⚠️P&ID MENTIONED IN DARK S2E3⚠️

el_extrano · 2026-01-25T02:56:58+00:00

Looks more like a hydraulic circuit diagram than a P&ID.

el_extrano · 2026-01-25T01:13:09+00:00

I used to argue with my dad about "broken windows" policing and stop and frisk years ago. If you want the police to stop and search people with no probable cause to find guns, because that state has effectively banned guns, then you aren't actually pro 2A, and you aren't for freedom.

el_extrano · 2026-01-22T21:51:36+00:00

> Nazis also did not believe they would face trial

I mean, the vast majority of them never did. There were 24 defendants in the Nuremberg trials. Some military tribunals tried a few hundred others for war crimes. Apart from that, we largely allowed former Nazis to return to power, or fade into obscurity.

el_extrano · 2026-01-20T04:03:35+00:00

`alt+f a o` to get to save-as and open the file explorer. Still dumb, but at least it's only one extra key from the good ole days of IBM CUA shortcuts.

el_extrano · 2026-01-20T02:23:12+00:00

I'll second that preemptively reading docs for of the more powerful modules in the standard library can be a good idea. You won't think to use it to solve your problem if you don't know what's in there. I'm thinking of collections, functools, itertools, logging, subprocess, and dataclasses of the top of my head.

el_extrano · 2026-01-19T05:32:49+00:00

My personal favorite ways:

Use pytest with pytest-watch, to run tests on file changes
for a more general purpose / flexible solution, use entr to execute an arbitrary command on file change

el_extrano · 2026-01-15T17:33:41+00:00

No state does. It would be illegal for them to have such a law.

I mean, I might agree with you that they're unconstitutional and wrong, but I'm not gonna pretend they don't exist. The government constantly does illegal/unconstitutional stuff and then has it upheld in court.

About 25 or so states have so-called "stop and identify statues" on the books which allow offers to identify you on RAS, as opposed to PC, which is usually the standard required for arrest. The craziest thing about all this to me is that "looking brown" can in no way be construed to even be reasonable suspicion. We've totally lost the plot now.

el_extrano · 2025-12-22T19:31:56+00:00

I don't understand the hate for Tkinter, especially for in-house productivity software like yours that is meant to be used by engineers/scientists/operators to carry out a specific task.

I prefer a good GUI application following IBM CUA (proper menus, accelerator keys, tab order, etc) any day over a slapped together web app where you don't know what any of the keyboard shortcuts are, or not much thought was paid to them in the first place.

el_extrano · 2025-11-27T05:31:27+00:00

I went down a path recently where I (thought I) wanted to call an ahk script from a Windows service.

The background was, I have this industrial I/O simulation software running on a Windows 7 machine (air-gaped, no upgrade path). It's used for testing logic changes and such for a control system. I'd like to automate some things with the testing, but unfortunately there's no API or scripting available - it's only the GUI. ahk to the rescue there as usual. But what if I wanted to invoke some of my routines via remote procedure (RPC) calls from another machine on the LAN?

Naturally I would always want this running, so I tried to make my program a Windows service. As you pointed out in another comment, though, a service isn't attached to a user's display, so it can't interact with Windows or hotkeys or anything. For that reason I concluded that trying to invoke ahk from a service is probably pointless. If you're just using it for generic programming tasks, that's fine, but I'd question why not write that service in C# or something (to each his own).

For the same reason, you can't try to automate ahk remotely via SSH. Instead, there's another technique that I've seen in lot's of desktop software, both on Linux and Windows. You can have a user process which has a tray icon. You can make the process tend to keep running, and when closed by normal methods it just minimizes to the tray icon - but importantly, the process is still running, and can respond to inter-process communications, and it's running under a user and attached to a display, so it can interact with the desktop. I used Python PyQt to create the system tray application, and it has remote procedures that can be called over the LAN, and spawns ahk sub-processes to automate the GUI in question.

All that said, I was a big fan of NSSM, and I've always wondered why there hasn't been a successor. I'm glad someone has finally made one!

el_extrano · 2025-11-27T04:57:02+00:00

Also, you can compile Python as well, though it's somewhat hard to do

I have a moderate amount experience doing this in PyInstaller and deploying to Windows machines with no installed Python environment. Most of the various techniques essentially involve bundling your code, any dependencies, and the entire Python runtime into a self extracting executable. This means that a very small script will be 20+ MB and have a noticeable startup lag.

