• 6 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • A few years ago, I set up a home-server with music and some pictures on there, and recently I noticed that my storage disk was getting full. Then I saw that the disk only had 16 GB and wondered, where the hell I got that small of a disk from.

    So, I go to plug in a bigger disk and can’t even find the original disk at first. Turns out my whole storage capacity was one of these bad boys:

    Spoiler

    A tiny USB-A stick, designed for keeping it plugged into a laptop at all times.

    And yeah, I’ve got about 1800 songs, clocking in at 5.8 GB, so even that tiny storage would easily be enough for a much larger collection.
    And I do also have them replicated on my phone, for listening on the go. (Don’t even need an SD card in my case.)






  • Man, at $DAYJOB, if we open-source something, they tell us to check for checked-in passwords and whatnot, and force us to throw away the commit history, which always feels stupid when we’ve known upfront that we’re going to open-source it and so kept things clean from the start.

    But then, yeah, you see a post like that and just think that it really wouldn’t have been too difficult to search for swear words before publishing.
    I mean, I also don’t really care, since it’s code rather than an official communication channel, but I can understand why management might care.




  • I thought about creating something like that and the major problem that I see is that lots of meme templates do have copyright and the font that’s typically used for memes, Impact, isn’t free either. Well, and it isn’t done by merely developing a software and offering it for download. You would need to host the meme templates or some editor webpage, which is a whole 'nother skillset.

    If we say that users bring their own meme template, and it can be a free font that looks similar to Impact, and it’s not to be hosted as a webpage, then it would be quite doable.
    You would “just” need to call the ImageMagick library with the right parameters. Still not trivial, but the path to get there is fairly straightforward. I could imagine that something like that already exists as an open-source project…



  • One time, I had to request firewall access for a machine we were deploying to, and they had an Excel sheet to fill in your request. Not great, I figured, but whatever.

    Then I asked who to send the Excel file to and they told me to open a pull request against a Git repo.
    And then, with full pride, the guy tells me that they have an Ansible script, which reads the Excel files during deployment and rolls out the firewall rules as specified.

    In effect, this meant:

    1. Of course, I had specified the values in the wrong format. It was just plaintext fields in that Excel, with no hint as to how to format them.
    2. We did have to go back and forth a few times, because their deployment would fail from the wrong format.
    3. Every time I changed something, they had to check that I’m not giving myself overly broad access. And because it’s an Excel, they can’t really look at the diff. Every time, they have to open it and then maybe use the Excel version history to know what changed? I have no idea how they actually made that workable.

    Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, please just let me edit an Ansible inventory file instead. I get that they have non-technical users, but believe it or not, it does not actually make it simpler, if you expose the same technical fields in a spreadsheet and then still use a pull request workflow and everything…



  • Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don’t want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
    It’s just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it’s been a few versions, so maybe they’ve fixed it. It’s always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.


    To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that’s supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
    The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn’t work.
    The second time, I couldn’t click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
    And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.

    Instead, I’ve slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it’s definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.







  • Well, I hope you are happy with the answers you already got, because my answer is that I personally don’t care to keep these items, so I don’t have much of an opinion on it. 😎

    That’s kind of the point I was trying to make up there, that I don’t have to be the arbiter of all morals, just my own morals…

    But if you want to keep such trinkets and you feel like you’ve informed yourself enough to know that no harm is done to these animals, and that makes you decide that it is moral, I will gladly accept your decision.
    If I learn that it does harm in some way, I would let you know, though. Not to attack you, but because I would assume that you want to do no evil. And that you don’t subscribe to the horseshit belief that your own ignorance of evil makes it moral.

    I feel like I really need to drive home that veganism is when you care, but you’re also lazy. I don’t want to have to inform myself about every supply chain for my food and every possible moral effect that my actions might have. So, I just nope the fuck out of a large chunk of that by not dealing with animal-sourced products.

    Like, yeah, if a bird drops a feather in front of you, the supply chain is quite obvious and I would hope you don’t set off a trend of enough people wanting feathers in their homes for there to emerge an industry.

    So, it’s almost certainly fine. But if I myself don’t actually want a feather, you can bet your ass that I will gladly stop thinking right then and there.

    If these were not just random examples and rather genuine questions, then I would try to help you reason through it, but ultimately the decision is yours…


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoShowerthoughts@lemmy.worldWomen and men and consensual sex
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    12 days ago

    I guess, they might not be talking about individuals, but rather humanity as a whole. So, if a person rapes someone and this becomes publicly known, they will generally be shamed more than a woman having consensual sex (even though some rapists also get to be president, I guess).

    But across the board, we have insults that every kid knows, which equate to “woman having (consensual) sex bad”, as well as gossip of the like, and even men being shamed for going out with a woman who has sex.
    Compared to that, rape is rarely talked about…