You may be joking, in which case: Fair game.

If not… come on. In what world do you write “(…) I’ll find you. Mark my words.” In that kind of context without being (at least humorously) threatening?

-Wfatal-errors is my friend

I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I’ve written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I’ve never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.

You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I’ve seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?

Software is a tool. I develop stuff that i know is of interest to companies working with everything from nuclear energy to hydrogen electrolysis and CO2 storage. I honestly believe I can make a positive contribution to the world by releasing that software under a permissive licence such that companies can freely integrate it into their proprietary production code.

I’m also very aware that the exact same software is of interest to the petroleum industry and weapons manufacturers, and that I enable them by releasing it under a permissive licence.

The way I see it, withholding a tool that can help do a lot of good because it can also be used for bad things just doesn’t make much sense. If everybody thinks that way, how can we have positive progress? I don’t think I can think of any more or less fundamental technology that can’t be used for both. The same chemical process that has saved millions from starvation by introducing synthetic fertiliser has taken millions of lives by creating more and better explosives. If you ask those that were bombed, they would probably say they wish it was never invented, while if you ask those that were saved from the brink of starvation they likely praise the heavens for the technology. Today, that same chemical process is a promising candidate for developing zero-emission shipping.

I guess my point is this: For any sufficiently fundamental technology, it is impossible to foresee the uses it may have in the future. Withholding it because it may cause bad stuff is just holding technological development back, lively preventing just as much good as bad. I choose to focus on the positive impact my work can have.

You are almost on point here, but seem to be missing the primary point of my work. I work as a researcher at a university, doing more-or-less fundamental research on topics that are relevant to industry.

As I wrote: We develop our libraries for in-house use, and release the to the public because we know that they are valuable to the industry. If what I do is to be considered “industry subsidies”, then all of higher education is industry subsidies. (You could make the argument that spending taxpayer money to educate skilled workers is effectively subsidising industry).

We respond to issues that are related either to bugs that we need to fix for our own use, or features that we ourselves want. We don’t spend time implementing features others want unless they give us funding for some project that we need to implement it for.

In short: I don’t work for industry, I work in research and education, and the libraries my group develops happen to be of interest to the industry. Most of my co-workers do not publish their code anywhere, because they aren’t interested in spending the time required to turn hacky academic code into a usable library. I do, because I’ve noticed how much time it saves me and my team in the long run to have production-quality libraries that we can build on.

You’re not seeing the whole picture: I’m paid by the government to do research, and in doing that research my group develops several libraries that can benefit not only other research groups, but also industry. We license these libraries under MIT, because otherwise industry would be far more hesitant to integrate our libraries with their proprietary production code.

I’m also an idealist of sorts. The way I see it, I’m developing publicly funded code that can be used by anyone, no strings attached, to boost productivity and make the world a better place. The fact that this gives us publicity and incentivises the industry to collaborate with us is just a plus. Calling it a self-imposed unpaid internship, when I’m literally hired full time to develop this and just happen to have the freedom to be able to give it out for free, is missing the mark.

Also, we develop these libraries primarily for our own in-house use, and see the adoption of the libraries by others as a great way to uncover flaws and improve robustness. Others creating closed-source derivatives does not harm us or anyone else in any way as far as I can see.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

This is starting to be some years back, but I was exclusively using apt when I was using Ubuntu, have they gone away from that?

I’ve only ever tried one distro. Please enlighten me on what’s wrong with Ubuntu.

I’ve never thought of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but if jar-jar being planned to be the actual phantom menace, but later being taken out of the role because fans hated him counts as a conspiracy theory: Count me in! I think the arguments are compelling to say the least.

I definitely roll with “badass tiny mf”, “chill little dude”, “tiny gangsta bro” or any other title making fun of my stature. Call me anything involving “king” and I’ll be inclined to convince you that, even though I’m short, you’ll be shorter once you’re confined to a wheelchair

But it might be beer!

