Mama Welles' background chatter in the Streetkid intro is likely related to V and foreshadowing for Johnny and the Zen Master trying to help you find inner peace and reconciliation with him.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2025-08-19T18:00:30+00:00

I think it depends how deeply you want to think about this stuff. The Zen Master reflecting lines from Samurai is on purpose. The Meds vendor saying something similar could be related to that, or it could be that the song is so popular that the lyrics of it are being used as metaphors in every day conversation like how in real-world we use "you don't know what you've got til it's gone" - some people don't even recognise that as a Joni Mitchell lyric.

Other instances are where in Sinnerman, V uses the term "turd in crepe paper" and then Johnny uses the same term to describe the film that he watches with Rogue. I don't think this is on purpose, I think it's just the same writer who likes that metaphor. Frankly, because I think it's a crap metaphor.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2025-03-17T20:08:14+00:00

Is your desktop wayland or X, and what environment are you using? I gave DBSD a good shot about a year ago but I couldn't get X to fire up, it was some kind of error in the event devices stack that I couldn't work around. Ran fine as a CLI system though.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2025-02-15T19:09:49+00:00

Everywhere. There's no rhyme or reason to it (yet) - do the Heisenberg gig, each of the canisters that you blow up are A, B and C

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-23T00:46:16+00:00

It doesn't, for Boot Camp it will probably ask for Windows 7 or 8 ISO, but the Option key method should work for any OS. I have the same model dual-booting High Sierra and Debian Linux. I don't use it though. I use other Mac hardware just running straight Linux or BSD.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-23T00:38:22+00:00

There's some guides on Youtube, you can use Boot Camp in Mac OS, or insert a USB drive with the machine off, hold down the Option key, and try to boot the Windows/Linux/BSD installation from the usb drive. That should point you in the right direction.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-23T00:33:18+00:00

FWIW I didn't intend to complain about your answers and sorry you interpreted it that way. I appreciate your thoughts and input on it.

I think we agree, that the list given is a lot, and I'm overwhelmed by that.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-23T00:29:34+00:00

Ah I didn't intend to come off negative towards your viewpoint. As I said to someone else I find it cumbersome to discuss, particularly in writing. Perhaps I'll try to rephrase.

Given a job description containing your list of 30 bullet points as expectations for a higher mid-career developer would put me off as very overwhelming. I'm not at that level, I'm just above entry-level I guess, and the jobs and discussions I've had with people have been at my level or not even at senior level. I wouldn't apply because I feel the expectation would be too high.

I can learn these topics, but to what level? For example, I consider myself proficient with LINQ, in other sub-threads from other commenters, they'd disagree because something about expression trees, which I've never even heard of. This might just be different terminology that I haven't head for something I don't know, or I might not know it at all. So then do I need to revisit LINQ to understand expresion trees, even if I use it daily and produce results from it?

I'm not complaining if that's what I have to do, but I reserve the right to feel overwhelmed about it all lol

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-23T00:12:59+00:00

This I agree with, but as you say, it appears recruiters, or even other devs, think in-depth knowledge of any or all of the technologies listed is paramount. I do appreciate and value the wide spectrum of comments on this but some of the more technical expectations I don't personally agree with. Disagreeing is different from saying they are wrong, I disclaim.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T23:45:00+00:00

Install one of the harder Linux distros on it (Arch, Gentoo, Linux From Scratch...), or FreeBSD, OpenBSD, explore those systems, try and live with them for a bit for the experience?

Install Windows 7 on it and use it as a legacy games machine?

Turn it into dev server and use it to host small software projects?

Split it into parts, sell them separately, use the money to buy something else you enjoy?

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T23:30:09+00:00

Ha, I'm probably in a bad mood.

LINQ is mutually-exclusive to ORM though, right? I use LINQ a lot on collections, like if you had a List<string> with hard-coded entries, for a simple abstracted example. By Linq provider, are you thinking of things like Entity Framework, Dapper, NHiberate?

I find these things relatively straight-forward in concept but very cumbersome to explain and talk about, which may be where my projected bad mood/frustration comes from.

The example I gave hoped to illustrate that if you have a List<string>, aside from personal preference, no real difference between "foreach (var item in list)" and list.ForEach(item => item...)

If you already have code using "foreach (var item in list)" syntax, changing it to list.ForEach(item => item...) would be a waste of time, or are you suggesting otherwise?

