That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.

My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.

First — stop giving them ideas! 🤣

Second, a small rock and some tape would likely defeat that.

EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.

So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?

As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.

Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).

But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.

To be clear — Mom’s “Depression Dinner” was in fact just greasy fried ground beef poured over mashed potatoes. No spices. I don’t even think she used any salt or pepper. Oily Gerbers would be a perfectly apt description!

Oh certainly changing the presentation, texture, and separation of the ingredients can make a big difference in a dish! I’d say the difference between “depression dinner” and Shepard’s pie is like the difference between cake batter and cake — they’re both made up of the exact same stuff, but one is a gloopy mess you’d probably not want to eat a whole bowl of, and the other is delicious cake you’ll want a second serving of.

I pretty specifically called out striving to create things like family or helping improve your community through volunteer works — which isn’t “capitalism” at all.

Each of us can always be someone better and do something more. That isn’t a bad thing.

You end by trying to put words in my mouth. I never said anything about the worth of anyone over anyone else. Striving for the betterment of oneself, one’s loved ones, and one’s community is a good thing — but the antithesis of that isn’t that doing none of those things makes you worthless. That’s something you came up with, not me.

Growing up my mother would occasionally make a dish my father enjoyed that she called “Depression Dinner”. It was mashed potatoes covered in fried ground beef with beef gravy poured on top of it.

I like mashed potatoes. I like using ground beef in a variety of dishes. And who can say anything bad about gravy? But mix those three together — ugh, no thanks. It was like baby food for adults. There was a reason why my brother and I took to calling it Depressing Dinner growing up.

The ability to “strive” is a learned skill that needs to be honed over years. It’s not really natural to most people — it’s easy to fall into a low-energy state and want to stay there because it’s comfortable. It takes practice and energy putting yourself out there and putting an effort into making more of your life.

If you’re happy with who you are and what you’re doing, then I’m not going to neg on your life. But are you going to spend the next ~50 years just gliding along, and not creating or building any value for yourself in this world (and that doesn’t have to be monetary value — building a family, and building up your community through volunteer works build value as well)? When you’re in the twilight of your life, do you want to look back and find you did nothing of significance with your life?

Maybe that doesn’t bother you. That’s fine. Just so long as 15 years from now you’re not some bitter middle-aged person complaining about people in the upper-middle class who get to do things you don’t get to do and who have more money and nice things that you do.

But none of that would be for me. So I put in the work, learned how to strive for the life I wanted, and got a graduate degree, built a beautiful family, got that management job (and the pay that goes with it), and spend my spare time volunteering (currently) with three different organizations. It’s a busy life and take a lot of time and energy — but it allows me to have people around me who love me, with the money to do and own nice things together, and to give back to my community to make it a better place. And when my time eventually comes, I’ll have hopefully left this world a little better off for the effort.

You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!

It was quite the interesting thing to run back then — it was all very “Wild West” of software, and a LOT of stuff didn’t work well.

It wasn’t my daily driver; it really wasn’t ready for most workloads back then. But it was nearly free, and we shared around the CD-ROM amongst hacker friends interested in giving it a try.

Yggdrasil LGX, back in ‘93.

Chuck E Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell — the same Nolan Bushnell who was one of the co-founders of video game company Atari (at one time, the biggest player in the home console industry). He started it in part as a way to promote Atari games and cabinets.

So it was both — and the “entertainment centre” part was always part of its “core mission” from its inception.

Arbitrarily and suddenly destroying all apps built with a certain tech stack…

Except they aren’t. Sure, PWAs may be slightly more disadvantaged on iOS/iPadOS than they are now, but they haven’t been “destroyed”. And they continue to work exactly as they did with the prior iOS/iPadOS release in all the rest of the world.

Everyone seems to think Apple is playing some sort of 4D Chess to kill off PWAs — but if Apple wanted to kill off PWAs they could just disable the functionality completely globally tomorrow, and they’d likely face no repercussions for doing so. They don’t even need an excuse to do so.

I’m not claiming that Apple is acting honourably here; merely that if they actually wanted to kill PWAs it wouldn’t require some sort of Rube Goldberg machine-style planning to do it. There is no conspiracy here.

The title appears to be quite the reach. If Apple wanted to kill PWA’s, they would have done so worldwide. There is absolutely nothing preventing them from disabling them in the US and Canada (and much of the rest of the world) today, but they haven’t — they’re only disabling them in the EU.

Crazy and sad. Reading his letter, I couldn’t help but get the impression that he has no idea a) about the current state-of-the-art in drive media and filesystems, and b) that Reiser 5 seems like it’s never going to happen.

It’s almost like he’s been frozen in time for nearly 20 years. Reading his letter was like pulling out and reading an old copy of Dr. Dobb’s journal. He is where he deserves to be — he is the architect of his own situation — it’s just wild to think of how much he’s missed out on due to his evil actions. It’s quite literally pitiful.

I suggested to a friend years ago that he keep all of hit used butts in a jar beside his bed. He came up with this idea that he should add some water to the jar.

The reminder every time he got up or went to bed that the black goop shit was the same stuff he was putting into his lungs every day eventually got him to stop. He couldn’t even look at the jar anymore — and certainly didn’t want to add to it. That thing was nasty.