Where I live they were systematically nice people that helped keep everybody safe. If they found some drunk/high person that needed help, they would drive them home. When we were teens and had beach parties, a couple of them would typically hang around somewhere out of the way, and only intervene if someone was being an asshole trying to start a fight (and they would tell people to pick up their glass bottles so kids wouldn’t get hurt the next day). If we were otherwise hanging around they might chat to us and ask what was going on around the neighbourhood, and nobody had an issue telling them anything, because we knew they were just there to look after and help people.

Obviously, I can tell that my experience with police growing up is far from what can be expected a lot of other places. I really do wish more places had police like we did.

Honestly: Yes. It’s an example that perfectly encapsulates how windows “as a concept” actively babies and dumbs down its users. I the 00’s, nobody had a problem with file extensions, but now that we’re working with users that have grown up with computers we suddenly need to remove them because they’re “too confusing”?

The amount of times someone has asked me why something doesn’t work, and I’ve silently pointed to the sentence or paragraph next to the code snippet they’ve copied…

Well yes, I get the differerence between an interface and a class, and what I write is typically a class, which contains properties and functionality that may or may not be overridden in derived classes.

For example, calling a parent class implementation can be useful when I have a derived model that needs to validate its input in some specific way, but otherwise does the same as the base class.

What I don’t understand is why this makes OOP bad?

I’ve seen this thing where people dislike inheritance a lot, and I have to admit that I kind of struggle with seeing the issue when it’s used appropriately. I write a bunch of models that all share a large amount of core functionality, so of course I write an abstract base class in which a couple methods are overridden by derived models. I think it’s beautiful in the way that I can say “This model will do X, Y, Z, as long as there exists an implementation of methods A, B, C, which have these signatures”, then I can inherit that base class and implement A, B, and C for a bunch of different cases. In short, I think it’s a very useful way to express the purpose of the code, without focusing on the implementation of specific details, and a very natural way of expressing that two classes are closely related models, with the same functionality, as expressed by the base class.

I honestly have a hard time seeing how not using inheritance would make such a code base cleaner, but please tell me, I would love to learn.

Hehe, exactly :) the thing with gases is that the line between completely fine (campfire outside) to potentially lethal (liquid nitrogen evaporating in a small, poorly ventilated garage) can be harder to see and judge for an amateur than a lot of other things. Anyone would understand that they should avoid getting acids or toxic chemicals on their skin, and the protective measures are quite simple to carry out. The same is true for most flammable or explosive liquids or solids. So the idea behind my advice was really “If there’s something that’s likely to hurt you because you aren’t properly aware of the danger involved and how to mitigate it, it’s likely to be a gas, so be extra, extra careful around gases, gas producing reactions, and volatile compounds.”

If you have a fume hood that’s good of course, but since the question was about advising amateurs on safety, my advice is restrictive, because gases can be very dangerous in subtle ways.

As an amateur: Do you know how to properly work in a fume hood so that it protects you? Do you know its capacity, and what to do if something unexpected leads to gas development over that capacity? Have you had training in using this stuff, so that you can react properly and quickly if something goes wrong, rather than freezing up?

In short: Because the potential dangers when working with a lot of gases are harder to detect, and harder to mitigate, than when working with other stuff, I’m taking a restrictive approach in my advice.

For you question on pyrophoric gases: They can remain in contact with air for a while (several minutes, depending on concentration) before igniting. Worst case, the room around you can fill with gas from a leak before causing a gas explosion. In principle you can also inhale gas from this leak, such the the explosion also takes place inside you :)

Anther chemist stepping in here: Anything that produces an off-gas of any kind that does anything other than smell bad should be considered potentially lethal. People have died from working with liquid nitrogen or dry ice without proper ventilation. In addition, a gas explosion can be far worse than any other explosion you are likely to pull off by accident, and if you have a leak somewhere you may have no clue how much explosive gas is in the room with you. Some gases will react and form acid when it gets into your airways, essentially acting as an invisible acid that can jump from the table into your face.

In short: Stay away from dangerous gases and stuff that makes them, and consider pretty much all gases as dangerous unless you know for a fact that they aren’t. Other than that, the potential dangers of backyard chemistry can largely be mitigated by using common sense and working with small amounts of chemicals, good luck :)