David Zaslavsky

Software engineer, former particle physicist, occasional blogger. I support the principle of cake.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2022

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  • @Fleppensteijn @Max_P The change in the first component of the version number from 5 to 6 is what could have tipped you off. I mean, admittedly there’s no universal standard for software versioning that everyone follows, but the closest thing there is to a commonly adopted standard (https://semver.org/) says that when the first component of the version number changes, it’s a big deal and things might break. (Or, a relatively big deal, but just how big that is in practice depends on the package.) If you didn’t know to look out for that, now you do. 😀

    Unless by “average user” you mean someone who relies on automatic updates and doesn’t look at what’s getting installed. Which is fine, but if you’re allowing automatic updates, you have to understand you’re giving up the ability to catch stuff like this before it happens. (This situation could certainly be improved, but generally that’s the state of things right now.)



  • @Moshpirit 👍

    If you have any experience with computer programming, I would definitely recommend looking up a tutorial on threads for your favorite programming language and writing a little program that uses them. The best way to understand what threads are is through practical experience.

    If not, hopefully you can find some good resources anyway! The gist is that threads are kind of like little mini-programs that run within a main program and can be used to do specific tasks that would otherwise “distract” the main program from its work. (That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s the best way I can think of to explain the basic idea in one sentence.)