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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • People can get used to weirdest stuff. Like my former coworker who uses mouse upside down, like, fingertip grip on the buttons and cord under palm. Said he used to love playing aerial combat simulators, but couldn’t get used to inverted controls, so he just flipped the mouse and learned to use it inverted for everything else. Havent played videogames in decades but it’s still stuck to him. The only problem is that he was a CEO at tech company, but from a passerby perspective it always looked like it’s his first time using a PC.


  • I hate this shit being routinely used in PHP. Symfony uses those functional comments for routing, essentially scanning every controller file as text on every visit, to gather the url patterns above functions. Laravel uses Reflection, which is functionally the same thing, to provide arguments to controller functions. Also, kind of related, the project I’m working now has few functions that use backtrace to return different results based on where they are called from. It is indeed very cursed and I’m ripping out any usages of them whenever I see one.





  • I did exactly that many years ago. Ditched my phone and went with x86 UMPC with builtin 3G modem, the name of which I don’t remember because it was some random Chinese no-name. Unfortunately that experiment coincided with the era of “fuck websites, we’re going app-only because we’re so hip”. I was in a world of pain right off the bat when I got a carrier plan, specifically marketed for usage on PC’s, and it did not work. I called them and they said to me:

    • Do you have Android or iOS?
    • I only have Windows
    • Windows phone?
    • No, Windows 8…
    • Well, you’ll have to use the app to activate the SIM card…

    Turns out, the usage on PC’s meant tethering…

    Lots of online things, if they were even available as websites, were highly cut down versions of apps. And SMS 2FA, goddamn. I remember not being able to buy booze and shoes because, apparently, phone confirmations were required in those establishments. Good thing they’re fading out in favor of TOTP and passkeys. But, at a time, I had to swtich to a carrier that allowed me to use “corporate” features like SMS forwarding and SIP telephony. Also, fuck WhatsApp, that shit can burn in all fires of hell.

    On the other hand, I really miss that time. It was liberating, just not having like, a few dozen malwares in my pocket tracking me down just to track someone’s dog, or a bus, or to spy on someone’s buying preferences or whatever. But things have gotten quite a bet better over the years, so I’m kind of inclined to repeat the experiment with my new-ish OM3S which I carry because I still cannot imagine going out without a proper PC on me (don’t buy it, though, it is severely underpowered, better get something GPD instead).


  • Skyscrapers, most likely.

    I used to live in a resort city for the past year, and really missed big city things, like specialty stores - for the whole city there was only one PC store, one bicycle store, one music store - and all of them sucked big time. So I had to rely on online marketplaces… oh wait, there were none, so I had to order international and wait for months. Local taxi was also not good, food delivery business practically non-existent. Same for furniture and appliances, instead of home depot and radioshack you’d have to go to bazaars and ask around. But the most important one is opportunities. I was a digital nomad and lived comfortably, but locals, holy hell, I don’t have any idea how they survive with wages this low. Pretty sure some of those construction workers would trade it all away to live as street musicians in SF or NYC, as just surviving there would put them in like worlds top 0.1%, but instead they work for hours on dangerous jobs for what I would’ve spend on a cup of coffee in a local cafe catered to tourists.





  • Tailscale… is not that good. The underlying wireguard is robust, but tailscale control plane is completely proprietary, as well as their DERP servers that it too often uses completely needlessly. They can also block you off from downloading it, updating, or logging in, if you happen to be in a wrong country.

    I’m myself looking for an alternative to it, but having trouble finding something I could share with non tech savvy friends while not being as complex on my end as, say, open/strongswan ais. Any suggestions welcome.


  • Just don’t make the mistake I’ve did at buying an electric bicycle. The controllers for the engines are mostly proprietary barely sewn together noname pieces of garbage, that you’d need some bullshit adapters and obscure software to flash settings in.

    Also don’t dig yourself too deep into cycling. There are good quality bicycles at a cost of a motorcycle or even a used car, and then there’s aliexpress specials made of whatever was lying around, but there are very few in-between options. I’d suggest just getting the latter and throwing it out when it breaks or you get bored.


  • ~/Sources for stuff I’m only building from sources and no immediate intention to contribute to

    ~/Projects for stuff I’m involved in, with a following structure:

    Projects
     - Personal
     - - Art
     - - Music
     - - Code
     - - - Ideas
     - - - In progress
     - - - Deployed
     - - - Scripts
     - - - Abandoned
     - [Company name]
     - - [Project name]
     - Interviews
     - - [Company name]
    

    The last part grouping project by companies has worked great for me, especially with freelance and outsource work. Sorting personal projects into types and stages feels like a mistake, as every time I have to navigate it, I can’t help but think of limitations of hierarchical file systems, as some of them are multiple types simultaneously, and also moving projects between stages feels dumb.



  • Ukraine is not committing brutal crimes, not lobbing rockets randomly, hoping to kill anyone, civilian or not

    Check your sources bias. Control phrase is “cluster munitions, Donetsk”. Russia is faaaar from being free of guilt, but, while they have capability to do this to ALL Ukrainian cities, I don’t see any footage of landmines all over Kiyv and Lviv. Another check is to listen to chants(e.g. москаляку на гіляку, смерть русні, etc) of each side. This effectively flips your argument upside down.

    Definitely not comparable, though, at least that we can agree.


  • That’s the face I’ve made just yesterday when my friend told me she’s now eligible for a subsidized IT mortgage. That thing was one of Russia’s last ditch attempts at stopping skilled workers from fucking off to different countries. The problem is, she’s a web designer. I guess that counts as IT nowadays, so good for her. But it’s bitter to hear as sr. backend tech who never hit the criteria…