pixelscript @ pixelscript @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

To me it was quite clear that they were asking, "Why Arch over Mint for OP?" They weren't asking why you like it, they were asking why you think OP would like it.

In that context I think experience is extremely relevant.

It's a simple function definition that's equivalent to:

    
function confirm(value)
{
    if (value == true)
    {
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}

  

Not the most original punchline; I'm sure you've seen it before. We were just baffled to actually see it in the wild.

Judging from the way this function was used, there no evidence to suggest it ever contained extra logic that was refactored out over time. I'm wholly convinced someone wrote this as-is and thought it was okay. I also knew that there's no way this was extracted for DRY purposes, as it was only called in one place, and the rest of the codebase was extremely allergic to DRY.

It was also formatted like complete garbage. Indentation level was not consistent line by line. And, presumably due to some carelessness handling line endings, the entire code file developed double-spacing. Somehow it was checked into version control in that state.

All these little nits, from the code's utter uselessness to its appalling formatting, compelled us to preserve it. It was like the entire rest of the shitty codebase in microcosm.

I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that's actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I'm sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.

Provided that your key store password can be made very strong, all the risk posed by having all your eggs in that one basket are, speaking from the perspective of an average computer illiterate user like my mom, far outweighed by avoiding the inevitable alternative of one password (or a family of derivative passwords) used across all services.

One extremely good lock is a step up from two dozen shitty ones if it's a cascade failure either way.

As a child I was raised in a household of chewable Tylenol tablets. Those were the only pills I really knew, particularly for mild pain relief.

In gradeschool, I had a day where I developed a splitting headache. I was sent to the ""nurse"", who, by nature of this being a small town American public school, was just the school office secretary armed with a bottle of child dose Advil tablets. I was promptly given a couple tablets to take, and was shooed off to the drinking fountain. Instinctively, I chewed the tablets. Within minutes, they came back to see me, along with my breakfast, and I was quickly sent home. The valuable lesson I took away from that day was, "chewables are for babies, grown-up pills are swallowed whole".

Growing older, I became accustomed to increasingly annoying pills, which only further cemented that lesson. The culmination was probably being forced to swallow huge capsule pills while having a throat swollen and raw with strep. I just accepted that "real" pills are swallowed whole, and they suck, and that's just how it is.

Much later in life, I was visiting my parents while recovering from a pub crawl. My mom offered me some Tums to combat some heartburn I was having. Somehow I made it far enough into life to drink alcohol but not know what antacids were. I was handed two US silver dollar sized tablets. Flashing back to my previous mistake when taking unknown pills, I swallowed them whole. I was embarassed to learn after the fact that they are, in fact, meant to be chewed.

The morals of this story:

1. I apparently have no problem swallowing any pill or tablet.
2. I am a fucking idiot and always have been.

I buy Royal Crown and mix it with Crown Royal.

The perfect marraige of the king of middle shelf soda and the queen of middle shelf whisky.

I was given a pair of HP ProLiant G6 rack servers for free from an IT director I had connections with when he was doing a routine hardware upgrade. Probably saved him some bucks on e-waste disposal costs. I kept one for myself and I gave the other to a like-minded friend.

I had no experience with homelabbing at the time. Was hoping this would be my foot in the door. Unfortunately that was the day I learned that enterprise rack servers from the pre-2010s sound like vacuum cleaners when they run. (They probably still do, I imagine, just maybe to a slightly lesser extent. I'm told enterprise hardware these days isn't so much pursuing incremental leaps in speed and power as much as it is pursuing energy efficiency and noise.) Because of all that noise, I ended up not using it, as I have nowhere I can stick it so it can scream and not bother anyone. Ah well. It was a fun experiment nonetheless and cost me nothing.

I set it up in a LACK rack, which I still have. These days it's just a slightly ugly, deceptively heavy coffee table in my living room. Might as well just toss it out at this point.

My office at work has a number of mildly curious things decorating it. Nothing alarmingly strange, but silly all the same.