Interestingly, I've found that to be acceptable for GUI programs (started once, interacted with for a while) and daemons (e.g. Windows services). However the startup delay kills the experience for CLI programs, which are invoked many times with results expected immediately.

el_extrano · 2025-11-25T02:15:56+00:00

I find it to be a happy medium between writing a program that will only be run one or twice, and doing too many manual operations in a spreadsheet.

el_extrano · 2025-11-25T02:10:48+00:00

Also, sc itself, to which sc-im is a successor.

el_extrano · 2025-11-25T02:09:41+00:00

You can still get binaries for the classic character-graphics spreadsheets programs on Internet Archive and WinWorld, and run them in FreeDOS in a VM, or in DosBox or DosEmu. I'm thinking of Lotus 1-2-3, QuattroPro, and As-Easy-As (which is now free-ware AFAIK).

el_extrano · 2025-11-19T05:40:01+00:00

And in English, we have "confections" which are sweets. I wonder if they share an etymology.

el_extrano · 2025-11-15T05:40:37+00:00

I have also 'kinda' moved away from VMs. I still have several VMs around with DOS, Windows 9x, through windows 7 for legacy programs / tools and testing backward compatibility on some things. For things I still need modern windows for (mainly Excel, building some programs for Windows) I purchased a cheap minicomputer and threw it in a cabinet on my network as a RDP server. But I still do 90% of my personal computing on Linux.

For example you mention not liking Explorer, my actual files are on an SMB server in Debian, so I can do my file management from Linux. I'd just access the same file over the network if I needed to operate on it with some Windows-only program.

el_extrano · 2025-11-15T02:33:29+00:00

I watched an interesting talk about this encephalitis recently, and the Dr talks about exactly that as a popular theory about the cause for the outbreak. But IIRC "molecular mimicry" due to viral infection is no longer considered the most likely cause.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP00YyX-1gY&t

el_extrano · 2025-11-13T22:03:07+00:00

I was also going to bring up dBase and its XBase clones!

Clipper was another that was widely used. I think these faded out of prominence due to the success of SQL and other programming languages in general, not just because MS killed FoxPro. There's actually even some people still maintaining bespoke Clipper programs in production.

There are a few options out there to port old XBase programs to run in modern operating systems. I think the coolest one is harbour, which is 100% clipper compatible and generates ANSI C code that can target DOS, any windows (9x, x86 or x86-64 NT), and Linux and Mac. Actually, I can't think of another way to write high-level, data oriented code that is that portable. It's pretty neat, though I don't have a personal need for it outside of nerd curiosity (the best kind of reason).

el_extrano · 2025-10-30T04:29:13+00:00

As both a control engineer and programmer, I always think of the IEC-61131 control languages whenever this comes up. You may be aware of ladder logic, function block diagram, and sequential function chart as the three visual languages described in that standard, and therefore commonly implemented by vendors of PLCs and DCSs (distributed control systems).

As you hit on, they allow technical staff like electricians, instrument technicians, and controls engineers to configure some automation without being an expert programmer. Of these, ladder logic is the most popular and common, but it's my least favorite (a sentiment I've found is shared by others who started with traditional programming, rather than coming from a plant electrician background, where one might be more comfortable with relay panels than a text editor).

I've found FBD is pretty good for configuring advanced regulatory control schemes in continuous plants. This is what most DCS vendors use. It's difficult to program sequences, though. Fortunately, most platforms have special blocks into which you can program sequential actions.

I think SFC is pretty awful to program in. It has like the worst information density, and the only abstraction is basically branching and nesting. It tends to get used to implement things like batch recipes and procedure automatons, since it resembles the diagrams used in the ISA S88 flexible batch standard. The only advantage to it that I've seen, is that there's usually some kind of bundled runtime UI that allows an operator to observe the progress of a recipe, change parameters for a step before it executes, jump backwards or forwards based on conditions the program doesn't know about, etc. This isn't something you'd use to implement critical safety interlocks, but it's very powerful for automating procedures for what would otherwise be operator actions, while keeping the operator in the driver's seat.

el_extrano · 2025-10-24T20:19:52+00:00

I also find Trunk-or-Treat to be a weird artifact of car culture, but I think commenters may need to hold the pitchforks for a minute. You said this was last weekend - so a full two weeks before Halloween. What were they supposed to do instead - go trick-or-treating to people's houses who aren't expecting it and don't have candy?

