pixelscript

It's not usually where the big bucks are, but there is a nonzero amount of money in bad code.

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.

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.

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.