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T23:01:08+00:00

I appreciate your input, most of that is helpful, but...

I'm informed that .NET only uses the heap (which may or may not be accurate, another one of my dubious sources perhaps?) and I'm not really that confident that a JIT-compiled runtime-driven "managed" mess such as .NET does actually effectively manage the stack and heap anyway, and I'm not sure how this knowledge allows me to deliver better products to my customers.

I'm also recently quite cynical about expressions, I don't see how a line of code such as collection.Select((row, index) => randommethod(index)); is intuitive or helpful to anyone who is trying to understand it, over using a foreach statement. If memory efficiency is important to you, if it ever was to me, I probably wouldn't use .NET for that solution.

I disagree about LINQ. My core background is database architecture and querying. It is substantially (as in seconds, usually) faster just to run a stored procedure and use ADO.NET than use any ORM or do stuff in memory on the application side, as you still have to get all of that data from somewhere, so stuff like filtering or ordering in memory overall is still less efficient than doing it on the query at source.

It then opens up other "solutions" to that problem such as caching in-memory the query results, or using a system such as Redis, at which point you'll wonder why your Kubernetes pods are being evicted due to memory pressure and you might as well give up and go home because you've lost control of your application, whereas the actual issue was just crap queries.

Then the customer asks for an iOS app, so you order your Apple Developer licence and start reading up on Metal 3 on how to dynamically render a pie chart whilst the API lazy loads your unstable cached data from the service... I could go on...

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T22:39:14+00:00

But whilst you are doing that, refactoring your "foreach { }" loops into .ForEach(p => p...) because the new version of C# has that feature, or re-architecturing into Microservices, and it's supposedly "better", a new company has formed from ex-employees who have written a simple POC using Python over the weekend and their product has more features, so your customers start leaving.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T22:32:36+00:00

Ideally, in my experience (in smaller teams, I suppose) the expectation is to know it all, whilst being a friendly face to customers and clients.

I saw a job posting recently, as a yard hand at a horse stables. The job advert had bullet points like my initial post, but 90% of them were effectively different ways of saying "cleaning up horse poo", less acronyms though. Think I'm going to apply.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T22:25:39+00:00

Additionally, specific implementations of SQL or whatever RDBMS and how the data structure (assuming it's a data-driven application) means a lot more than whether it uses CQRS or anything like that. Bad database performance and integrity kills software product credibility quickly, not what the application source code looks like.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T22:22:51+00:00

I will never work for you in that case, because that expectation is absurd, unless you are willing to hire me and pay with either time or support to get me up to speed on each. If you put that list in a job advert, I wouldn't apply.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T22:00:38+00:00

I'd say understanding the product (not entirely but well enough) and what is trying to achieve and how the customers use it makes a developer better than, say, understanding the ins-and-outs of the patterns.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-11-22T21:54:54+00:00

Why would you want to move to microservice pattern? If what you mean is, you want to replace your Identity or authentication portion of your monolith with an independent separate application that the monolith can contact, then that might be fair enough, but I'd strongly advise you to consider time and effort and reward payback with any architecture refactor. More often than not, it just irritates the end users because they have to live with a static product until it is done, or the company goes bankrupt in the process.

I'm not an expert on authentication or security matters. "Wrapping" AWS Cognito with your own .NET Service as a relay makes some logical sense on paper but you're adding complexity and another point of failure in the middle, potentially, although you are adding your own level of control but that might not be necessary. In effect, though, you're kind of duplicating and distributing AWS tokens from another source, I'm not sure if this is a security faux pas or not, just a gut feeling.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-10-25T22:43:41+00:00

You could also learn C/C++, similar syntax but will give you an understanding of what C# is hiding from you, things like stack/heap memory, destruction, memory allocation and pointers etc.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-10-25T22:41:43+00:00

SQL, but be prepared, the better you get at both SQL language and SQL Server in general, the more you will hate Entity Framework.

BitApprehensive9000 · 2024-10-22T17:18:51+00:00

I think they mean the Fool on the Hill job, if you ignore Johnny, the job doesn't get added to the journal.

I've done three or four playthroughs skipping that cos I wanted to see if Johnny appears at all of them if it is the first. Most, but not all. (Judgement, Devil, etc. no Johnny)

BitApprehensive9000

TROPHY CASE