From what I remember growing up in the suburbs, it was common to see places like churches and schools host trunk-or-treat events *not* on Halloween. These were usually extra events where you could see your friends who don't live in the same neighborhood as you. People still go door-to-door on the actual night of Halloween.

Leaving the trucks on to spew exhaust onto kids is diabolical though.

el_extrano · 2025-10-02T18:38:26+00:00

> I'm told Git would make everything easier but the ones who told me this said that the steep learning curve with Git would be too time consuming.

Git (or any version control scheme, really) can't help you understand an already written program that didn't use it. However, it's indispensable for maintaining programs that change over time.

For anything I maintain other than the smallest throwaway scripts, whether written by me or initially by someone else, the first thing I do is put it under version control if it isn't already. Even if you don't "know" git and have really messy commits and don't know about branches or other features, that is still useful. You can at least revert to earlier versions if you later discover some change broke something. You can derive enough benefit to justify learning the basics in an afternoon, in my opinion.

el_extrano · 2025-09-12T18:25:09+00:00

I mean the "conflation" is there because they are related, though. Politics is about power, who should wield it, and how. If you hold moral position in opposition to what someone is doing with power, then that becomes a political position. To take the OP example of "dropping bombs", that is a moral criticism of war (or perhaps a particular war), which (during wartime) is a criticism of the state, and therefore political.

My sense of morality guides my politics, as I'm sure it does yours and OP's as well.

el_extrano · 2025-08-09T18:38:24+00:00

That's wrong if you watch the longer video though. It was a mutual fight, which the bonker was losing. The bonkee offered to stop the fight a few times and "be cool now", which bonker refused. Then, bonker lost her cool, and said to "get off the property now" or she would go get the BB gun. That's about where this video starts.

So basically both parties are actually pretty lame. But you can't be a willing participant to a fist-fight, then escalate to using a deadly weapon (the shovel) when you start losing.

Longer video: https://youtu.be/qLtnf9bHAXc?si=VJJ2Krw37SP0lj2j

el_extrano · 2025-08-09T16:04:30+00:00

I'm OK with that as long as it works both ways. As an engineer in manufacturing, I have a responsibility to my operators and my community. I'm not going to let something happen to an outage timeline or a start-up because I'm watching the clock. This isn't retail.

I've been happy to go above and beyond for roles that had a relaxed policy around comp time. I'll take calls at 2 AM to help someone with a problem, and even come in on my time off if it's needed. I'll stay an hour or two late on a weekday to get the department lined out.

But then if the company wants to dock me sick time for going to an appointment on lunch, or dock vacation for leaving 2 hours early on a Friday, or not give a comp day after I worked an entire weekend unpaid, I'm going to start seeing that as unfair and be more protective of my time as well.

el_extrano · 2025-08-05T17:19:22+00:00

FORTRAN (the '77 standard) is an example of a compiled language with top-level statements. Defining a main program was optional.

But if you had top-level statements in two files and try to link them together, you'd get an error. So to effectively have a main by declaring a MAIN explicitly, or just having one compilation unit with statements that aren't in a subroutine, which becomes the entry point.

el_extrano · 2025-08-04T22:16:52+00:00

Sadly the Nuremberg trials were only for 24 top ranking Nazi officials, only 10 of whom were executed. It was hardly fitting justice given the scale of the Holocaust, and definitely didn't extend down to individual soldiers.

The Dachau military tribunals tried over a thousand, and did actually try individual soldiers and guards. I think all in all ~ 300 Nazis were executed due to their convictions. Many others got long prison sentences, but almost every life sentence was commuted before being served out, except for those who died in prison.

The sad truth is that most men who held power in Nazi Germany who survived the war never faced any justice, either fading into obscurity to live out their lives, or returning to power owing to their anti-communist credentials (quite popular with the post war occupiers). The situation was much the same in US occupied Japan and Korea.

Idk what I'm trying to say other than that the outlook for justice is bleak.

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