Punkie

When eventually washed off, the aerogel is handily broken down by soil microbes.

I am not going to claim to be an expert on any of this BUT that wording sounds suspiciously like bullshit. Maybe it’s not, but it’s one of those phrases that sounds like when vitamin companies claim that more B12 has shown to fix whatever ails you. Or “our plastic is environmentally friendly: 100% recyclable, and breaks down into teeny micro-particles over time, and gets absorbed by the sea life like ordinary sand…”

That explains why it’s so hot outside.

I have had two tech jobs like that, even before COVID, starting in 2016. The first time, it was a company that outgrew their workspace. They put us in ‘rent-an-office’ spaces for a bit, and then my boss started working from home a few days a week. Then he allowed me to. We moved to a new office, but it was always empty in my section. That was fine, too, but the commute was terrible, so I started doing 2 days a week, then once a week, then a few times a month. I rarely saw my other coworkers in person, and nobody said anything aloud.

The next job started because of COVID, and when they started doing RTO, they also wanted to do “hot desking” (no assigned seating) and open office plans, and I was not having that. I was not going to work in a “cafeteria” like setting. So I got contracted work and have worked from home 100% for several years now. Nobody has office space, and we work all over the world to collaborate. I get paid very well.

I hope i never had to go back to an office. I reach retirement age in about 15 years, and I am hoping to make it.

I had a motherboard like this: the USB ports didn’t work until it booted into an OS. You had to connect a PS2 to make changes in the BIOS, and could only boot from IDE. It was super-annoying.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

That doesn’t even cover the issues of explaining how they figure out what DAY it is every year.

“Okay, so they start by figuring out when the Earth has the most direct sun on the the Tropic of Cancer… no, not the disease, a giant crab… it’s a line of latitude approximately 23°27′ north of Earth’s Equator, right? Yes, there’s math. Anyway, the take the day the sun is strongest and weakest, called the solstices, and … the solstices… It doesn’t matter, It mattered for agriculture back then, especially when spring and fall were, which are the calendar dates in between them, yeah? So the spring equinox ,., that’s what they call the ‘in between solstices,’ equinox… which is March 21st or 22nd or something. What? No no, I am explaining how they figure out when easter is. I haven’t forgotten. So now we know when the spring equinox is, so now we look at a chart of the moon, and figure out when it is full. Full. No, not ‘full of what?’ it’s full meaning that you can see all of in the sky. Well one half of it, actually. The sunlit half, but it’s FACING us, see… The sun lights up and it shows as a circle instead of a crescent or something. Moving on, they look at the FIRST Sunday AFTER the FIRST full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox. Except if the full moon falls on a Sunday, then Easter is the next Sunday. Why? Well, St. Bede the Venerable, the 6th-century author of Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’), maintains that the English word ‘Easter’ comes from Eostre, or Eostrae, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. That’s where the Spring Equinox comes in. NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!”

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”

I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as “…” (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you’d never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of “[program] service is already running” errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little “helper” script for years.

Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.

So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.

Oof.

Ah, yes, I remember being a theater geek. :D

Oh, Nancy knows.

Not just LinkedIn profiles: there was a case out here near DC a while ago where a well known company leased out their function space for training meetings. Using a compromised company account, a set of scammers set up some fake recruitment profiles, leased out the meeting space for “software training,” and did some “mass hiring” where 30 individuals had their credentials scanned and duplicated. The effect was someone from the recruiting company was contacting you, you had a face-to-face where you got offered an in-person, you showed up to their offices, and got a “job offer pending a background check,” with a date of hire in official-looking emails. You sent in your SSN, copies of your passport and driver’s licence, and after a few weeks, they tell you to show up for orientation. Only, the day these people showed up, the company was confused and had never heard of you. The people you supposedly spoke to had never heard of you. And your identity was stolen, and huge loans and charges started showing up in your credit report.

Yikes.

Having moderated forums back in the day, I can answer to some of that motivation.

First, some people are just bullies. A sense of tribalism forms around bullies, who feel the need to act out and repeat the abuses they have endured. Hazing stems from this, too. Cruelty masked as “you should know better,” advice. Given too late.

Some have a smug sense of superiority, and want to keep it that way. Less smart people means they stay king of the mountain. Others are scared their own lack of knowledge will cripple them if they don’t keep the potential competition down. Insecurities drown out any sense of empathy.

Some people hate themselves so they punish others in retaliation. Like, trying to erase past cringe by making others hurt to even the score.

A few are sick of “the same fucking newbie questions again and again and again,” but still hang out in newbie forums for some reason.

really just doesn’t do what I needed to do.

This has been my experience, or sort of does what I want it to do, but I have to rethink what I need it to do instead of something really simple. Like a “new type of shared file system” that replaces NFS/Windows sharing. So instead of files in a standard file system one can manage with a file browser, it has “indexed” your files in such a way that the actual files are renamed into data chunks, and one “finds” files by their non-intuitive search engine that can’t do even basic search engine tricks like “AND/OR” searches, wildcards, and the results are hit and miss. “But it’s faster and more elegant!” So how do you restore from backup when the system fails? “When the system does whatnow?”

Yeah, no thanks. I can recover files from a file system much easier than some proprietary encoded bullshit fronted with a bad search engine over a proprietary and buggy index.

“… I was now… a fem-MAN!” [Orchestra music swells]

I hate to be honest, but I used Amazon Prime a lot because:

1. I cannot drive. Thus, getting to the store is difficult.
2. I must bring in 3-4 items a week, so yeah, I save on shipping.
3. Auto-subscriptions save a little.
4. I have priced a lot of stuff over the years, and while Amazon is not always the best, the convenience is impressive.
5. They have, multiple times, been incredibly helpful with customer service. Like above and beyond.
6. COVID and nobody masks around here. I have an autoimmune condition, so it’s important that I not leave unless it’s a medical appointment or similar need.
7. They just have stuff I can’t find anywhere. Yes, as some have said, caveat emptor, but that’s true for all the stores.

I also save a shit ton of money. When I used to browse Walmart or Target, I used to buy a lot of shit I didn’t need. I don’t get as distracted with focused buying. I also order from Aliexpress if I can wait 30 days, and I have only been ripped off three times in several years, for a total of maybe $35.

I’m not saying my way is better, and certainly not if it’s better for you, but it’s been a godsend to the house-bound.

I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.

But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.

Yeah my childhood sucked, and knowing I’d have another 12 years of abuse with nobody taking me seriously because I’m a kid? No thanks. I could put $10mil to good use right now.

When I used to run a book store in the 80s, two magazines were the largest (and 99% ads): bridal magazines and Computer Shopper.

I am dumb. What would cops want with my prescription information? I’ll probably understand if someone gives me examples of how this could be used against me.

Nope, came here to post the same.