Because you don’t know what you’ll need that wrapper beforehand, that’s my entire point.

Unless you’re only doing trivial changes, the chances are very high that you won’t be able to design the class structure. Or, you end up essentially writing the code to be able to write the tests, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If you have to ask “can’t you just” the answer is almost always no.

And who actually writes tests like that?

I mean, do you think tests do the calculations again? You simply have well defined input and known, static output. That’s it.

Tests first is only good in theory.

Unit tests typically test rather fine grained, but coming up with the structure of the grain is 80% of the work. Often enough you end up with code that’s structured differently than initially thought, because it turns out that this one class needs to be wrapped, and this annotation doesn’t play nice with the other one when used on the same class, etc etc.

Especially then I’d test the shit out of everything? I’m getting paid for writing correct software.

For local development, it should be super quick. However, I’m currently building a small project where a device (or rather the library using it) can’t really be used with a debugger. So 500 print()s it is.

Learning from a history and putting on a pseudopatriotic show to paint over any responsibility is not quite the same.

The US killed literally one or two orders of magnitude more civilians in retaliation for 9/11 and still acts like it was the second largest tragedy in the history of mankind, only slightly below the Holocaust.

Yes, 3000 victims is really bad, but what the US is doing about it is pathetic. It’s a simulacrum.

There’s more airport security, alright. But is that really that much of a change?

Especially if you consider how much of the security theater was added well after 9/11, because of other incidents.

Especially if you’d add up all the inefficiencies already introduced in the name of efficiency. All those grant proposals, superfluous fluff articles to bump impact factors, etc. are all required overhead to game a system designed to seem efficient.

I heard the explanation “conservatives stop thinking if they like the current result”.

If immigrants committed any crime, the obvious solution is to deport all of them. Less immigrants, less crime, sounds great, no further research needed.

But if it’s about something like social security, they go to the ninth layer of indirection to “prove” that it’s bad, because now they found a study that slightly agrees with one of their talking points (p ≈ room temperature).

Problem is, you almost never know if that’s actually true or complete bullshit.

It seems plausible, but killing virgins for rain also seemed plausible back then in the 70s.

Like, not being able to run it on a perfectly capable machine, just because someone at MS decided it’s not new enough? Yeah, minor annoyance.

Yes, but it’s not Unix. That’s literally part of GNU/Linux’ name.

Mac OS is more Unix than Linux.

And a lot of people would call that incapable.

This is a form of learned, or rather forced to internalize, helplessness. People don’t even want to understand things, even though they absolutely could and ought.

Why, though?

A french press is literally the easiest way to make coffee. There’s hardly anything to fuck up and it’s dirt cheap - like 10€ at Ikea.

No, but it causes alpha particles to be emitted.

I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.

The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.

Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.

Germany is currently considering a third way: they ask you.

Everyone in Germany has health insurance, so the idea is that the health insurance simply asks you directly to decide. Most people are in favor of organ donation, but never actually get an organ donor card or talk to their relatives. Asking them to decide won’t get anywhere near the donor rates of an opt-out scheme, but it could drastically increase them.