB>
-e                      -- equivalent to -vE                                                                                                                                                     
--help                  -- display help and exit                                                                                                                                                 
--number            -n  -- number all output lines                                                                                                                                               
--number-nonblank   -b  -- number nonempty output lines, overrides -n                                                                                                                            
--show-all          -A  -- equivalent to -vET                                                                                                                                                    
--show-ends         -E  -- display $ at end of each line                                                                                                                                         
--show-nonprinting  -v  -- use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB                                                                                                                         
--show-tabs         -T  -- display TAB characters as ^I                                                                                                                                          
--squeeze-blank     -s  -- suppress repeated empty output lines                                                                                                                                  
-t                      -- equivalent to -vT                                                                                                                                                     
-u                      -- ignored  

# Actual completion
$ stfu cat <tab>
...a list of all /usr/bin commands
$ stfu cat -<tab>
...nothing, since no /usr/bin commands start with -

(repost, prev was removed)

EDIT: Solved.

I needed to set the curcontext to the second word. Below is my (iffily annotated) zsh implementation, enjoy >:)

stfu() {
  if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: stfu <program> [arguments...]"
    return 1
  fi

  nohup "$@" &>/dev/null &
  disown
}
#complete -W "$(ls /usr/bin)" stfu
_stfu() {
  # Curcontext looks like this:
  #   $ stfu <tab>
  #   :complete:stfu:
  local curcontext="$curcontext" 
  #typeset -A opt_args # idk what this does, i removed it

  _arguments \
    '1: :_command_names -e' \
    '*::args:->args'

  case $state in
    args)
      # idk where CURRENT came from
      if (( CURRENT > 1 )); then
        # $words is magic that splits up the "words" in a shell command.
        #   1. stfu
        #   2. yourSubCommand
        #   3. argument 1 to that subcommand
        local cmd=${words[2]}
        # We update the autocompletion curcontext to
        # pay attention to your subcommand instead
        curcontext="$cmd"

        # Call completion function
        _normal
      fi
      ;;
  esac
}
compdef _stfu stfu

Deduced via docs (look for The Dispatcher), this dude's docs, stackoverflow and overreliance on ChatGPT.

EDIT: Best solution (Andy)

stfu() {
  if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Usage: stfu <program> [arguments...]"
    return 1
  fi

  nohup "$@" &>/dev/null &
  disown
}
_stfu () {
  # shift autocomplete to right
  shift words
  (( CURRENT-=1 ))
  _normal
}
compdef _stfu stfu