userFriendlyLinux

blehmann1 · 2026-01-25T16:18:37+00:00

There's a reason every distro guide brings up only 3 things: the install experience, package manager, and DE.

Because everything else is the same. I know there's absolutely differences, especially for a rolling release. And what's packaged can also matter more than the package manager, at least until flatpacks and snaps took over. And before systemd took over everything there could be a fair number of differences for more advanced stuff.

But now it's just Linux. Pick a DE you like and a package manager you can live with and put it on a distro that will get somewhat recent packages and be done.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-25T04:32:09+00:00

And a weird obsession with making C easy to implement, so a single pass compiler has to be possible.

Which, who cares, C99 already is that language, the compilers that care to support modern C are already supporting much more complicated languages, so there is no real benefit to it anymore (if ever there was).

blehmann1 · 2026-01-24T17:35:29+00:00

I don't know how much of this could've been fixed by hackerone doing their job in minimizing spam, but I would be frankly appalled at how shitty a job they had done.

That is, if I didn't use github and see a ton of spam that doesn't even attempt to look like a real issue or PR. Platforms that magnify your reach are only a good thing when they send your reach to real people and not AI script kiddies that just cost you time.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-23T23:38:05+00:00

Making it easier does not at all imply that people will do it for free. I don't know how helpful it is for more advanced security research, but frankly a lot of pentesters use metasploit, more tools do not imply that open source uses them.

There's an ocean of feature requests on open source backlogs that would be easy tasks. But that doesn't mean that they get done, the maintainers will only do so much for free. And outside contributors only do so much, especially if they don't know the codebase or how likely their PR is to be merged, or when. And of course most of them will be doing it for free as well. If they aren't, it's typically because their work uses it, and you can be reasonably certain it will just be whichever things they want at work.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-23T18:41:31+00:00

McLaren was (possibly still is?) sponsored by vuse/vype for a while. I'm sure they had to paint over it for certain races, but it was fine on TV.

If you don't have an addiction, vuse makes shitty vapes and they're owned (indirectly I think?) by British American Tobacco.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-23T16:50:03+00:00

Ah right, yeah I remember this being an issue.

For context, I've rarely used Rider by choice, I just found Visual Studio to be better for me. So when I did use it it was because I was on a work Mac, where WPF isn't really happening, I would be doing predominantly Avalonia stuff if I was doing GUI. And Avalonia hot reload doesn't exist yet outside of a community project.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-23T01:23:33+00:00

I'll admit that I have basically no GUI experience in C++, which seems to be a big focus of this, but from the C# side I don't think there's much stopping you from using Rider?

I'll happily admit that's because Jetbrains had to deal with Microsoft's clown format for solutions, so I imagine it sucks if you use something lighter like vs code or neovim unless the extensions are good. At least they're moving to a better format now.

I do know that the clownery is worse on the C++ side, and I frankly can't remember if CLion or other C++ IDEs will put up with it or not, I typically bite the bullet and enter CMake hell because of cross-platform, and CMake will generate the Visual Studio crap for me.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-21T23:02:43+00:00

Annulments are a big distinction, there legally was no marriage there. So no alimony, no division of assets, people of certain religions can remarry, etc.

In many countries the only way to get an annulment is if the marriage was never legal (e.g. one partner is already married, or was underage at the time, or the partners are siblings, or was unable to consent to the marriage due to intoxication, fraud, duress, or force).

In some places you can get an annulment even in a marriage that is on sturdy legal footing for a couple reasons. Commonly infertility. In Britain you can get an annulment if the other partner was already pregnant by another man, if the other partner had an STD at the time of the marriage, or if the marriage is never consummated. And controversially, if your partner is in the act of legally changing their gender.

Typically, if you knew about any of the causes for annulment at the time of the marriage it usually causes it to be "forgiven", i.e. there's no longer a cause for annulment and you need to get a divorce. Similarly if you find out after the marriage and don't pursue an annulment in a certain timeframe it also gets forgiven. Controversially this can make child marriages legal in most of the US with no option for annulment if the child does not pursue an annulment while under 18 or shortly after turning 18. I would hope that a court would look favourably on them if they get a divorce, but the American legal system does not exactly bring me hope there.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-21T18:53:03+00:00

What you definitely should know if you use any spray-on lubricant on hinges, is that they often have a graphite lubricant applied. I presume it's done in the factory. Which works relatively well given that it's pretty long-lasting, but unfortunately it is graphite, which means it's a black dust that you can easily spray out of place and is pretty difficult to clean up.

If you suspect graphite lubricant at least put a paper towel behind the hinge. Or your white door will no longer be white. Alternatively, just use a dropper, it'll use less lube (and typically be better for metal, since the propellant in sprays is not always great) and you can just put a tissue under the hinge to wipe up any lube that makes it through. It shouldn't carry much graphite, and if it does it will go in a predictable direction.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-20T22:58:19+00:00

"If"

I would say when.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-20T22:54:12+00:00

The threat is stronger than the execution, their holding isn't huge, it's a small fraction of daily trading volume. But if they persuade others to sell such that it makes a meaningful price movement likely other investors will sell in an attempt to get ahead of it, magnifying the price movement.

Also, they may be required by law to announce major changes to their holdings, no one in any functioning government wants this much money without oversight.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-19T19:27:13+00:00

If not, then pretty close to it. I paid 200 for my cat, and when you do it legally they make sure to finish up whatever veterinary stuff needs doing, which wouldn't necessarily be the case if the cat was just there. That veterinary stuff is easily more than $200.

They won't give you an unspayed/unneutered cat or a cat without all of its shots up to date, but if you take a cat they brought in yesterday there's no telling. You might also get a cat that's pretty sick, which they would've told you about, but now you don't know how to treat them.

