My favorite ever SO experience was this time I found a dude who had had my exact problem four years earlier. The thread was the only google result for the error message I was getting that wasn’t just random pasted log files, etc.

Two people who had no idea how to fix it gave him some useless suggestions, then crickets.

9 months later, he had come back and posted

I solved my problem!

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=5M

I wish I’d saved the link.

I’m hosting a minio cluster on my brother-in-law’s old gaming computer he spent $5k on in 2012 and 3 five year old mini-pcs with 1tb external drives plugged into them. Works fine.

I think you’re going to have more luck with a more right wing, more immature humor, more toxic masculinity kind of crowd.

Hopefully this shit backfires on the platforms like fuckin crazy.

Won’t happen. Wishful thinking. Maybe one or two members, brave enough and politically secure enough will make a meaningless gesture, but that would actually be a pleasant surprise.

I originally posted this half a year ago. Now it’s even more true:

Our political system is an old, poorly maintained computer that sits at your grandparents’ house. It’s so clogged up with malware it can’t function and the scammers and botnets are doing whatever they want with it. It’s the only computer that your family has access to, and technically it’s supposed to be shared but in practice your grandparents only let you use it when they’re out of the house. Your grandparents don’t understand it and think it “runs fine” and are more scared you’re going to put commie or terrorist stuff on it than they are about the huge amount of viruses and spyware it’s already clogged up with. Your parents are too tired from working 3 jobs just to survive to care about it or pay attention to it and they “don’t use it anyway” so trying to get their help fixing it is useless.

You know that the ONLY WAY to fix this situation is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall, but grandma is worried she’d lose all her emails and grandpa says if there’s something wrong with it, he’ll fix it. You do see him messing around in settings all the time, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing. He also talks to “Microsoft tech support” a couple times a week and sends them money. You’ve told him it’s a scam and he told you to “Shut up, you don’t know anything about computers.”

This isn’t even an analogy… it’s literally what’s happening. Legal systems are just complex code that runs on human beings. The constitution is the kernel, the US govt and all it’s bureaucracies are the OS and you could even think of the states as containers or virtual environments that run within the context of the bigger system. The OS has been completely hijacked by scammers (no, seriously, I’ve done subcontracting for big defence contractors), the users with the power to fix things don’t understand, don’t have the skills to fix it and are more scared of the people who want to fix the system than they are of the scammers. The other users who could help deal with the situation are too exhausted and burned out to care.

EDIT:

To really finish off this analogy, it needs to be added that your stupid little brother and his shitty friends ALSO use this computer to troll, harass girls and “nerds” they know from school and go on 4Chan. If you bring up reinstalling, your brother and ALL HIS FRIENDS dogpile into the conversation saying THEY want to reinstall too and that 4Chan says Hannah Montana Linux is the best OS to use… and they have a USB stick right here.

I have an ex whose parents are like that. Voted for Obama twice, I’m sure they voted for Trump three times. They literally moved out of our state (Colorado) because we elected a gay governor (Polis) and my ex’s mom was terrified God would punish the state for that.

You wouldn’t download a car.

• Sick of feminist and LGBTQ ideology being pushed.
• Can’t really articulate what that is and what it means, or be specific about what they don’t like about it.

Sadly, this tracks, this is this entire block of white men pretty much (and is identical to people who complain about “woke” and “critical race theory”). It’s a result of flooding the zone with shit (google that if you don’t know what it means) and if anything, it usefully tells us who’s vulnerable to that (a tragically large number of people).

80 yr old energy is its own thing and it can be glorious.

A buddy of mine has a story about how his great grandma told him “When you’re old, you can do whatever you want,” and then tripped his shitty, obnoxious cousin who’d been bullying him and picking on him all day and said “Stop being mean to your cousin dear.”

When the cousin’s mom came to see why he was freaking out, he said “Grandmom tripped me!” And his mom said, “Oh honey, you know Grandmom doesn’t see very well…”

It’s not HTMX (well kinda, see below). It’s devs being like “These bugs aren’t my fault until you prove they are.”

And it’s abstraction. I understand WHY we do it… I guess. I don’t AGREE, and this is why. If you’re playing with code that generates code that you don’t understand and then can’t debug… I’ve always preferred to write the code that’s going to run. Don’t give me APIs that interact with database, let me write SQL. Don’t give me something with a “simple syntax” that behind the scenes generates a bunch of JavaScript doing who knows what that no one on the team understands (HTMX), it’s gonna be easier on everybody to just write the JavaScript. The only reason the devs solved it was ChatGPT knew what they had missed… and I had to point them in that direction (I cut and pasted the errors into ChatGPT and then said “Guys, IDK what this means because I don’t know anything about HTMX. Do YOU GUYS KNOW?”)

I ended up spending hours of my life on some tech some hotshots wanted to use because it’s the “new, sexy thing” and what I learned was “Oh, this is just abstracted syntax ontop of Ajax which is ALREADY abstracted syntax ontop of JavaScript.” I find this annoying, not charming.

As a security and DevOps engineer, HTMX has been such a pain in my butt lately.

Something are broken? -> Web devs blame WAF -> Me debugs and researches for hours when I has better stuff to do -> Finally me: WAF is fine. Is your broken JavaScript. Wut do? -> Web devs: Not know, write in HTMX, JS is abstracted, now we fix. -> 15 minutes later web devs: We fix! We do basic thing wrong! Now learn something new about HTMX. -> Me: Great. Thanks so much for that.

A good primer on what to expect running local LLMs *on Windows.

North Korea, China and… Oh yeah, the effing United States, come January.

My state (Colorado)

• Repealed our 18 year old ban on same sex marriage (yay).
• Failed to pass ranked choice voting (boo). My impression from talking to folks is that many people (especially older people) don’t really know what it is and when they read it on the ballot they feel like it’s weird and complicated.

My city (Boulder) is a liberal bubble and predictably our local issues are all disagreements between upper middle class+, over 40 property owning NIMBYs vs. progressives who care about affordable housing and the homeless. Literally every city council candidate’s platform is EXACTLY the same, except on housing / homelessness issues. Every election, I google all the judges and city council candidates and vote for the ones who seem least NIMBY. The judges are almost always NIMBYs. The city council members I vote for almost always loose.

If the CU students who were eligible to vote in Boulder would do so, this wouldn’t happen.

Is python being easy to learn actually true?

I’ve never found this to be true, I think that’s partially because I don’t find Python to be very fun to write in, so I don’t enjoy it very much, so I don’t learn new things about it very quickly.

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I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you.

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Yep. As a Gen Xer with a teenage son, when I hear my peers freaking out about our kids and technology, I remind them what our parents said about MTV.

Are we living in a world in which the JS/TS ecosystem is the yardstick by which we measure well written code? I mean… Wait a minute! I figured it out! This is the Bad Place!