Captain Aggravated

Can you blame a Chameleon for blending in? Look to the right of Fedora.

The Island of TempleOS is in the middle of the Holy Sea.

My father, an IT professional since before there was IT, once said to me “One of the reasons why I like Norton is it will check if there’s updates to my software for me.”

Oh you bitter winter child.

Loss is a meme about miscarriage in the same way that Press F To Pay Respects is a meme about dead and wounded soldiers.

Loss, as an episode of Ctrl-Alt-Del, was like running a sweeps week episode of General Hospital in the middle of a Jackass marathon. The audience of Jackass fans you’ve attracted are going to phone in to ask just what the cunting heck you think you’re doing.

I put together an original MMU for a customer back when it came out, I don’t think it ever worked. I might try an MMU3, they’ve apparently got it reliable, but I’ve been 3D printing since 2014 and haven’t really found much of a need for multicolor printing that I couldn’t do by snipping the filament and pushing different filament into the pinch rollers to make, like 2.5D signs or something.

Sounds like you can go wrong with one of those brands.

Another reason I’m glad I ordered a Prusa; I’ve already been using PrusaSlicer for my old printer, so I know the toolchain is ready to go.

I’m drunk and belligerent to not give a shit about pointless pedentry, but to finally assert that…it doesn’t fucking matter. Back when actual humans still liked Google, back before we forgot they technically changed their name to Alphabet, back when their motto was “do no harm,” they started interviewing engineers with clever brain teaser puzzles. Because at the time, Google was out “Think Differentlying” Apple. Web 2.0 was all the rage, connecting shit together in ways we didn’t know we shouldn’t was in vogue, so it made sense for them to ask software engineers about the traveling salesman dilemma and shit like that. Because they were designing things like Google Maps, and they needed people who could solve “find a route from all addresses in the United States to all other addresses in the United States on consumer-grade hardware.”

But “Someone who needs an ordinary LAMP stack for their completely unoriginal eCommerce website” Inc. decided to start interviewing IT guys the same way because it made them look hip, and as a result Elon Musk spent a quarter term as Chief Superpower Fucker Upper.

That’s kind of my point. Google started that nonsense of making job interviews into lateral thinking puzzles, then all managers latched onto that to make themselves look hip.

I want to see competence and practical problem solving skills.

You know, we’re talking about how pointless a riddle it is. “Why can’t I walk into the room more than once?” I’ve heard similar hiring riddles about things like “You’ve got ten ethernet cables that run the length of a long hallway. They’re not marked at either end, what’s the most efficient way of finding out which is which?”

And you know what? If I’m hiring a networking guy, I don’t want him to deliver me an “ooh I know this one” answer to that, I want him to tell me he’s got a cable tester with several remote probes so he can figure that out in a small number of trips. Maybe show me how he can hook a couple together with a coupler and use the cable length function to shave a couple of trips off. Not recite a memorized brain teaser answer.

The “premise” is detecting that a now dark light was recently turned on by feeling for residual heat. “Hot” is a relative term.

LED bulbs do get warm, not as hot as incandescent bulbs but they do emit heat. You might have to run them longer than a minute to warm it up enough to be immediate about it.

The official answer to this riddle is turn switch 1 on for a minute or so, switch it off then switch 2 on. if the bulb is hot but dark, its 1, if it’s lit it’s 2 and if it’s out and cold its 3.

the adult answer is why do I have only one chance to walk in the room?

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

My problem is people keep infecting the world with software designed with Gnome’s “Mac with Meningitis” style sheet.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I’m doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.

Just watching TV or movies…honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I’ve got a copy of Master and Commander on “fullscreen” DVD, 480p 4:3. I’d really like it to be 16:9 but I can’t come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I’ve got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going “That scene looks pretty good, oh that’s grainy as hell, now it’s better.” Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there’s no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is “authentic.”

So at 4k, it’s either going to display a level of detail that I’m sitting too far from the screen to notice, it’s going to look even noisier, or it’ll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So…?

Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.

If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I’ve learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.