what caused you to get into Linux?
In Scouts, when we got issued our first pocket knife, they had a whole thing to go with it about care and responsibilities. One part that still sticks to me this day is, "never ever loan your knife to someone. There's a reason they don't have one, and it might be a good reason. Either they aren't allowed to have one, or not responsible with their last knife and lost it, or broke it, or had it taken away. The same will happen to your knife if you give it to him."
I grew up with pretentiousness like this. Lot of upper middle class twits who wanted to be upper class. I used to get their goat with a kind of backhand kindness.
"You know about ABC?" Where ABC is a question about a topic he claims to be an expert in.
"If you don't know how to ABC, you aren't very educated."
"Ah, I see you don't know either."
"I never SAID that! But I have neither the time nor patience to explain it to you."
"Let me ask around, and we can find the answer together."
"I KNOW the answer!!!"
"Not well enough to explain it, though. But that's okay, we can learn that, too. Let's ask this guy. Hey, my colleague and I were wondering if you could explain ABC..."
Oh my god, this makes their pompousness positively FUME with rage.
Was part of an oceanography class who had just arrived at a local mall. We were returning from a field trip where we were studying river currents. This is done, in part, by a super concentrated dye that starts out black but eventually thins out to either hot pink or a weird high visibility yellowish green. Some of the students might have kept some of those packs. Some might have even emptied them into the mall fountain. Funny thing, large amounts of hot pink dye, in a closed loop recirculating fountain, never really gets pink, but more of a... blood red.
In our defense, we didn't know the fountain was a closed loop. Thankfully nobody saw us, and it was written up as a "Halloween prank," in the local paper despite it being early December.
My primary address is 192.168.0.1
There might be some kind of critical ratio formula of party size, alcohol distribution, and damage by one single idiot. I have seen so many stories like these. Usually "a friend" of another guest.
Scissors and knives.
I used to sell high end stuff like that, and let me tell you, there's a trope about crafters considering murder when someone uses their, say, fabric scissors or sewing scissors to cut paper or something that ruins them. For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears used by professional hair stylists. Fuck, some go into the HUNDREDS of dollars or more. And then some clown wants to cut some box open with them.
Knives, though. Good set of chefs knives goes into the thousands. Like the kind used by professional chefs. I had some chef clients who tell me horror stories about some kitchen yokel using a $350 hand forged Santoku to stab open a can of tomato paste or toss into a cutting board like a throwing knife.
But even basic knives. People using them as prybars, hammers, screwdrivers, and tossing them in a drawer with other metal rattling around.
I was part of a Reddit gift exchange ages ago, before they separated domestic from international. I had to ship a $30 coffee mug to Brazil and it cost $220. Oof.
Depends on "how dumb?" I had a Motorola RZR before my first iPhone(2), then before that, some camera flip phone (Motorola E815), and before that, an SCH-3500 flip phone. Before that, land lines only.
Well, they may like the attention and validation it brings. I knew someone who was asexual that had a lot of dotcom money. He loved to go to Vegas and gamble. He knew the house was stacked against him. He knew that the girls who sat on his lap only liked him for his money. He still loved the attention he got when he tipped big. I saw him tip a waiter $200 on a $150 meal. He LOVED it. And why?
"I used to be poor. I was a nobody. Now I make people happy with my money, and I feel good about myself."
Can't beat that.
This is so true. That's why there's no shame in using Google or Duckduckgo or even Chatgpt. You have to know enough to phrase the right question, know how to filter the right answer, and then use it.
I can Google a Chinese dictionary, but that won't make me fluent in Chinese.
I was told this, too, but when I got to Functions and Analytical Geometry, they started suggesting calculators. Now kids have laptops, gees.
While I never had it happen, it could give you wrong command line switches that do damage. For example, when I asked how I could list volumes attached to an AWS instance, it gave me a "modify-volume" command instead of "describe-volume" command. Thankfully, I caught that before I cut and paste it.
I would rather deal with the (often exaggerated) care of a cast iron pan than deal with non-stick Teflon or similar. And have. But stainless steel is a comfortable favorite for common jobs like cooking soup or quickly frying an egg or two. Light, easy to clean, and practice usually means it won't stick if you know how to grease a pan and keep the temperature right.
I worked in a job with build scripts. Developers would list what they wanted in a drop-down menu on a website, with very few "fill in the blanks." This would create a template, which was sanity-checked.