Our office is one of the few separated rooms in our building (most of it is a large open room), and it has a typical false ceiling covered in square foam tiles. Evidently, the previous tenant cut holes into several of these tiles to serve as drop points for cables that they had run through the ceiling. Prior to us moving in, they must've taken out all such equipment and, to restore the look of the main space, swapped out all damaged tiles with pristine ones from the ceiling in what would become our office. That means we have all of the ones full of holes. We also happen to be immediately below where the aircon is blown into the building (in short, the duct abruptly ends and vents directly into the cavity above the false ceiling, and no, I do not know why they did this), making our room exceptionally cold, to the point where we sometimes run space heaters in the summer. At one point, we jokingly hypothesized that the cold air was leaking through those holes in the ceiling tiles and making our room too cold, so as a joke solution, we crudely plugged the holes by stuffing them with random trash we happened to have lying around. That being, loose plastic bags from the gas station and grocery store, and some bulk toilet paper packaging wrap. Due to some of the bags being a burnt orange color, we came to refer to these eyesores as our "Halloween decorations". For over a year, we had several people enter the office, ask about the bags in the ceiling, and become bewildered at our assertion that they were Halloween decorations, particularly because it was June.

Our office has a tall, narrow window looking out into the main room next to the doorway. We usually have this decorated with those cheap gel letters designed to stick to windows and spell out generic phrases that you can pick up at dollar stores. We amuse ourselves trying to come up with clever anagrams with the available letters. Currently, we have a set that is intended to spell out, "hello spring", but is arranged to read, "no girls -- help".

On the wall in a cheap picture frame from Walmart is a printout of some of the dumbest code we've found in our repository (we're software developers), to forever enshrine it in infamy. Sometimes when deep in thought about a complex problem, we ritualistically gaze upon it in hopes of receiving a blessing of inspiration.

My coworker, with whom I share my office, has a very small mirror frame photograph standing on his desk, perhaps about 8cm tall by 5 cm wide. It portrays an image of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung (this one, specifically). He refuses to elaborate why. Hiding behind the tiny print is another nearly identical tiny print of the same image, except he has photoshopped it to give both of them fatter bellies and put a large, cartoonish dent in each of their heads. At random intervals, he swaps the two prints when no one is watching to gaslight people who visit his desk.

Honestly? Still haven't found one.

The communities I've found are all fine, but I haven't found any that are a tailor match for me. Every one so far has either been not quite my cup or a ghost town.

I'm mostly sticking to All and interacting with posts I like as I see them, with no real care given to what community they are from. Individual communities don't have much for me, but all of Lemmy combined holds my interest decently well.

I don't get boxers either. It's just going commando with an extra step. The sole thing you stand to gain (support) is nonexistent with boxers. I don't know why people bother.

I feel like I've invited everyone in my family to go on a great, grand vacation away and I'm the only one who's packed.

From their perspective, you're the fringe idealist who wants to move to a strange, remote place because of nebulous political ideology they neither understand nor wish to understand. And you are proposing that they uproot all of their preexisting social connections, support infrastructure, comfort, and familiarity to come live with you out in the middle of your scary, unfamiliar dystopia. Or, at least, force them to book a redeye flight and stay at a suspect hotel every time they want to visit you.

And honestly, you really are the fringe idealist here. Look at where you are posting this. Look at how few of us there are. Look at how many hoops you needed to jump through to set up what you have now. I certainly don't think you're wrong to champion privacy-focused ideals, but it absolutely is, strictly speaking in a populist context, extremely weird. It is weird to want to understand computerized tech, to know what it actually does, and to make bold, against-the-grain choices based on that knowledge. This is the unfortunate reality, and you have to make your peace with it.

I really do think your option is binary here. Join 'em, or cut 'em. Once you've shot your shot to convince someone to be more consciencious of their privacy and to take action to better secure it, and they frustratingly decline, that's it. They are not coming with you. Further pressing the issue will just drive a wedge between the two of you. At that point, the choice is yours. What's stronger, your willingness to stay conected, or your principles? Are you so rigidly disciplined that you're willling to cut ties (at least, through these channels) just to keep it? If so, I guess that's just a reflection of how much your principles really mean to you. If not, well, it's SMS/RCS and Google Docs for you.

Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it's a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that's clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don't even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.

Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It's designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.

I always start off by telling them "I know what I'm talking about, I work in IT, let's skip the basics, I've tried it all already." but they sometimes still don't listen.

They don't listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there's probably at least three people who don't have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they're an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.

If only shibboleet actually worked...

Humans have best retina stimulation in blue light, not green light.

The real reason I suspect the light happens to be green is that green phosphor is relatively inexpensive.

Blue light could be disruptive to circadian rhythm while green light is somewhat less so, but I guarantee this was not part of the calculus here. It is just being thrifty. Circadian rhythm benefits are just a happy accident.

The replacement for the JavaScript Date API is on the cusp of finalization.

They just got an RFC proposal approved by the IETF for an extension to the way datetime strings should be serialized that adds support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. That seems to have been the last round of red tape holding them back. Now it's just a handful of bugfix PRs to merge and browsers can begin shipping implementations unflagged.

You can watch the progress here if you find it interesting. In the meantime, there is a polyfill out now if you want to get started with it.

I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.

I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.

I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I've never had read or write issues. Though I'd probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There's also a USB-C mod available that I'd like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I'm eager to never need to do again.

I'm also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that's mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that's no longer a huge concern...

Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don't even need iTunes to use it.

When it comes to closed-source software developed opaquely by for-profit corporations, particularly the huge, monolithic ones like Microsoft, I generally have the attitude that, if I do discover a problem:

1. They won't take my detailed report
2. If they do take my report, it goes straight into a shredder bin (or a massive queue where low priority problems go to die, which may as well be the same thing)
3. If they do read my report, then it's likely something they already are aware of
4. If they don't know about it somehow, the issue is probably so low-priority and niche that it wouldn't escape the backlog anyway

Probably not nearly as bleak as I make it out. But when you can't see the process, how can you tell?

With open source projects, these things can all still happen, but at least the process is more transparent. You can see exactly where your issue is, and what's been done to it so far, if anything. Other users can discover and vouch for your problem. And if the dev team takes pull requests, and you are willing, able, and permitted to contribute, you can make the fix yourself.

It's not quite what you're asking, but I have had my perspective on a lot of songs changed once I actually looked up their lyrics.

My listening comprehension for music lyrics is piss poor. For any given pop or rock song I'd hear on the radio, maybe 70% of the time I find lyrics unintelligible. Clearly it's skill issue on my part, as the body of music listeners at large seem to have no problems understanding what they're hearing. I don't know how people do it.

Sometimes I'll catch enough words to throw into a search engine and get the song's title and lyrics, and maybe even a short blurb of context. That knowledge alone can make a song go from irritating noise to something I find rather pleasant.

I believe the most recent song I looked up and learned something about was Even Flow by Pearl Jam. It's a song about homelessness. Who knew? Fucking everyone, probably! But not me. For fifteen years all I heard was "FREEEEE-ZIIIIIN'..." and the rest just goes to mush. I also learned Even Flow is a completely different song from Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. The damn radio kept bamboozling me with that similar vocal progression they both have!

Ah well. Better on the bus fifteen years late than never on the bus at all. They say ignorance is bliss, but it's also the source of a lot of undue hatred. I find I hate far fewer songs when I actually understand what they're trying to say (if anything).

Of course, knowing doesn't magically fix all stinkers. I Love It by Icona Pop didn't get any better in my eyes when I found the lyrics for it. I find most pop country songs (which I am unavoidably subject to, living in the American midwest) don't have much novel or interesting to say, either. The closer I look, the more accurate Bo Burnham's Pandering becomes, and I hate it.

I guess the silver lining here is I get to lucky 10,000 my way through many of history's greatest hits. I'm sure many people would give a lot to experience something they like again for the first time. By virtue of my being absurdly late to the party, I get to do it every day.

Finishing up harvest!