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Comment Still using Perl... (Score 1) 82

... though not exclusively. There are cases where making the choice between Perl and Python still has me leaning toward Perl. Perl was my first (non shell) interpreted language and it still feels like a comfortable pair of slippers.

I had to modify a Perl script written back in 2010 when the Govt recently decided to change the format of data I was reading via Perl. It took longer to figure out the change in the data than it did to modify the 15 year old Perl script.

Python is fine -- I really like the ArgumentParser module and a few others -- but going back to make changes to an old Python script is more painful than it is for a similarly aged Perl script. What helps when I have to deal with Python is using Code with some plugins that make the indentation more obvious (esp. Blockman).

Comment Re: 5 years? That's the plan (Score 1) 44

Destroying your competition is a time honour tradition with companies.

Occasionally someone will restart a similar company, but usually the non-competes the original founders have when bought out are sufficient to prevent that. (Money and time change people's priorities, so having a 2 year industry reaction ends up being a lifetime of change).

Of course companies gut the assets then can use elsewhere, retailing the value they can; but destroying companies the feel compete within their markets is usually the primary goal.

Comment 5 years? That's the plan (Score 1) 44

When a company disposes of another company at the 5yr mark it usually means that was the plan from day 1. Buying up companies and dismantling them right away can get your company scrutinized, but after 5 years "it just didn't work out" is an accepted answer to destroying valuable assets. (Especially when they can spend the time devaluing them too)

So you think the audio book industry loves these types of podcasts? Not at all.

Comment Re: Cultural variations (Score 4, Insightful) 43

Keep digging on the blue / green and you'll find the same general issues apply across cultures based on historical events.

Japan didn't have a reason to prioritize differentiation, they perceive the color the same as you. It's the translation from stimulus to specific categorization that is different.

Xkcd color chart comparison between male / female color names highlights something similar. It's not perception though, it's "importance". I don't care if there's 4 shades of green by name, or 72. Someone else with a keen interest could choose to differentiate in 256 unique names. It doesn't however mean we perceive the color differently.

Comment Unsurprising (Score 2) 43

Unsurprised. I've had this conversation multiple times with different people, not surprising since my day job is web development and my hobbies include photography.

With color blindness excepted and probably slightly interesting to compare between, perceptual evidence provides us with color relationships that are obviously very similar in most instances.

There's arguments over color names, but if you look deeper you'll find a long list of consistencies (check out the color blue across diverse cultures; the similarities are fascinating).

(Color nameing groups seem to be structured importance of differentiation; those priorities are different between genders, but provide a perceptual color chart and ask people to sort them and they'll generally come up the same.

Comment Re: Destroying Websites? (Score 1) 85

I have a site with thousands of products and massive search space due to the number of attributes customers can search on.

The bots are completely stupid trying to product search and iterate over criteria combinations which aren't overall very useful.

You can efficiently grab all our products if a small amount of intelligence is applied and you'd have negligible impact on the server. Instead the bots try to search using each and every possible attribute and therefor blow the cache. I could write a bot to fetch the entire contents of the site in less than an hour and the server wouldn't take a hit; the regular search bots aren't usually pathological about the search criteria.

If the AI ones paid attention to the robots file, and site map, they'd barely be noticed either.

Sure, I can restrict the methods used to search the site, limit it to a cachable subset of search terms, but that would negatively impact users that have unusual requirements.

Comment Re: Destroying Websites? (Score 4, Informative) 85

They are more aggressive than standard bots, and often follow links in a pathological way.

We've had to cut multiple bots off that weren't following robots.txt recommendations.

Balancing performance for real users is a challenge when the bots go overly aggressive and the tools for managing them aren't quite there yet.

Comment Re: Only speaking for myself (Score 4, Informative) 209

"Only speaking for myself but I find being isolated all day at home, not going out but ordering door dash, ordering on Amazon, etc doesnâ(TM)t seem healthy"

You're right, that isn't healthy. Don't do that.

If you work from home you need a plan for how to end your workday. Get up, get out, remove yourself from your "workspace".

The transition from work to home is mostly eliminated when working from home, so you have to wilfully manage it. If you do though, you'd be fine. You can't let that push you to be the worst version of yourself.

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