Punkie

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.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

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 Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut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.”

About 20 years ago, I used to keep Lego Bionicles at my desk, but had to stop because pranksters would do this, and then HR would make negative comments.

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.

I was for about 15 years post high school, but her life was rough and I was always the one initiating contact, so we drifted apart. I hope she okay. Smart woman, gifted arist, terrible parents.

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.

When I was 19, I had friends from high school who were still younger, and one of them was my friend Julie who had helicopter parents (she would have been 17-18). I was doing security at an event where the radio headsets we had were super-shitty, and the guy running security was a dumpster fire on his own. Julie’s parents forbid her from going to the event, and grounded her to her room. Then her dad called the hotel where the event was being held, was told Julie had “run away” to this event, and that I was somehow responsible. Given she was a minor, the event runners were understandably concerned, although they were frustrated that Julie’s dad was unable to describe her in a way that was useful: “Asian, wearing black, or a tee-shirt, or something. Ask Punkie where she is.” So they contacted the head of security to find me on my rounds to see if I knew what this crazy man was talking about. The head of security said “okay” and did nothing.

At some point, the head of security was fired for a variety of reasons, and this increased the level of miscommunication. Meanwhile, Julie’s dad was calling every few hours, demanding to know where his daughter was. And soon there was a concerted effort to find me, which was complicated because of the communication issues. By the time someone found me and the connection was made, my response of, “I have no idea, Julie said her dad forbid her coming here,” was not what they wanted to hear, and met with skepticism “You’re not hiding her, are you? Like she ran away with you in some tryst? She’s 17 and you’re 19, that could have legal ramifications!” No. We’re platonic friends, I don’t know where she is. if I tried to bonk the poor woman, she’d clobber me.

Meanwhile, Julie’s dad finds Julie in her bedroom, right where he left her. Julie later told me that she was ignoring her dad calling for her, and didn’t “come downstairs” like he demanded because she assumed it was a trap to get her punished for leaving her bedroom while she was grounded. So naturally, her dad assumed she wasn’t in the house. Because he called for her and she didn’t answer.

Poor Julie. Her parents were crazy-nuts.

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

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.

Ah yes! My wife uses straws, too.

Having seen these in a demo, they have weight triggers to prevent that. Also in or demo, one got stuck on a power cord, the other on a electrical plate in the floor.

Yeah as a kid in the 70s, it was a known trope. Benny Hill and Monty Python even alluded to it.

Nope, came here to post the same.

I got all of that except “shag ye x,” because it sounds like “shag (fuck) you x,” where “x” is the subject that is a bit vague. Like, “I’m trying to shag you, love?” or “Fuck your ex,” as in, the last person you broke up with?

Inserted ‘taunts’ in the code, including references to “grok”

Uh. OK.

I mean, I understand the Heinlein word, but what does that have to do with his motivation?

Worked for a company in 1998 that had all the employee data on an excel spreadsheet: everything from emergency contacts to date of last paycheck. All of HR. And “for security” it was stored on a floppy disk. One single disk. Which was put back in the safe every close of business. One day, the disk got corrupted. The “backup” was an end-of-year printout, but any changes since then were gone.