One of the "fill in the blanks" was "home directory of user, if not default /home/username." Some people filled it in, some didn't. A lot of "users" might be apps with /home being "/opt/appname" "/var/www/html" or something. We checked to make sure that directory existed, if not, create, and set permissions. Easy peasy, all automated. Ran this lots of times.
Then one day, the script failed. Borked the whole box. Sometimes the VM was corrupt, so delete VM and try again. Usually worked. But this time, the build kept failing. The box went down. Wasn't even bootable. This happened several times with this one build. So we mounted the borked drive under a new VM and checked out the logs. Just like the dessert stage of Willy Wonka chewing gum, it always failed at the last stage: making /home directories.
It would create them, then halt that it could not find bash. We looked for bash on the bad drive, and it was the usual /bin/bash shortcut to /usr/bin/bash and we were truly puzzled. I did a chroot to the drive and NOTHING worked. It just hung. That was the first clue.
The second was looking through the build script (in bash, which we didn't write) and checking the steps. Looked it the logs. Always died at creating some user named sapadm, the user for the HANA database. Eventually, I checked the configure file, and noticed it was the only user with the odd home directory "/usr/sap." Then it hit me: the permissions.
The script, thinking it was a home directory, did a chmod - R 755 for all directories and chmod - R 644 for all files! That meant, while creating home, it made everything under /usr not executable anymore! Holy shit, no wonder nothing worked! So we commented out that user in the config, ran the build again, and we were good! We created the sapadm by hand, and then later fixed the bug in the script.
SANITIZE YOUR DATA. Or you might turn Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry.
I have found that it's like having a junior programmer assistant. It's great for "write me python code for opening an in file from a command line argument, reading the contents into a key/value dict array, then closing the file." It's terrible for "write me a python code for pulling data into a redis database."
I find it's wrong 50% of the time for certain command line switches, Linux file structure, and aws cli.
I find it's terrible for advanced stuff like, "using aws cli and jq, take all volumes in a vpc, and display the volume id, volume size in gb, instance id it's attached to, private IP address of the instance, whether is a gp3 or gp2, and the vpc id in a comma separated format, sorted by volume size."
Even worse at, "take all my gp2 volumes and make them gp3."
I did too... In Chrome on Linux. I'll check my use agent, it might be set to something else because I use it to check some stuff with developers.
Alligator - oddly enough as fritters at a Margaritaville in New Orleans. Like most say, flaky like fish, tastes like chicken.
Horseneat served and packaged like baloney in Sweden, eating with crisp bead and breakfast cheese. Was not a fan.
Moose in Sweden. Like beef, only the "grains" of the meat were really large.
Reindeer in Sweden. Like venison, but I am told "less gamey." I say I am told, because apparently I cannot taste the "gamey" in meat. That is, I have had gamey venison and non-gamey venison and can't taste whatever gameyness is.
Cicada - tastes like weak shrimp.
Why people get these treatments is complicated. Some might to attract men, but others might to "look like their competition," or "at least I don't have saggy, wrinkled lips." It might not have anything to do with men at all, but a general body dysmorphic disorder for deeper mental issues. Or really bad advice from a plastic surgeon. Could be lots of things.
I bought a $3 mini hook knife for my keychain off Aliexpress. I was tired of getting my pocket knife or Leatherman confiscated or stolen "for security reasons" at ever increasing (and surprising, like libraries, bars) venues. The majority of my needs was to cut open boxes and plastic packaging anyway. It's the size of half a stick of gum, pops open with a button, and only the inside of the hook is sharp, making it pretty safe for wet hands. The handle is part carabiner clip. Not sure how long they last, since they get confiscated, but at $3 each, I don't care. Keep it on my keys. The clip makes it easy to take off my keys if I need to leave it behind, but if I end up getting it stolen, meh.
It cuts through cardboard really well, and also opens that hard plastic packaging, burlap sacks, plastic strapping, and that weird material large dry dog food comes in.
I am sure the mystery of disappearing limbs will FAR overtake the one person who wasn't affected. Worldwide panic and who knows what else. You could also wish 99% of people lose a random limb, and that would mean 70 million people would still have all their limbs.
Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn't afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.
Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn't know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my "franken-puters" cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.
Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that "right tool for right job" is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.
Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.