pantaloony

It's funny how in 2020 PHP use is a sharply bimodal signal—it either means your tech leadership is clueless/absent/hopelessly-terrible, or they are among the few who've achieved true enlightenment.

As in sales clerk. Ring up sales, stock shelves, putter about and put things in order. Read a book or knock out some pushups if it's a really slow day, everything's in order, and the owner's not a dick. That kind of thing.

[EDIT] sense 5 in Webster's 1913. Apparently it is, or at least was, a US usage.

5. An assistant in a shop or store. [U. S.]

IDK about Gibson but back in the '00s I tried someone else's brand new First Act from Walmart (or wherever, but probably there) and it'd be fair to say it didn't work.

[EDIT] that is, I could play a large number of tunes such that they were recognizable and even pleasant-sounding on an ordinary cheap (say, $300-400 used or dent & ding) guitar, but was unable to do so at all on the First Act, which probably needed at least couple hundred dollars of work and parts replacement by a luthier to render it even minimally playable, let alone good-sounding. The neck definitely needed some adjustment, the frets probably needed attention (filing down, perhaps) and the tuners just needed to be replaced with ones that worked. I'm am quite certain almost no otherwise-well-motivated kid could have learned to play on that instrument. It simply did not work.

> Let us not kid each other. For most people their "work" is not a choice. The system is set up so that it is either you take whatever job you can to survive, or it is homelessness and no health benefits for you and your kids.

I'm not about to complain about my software development job in the US, but if not for job insecurity I'd rather clerk (not even own) at some small retail shop in Europe. And yes I've done "menial" jobs—take away the stresses of US healthcare and retirement systems and worries about your kids' ability to pay for school, add European amounts of time-off, and lots of those jobs are pretty damn great, actually, job-insecurity aside (which is not a trivial thing, I grant—point is about what's "fulfilling" or satisfying in a job).

I don't have a gripe with the term per se but in this case omitting who did it plainly renders the headline clickbait. If one tiny bit of info added to a headline would lose you most of your clicks, you're being deceptive to gain clicks. In this case the info is that the Nazis banned the book, because no one at all familiar with their book-banning criteria would find it surprising that math books were among the ones they banned, and so would shrug and move on without clicking. The implication of the headline is that the banning is novel or surprising or perhaps especially (and most provocatively) due to its content, but it's not.

Notably, a bad hit can result in multiple outs.

For me checking the mail when I’m not expecting something (so, 50 weeks out of the year) most closely resembles emptying a small trash bin every so often so it doesn’t overflow. I’m generally pro-USPS for other reasons but yeah, checking the mail is a kinda worthless chore. Do it so they don’t suspend delivery in case I need something. Not to read anything that showed up.

Sure, which is why I edited that “algorithms” is more accurate. When I read proofs I have to go through each step and figure out what every term on either side “does” to something “going through” it to make sense of it. I’d rather have my sandwich-making instructions as instructions than a series of statements about how the sandwich looks at each stage that I have to go back and turn into instructions to actually do anything with it, if that makes sense.

I get that other people don’t have this preference, but I strongly do. Test results indicate I should be incredibly well suited to mathematical work but I feel the way I imagine a dyslexic must when I try to read math or “mathy” programming languages. Give me something more-or-less procedural and I’m totally happy (though I gather I had a much easier time understanding and getting comfortable with recursion than many people do, which seems weird given I find the languages most heavily associated with it almost unreadable).

I map “natural” on the touchpad to moving the page. I map “natural” on the scroll wheel to moving the scrollbar. Both are “natural”, but opposite.

I’m legitimately not sure democracy will survive modern, sophisticated propaganda techniques, plus an open, international Web, plus losing the ability to more-or-less trust audio and video recordings that we’ve grown used to over the last hundredish years. Between state actors and, eventually if not already, transnational corporations waging info warfare, I kinda doubt the institution can take it. Too much info, too fast, from too many sources.

You’re not alone. My brain works in steps, not proofs. If all code looked like Haskell and friends I doubt I’d ever have gotten into it in the first place.

[edit] algos, over proofs, would probably be a better way to put it.

I'd imagine the (apparent) need to process, what, 12ish of these per weekday has something to do with it. How many can you manage in the "pipeline" at that rate? What's their staffing like? I bet they're staffed as if the police would at least kinda cooperate, so if they don't then there aren't enough personnel to follow up on any but the most clear-cut and serious cases with a bunch of public evidence already available so they know it might go somewhere if they put in the hours.

Mostly because it's a very effective way to ensure things get fixed, while gaining the "attacker" nothing. It's harmful, but so is finding 4000 insecure databases, sending 4000 notification emails, and having 3950 of them ignored (and that approach is probably more risky, so far as inviting legal trouble and expenses). It also neatly removes anyone else's ability to take the data.

Gnome is crashy, gobbles resources, incredibly laggy, and drops frames on my beast of a newish hex-core machine. I've switched to KDE in a VM on Win10 (some of the crashes were Linux graphics drivers, not entirely Gnome's fault, though some were Gnome—running in a VM makes them go away entirely, and also all my bluetooth stuff stays paired much better since Linux doesn't even know it's bluetooth) and it feels 4x as responsive on literally half the hardware, and under virtualization, as Gnome did.

I recently trialed a 2GB memory (!) dual-core Celeron minipc as a workstation, and if I could have solved all the 4k 2x scaling issues without spending hours (more) on it or resorting to a too-heavy-for-the-hardware DE, and gotten 60hz out of it rather than 30, I'd probably have upgraded the RAM to its max of 8GB and been totally happy on it. Void Linux with suckless tools made it feel blazing fast, as long as I avoided webshit (so, Sublime over VSCode, keep Slack the hell away from it, use a real email client rather than a webpage, that kind of thing). All browsers felt too slow to even launch except Surf and qute, and the latter was a tad slower and jankier than Surf so I settled on that, but it was fine as long as I avoided the kind of pages that eat a couple hundred MB and burn cycles for no clear reason (which is lots of them, sadly). I bet I could have made it work even better if I'd looked into adding a disable/enable JS toggle, defaulting to off, and maybe some kind of click-to-load-media thing, but it was surprisingly usable as it was. FF and Chromium were far too heavy to launch with no page loaded, of course. Man I miss pre-2.0 Firefox, when it was light and fast.

My blame scale for breaches, most to least:

1) the cultural and economic forces driving everything online way before that’s anything like a good idea,

2) companies storing more than they need to,

3) the people who left it unsecured (bigco, tech startups, and anything very sensitive),

4) the people stealing data,

5) the people who left it unsecured (Smaller shops that’ve been made to feel they must be online),

[large gap]

20) someone who simply deletes all the insecure data (assuming they didn’t also steal all of it)