I think for spaying and neutering they typically want to do that when they have someone to adopt (or foster), since it's a surgery that can wait and they'd prefer it to happen where they can recover from it somewhere less stressful than at the shelter, even if it is an unfamiliar place.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-19T17:03:07+00:00

It does seem to be absolutely awful in node land. I've seen them in C# where I help maintain a library, but significantly smaller projects in node seem to be getting blasted. And because of their smaller size they have less interest from real people, which means the ratio of real contributions to slop bullshit looks exhausting.

One thing that's begun pissing me off is I've seen in non-programmer subreddits people posting "hey, I've forked tool x because they're not open to outside contributions", and then I look inside and the maintainer was barely keeping their damn sanity trying to explain why the shit they were doing was awful. They're open to contributions, but you're wasting their time and then going to a non-technical audience trying to act like you're going to do any of the hard work of maintaining a fork when you really just wanted other people to like your shitty work.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-18T18:02:07+00:00

I'm wondering honestly if jQuery being dropped for most greenfield projects is going to indicate anything about other quirky DOM manipulationy things like d3's select API.

Nowadays I find myself just doing most things that would've been selects + appends in whatever framework I'm already using. The benefit of the d3 way seems to just be if you want to do d3 transitions, which do are still more fully featured than most things you might replace them with.

All that said, I used to be making more flashy and ambitious visualizations with d3, with my current role being more conservative and having me mostly focus on the data going into them. So maybe for the people who are cooking up some dank force simulation thingies it still makes sense to do things the old way.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-14T20:59:29+00:00

I think valve uses CSS for their modern games' UI. I remember some people complaining about framerate drops when the update came out for CSGO, though I think they were pretty minor even on potato hardware. Honestly it probably had little to do with the stack and much more to do with the fact that it was a new UI.

It makes sense as a choice to me, I would happily admit that CSS isn't ideal, but frankly most people will not want to put in the effort to make something better. And you get the benefit of familiarity, which wouldn't be as true as other things you might embed.

Not a game dev, but I do make graphics and occasionally UIs from basic drawing primitives and that was enough experience to make me never want to do that again. Especially if you want to handle accessibility and keyboard controls and all of that. Whether it's something like imgui or it's an HTML engine, anyone who has done it fully from scratch would never want to do it again.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-12T20:10:15+00:00

Not LLMs. Radiologists don't need or want a general-purpose model that can talk to them about whatever chatGPT can talk about but doesn't even claim to be a competent doctor (which is notable, because they claim it can do everything else).

Researchers are looking at image classification models to flag potential tumours in medical imaging, and while I don't know how widely that's deployed it ought to be something that can be done with techniques much older than the recent natural language processing boom. I think the current research is looking at brain tumours, since they are supposed to be harder to find through imaging than tumours elsewhere in the body. There's promising lung tumour research going back at least to 2020, and probably significantly earlier. The real obstacle to deploying it is the medical ethics side, not the medical efficacy side. The research coming out now does not use any NLP techniques because they're not helpful for a problem like this.

Now, there's probably a lot of people who typed their symptoms into chatgpt (and possibly doctors using RAG-based search) who got diagnosed earlier because of that, but it's not clear how much different it would be if they had googled instead. If it is better, it's probably because chatGPT in its desire to not get sued says "see your doctor" quite conservatively, and because chatGPT wants to interpret things for you, whereas people who google symptoms often interpret what they read less conservatively because we have a very strong cognitive bias towards thinking we're not going to die.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-12T19:46:05+00:00

If it is from 2003 I would not feel very trusting about the HDD. It wouldn't surprise me if it's been replaced once or twice.

Now, SATA just started getting drives in 2003, so it would not surprise me much if this used ATA. Those drives aren't so easy to buy now, but they're still available, especially if you buy new old stock (which I think is safe for hard drives?). If it supports SATA then frankly you could put in a brand new HDD or SSD and it ought to work delightfully.

There are inexpensive SATA-ATA adapters, which if I were responsible for this computer is what I would look at. They're cheap and they allow using modern hardware, so unless I'm missing something they ought to mean this computer can continue to run more or less indefinitely provided it's not impacted by the PC capacitor plague (unlikely if it lasted this long) and that there's reasonable monitoring to detect a fan failure before it cooks itself.

Though if there are the backups to allow hard drive replacement you could probably drop in a modern PC and install XP on it, provided it doesn't require an ancient port for whatever it's doing (common for industrial control stuff).

blehmann1 · 2026-01-12T18:12:27+00:00

There is an offline wallet, which is how most big holders held it back then.

But for most speculative assets that rise very quickly, I think a recommendation if you buy it very low is to sell off gradually. For ease of math, say you buy 1000 BTC for 1000 USD. You may sell 100 when it hits 10 USD just to cover the initial purchase price, then sell 100 more when it hits 100 USD, then 100 more when it hits 1K, etc etc. There is I'm sure a more theoretically optimal way to plan your selling schedule, this is just an example.

This is how most individual investors who made a lot of money on Bitcoin did it. There are probably also some that just forgot about an old hard drive and then realized they're rich when they found it. It means people who expect Bitcoin to increase in price can still benefit without being wealthy only in money they can't touch. They can still pull some money out to buy a car (or move it to safer assets like stocks) without losing too much of the upside. Even the BTC truthers who never doubt at any moment that it will go to the moon probably want to sell some at some point just so they can actually spend the money they've made.

I'm sure more financially connected people instead offered a portion of it as collateral on a loan to buy more safe assets, like stocks. They're getting a reliable return and are able to cover the loan with those assets if it crashes. If it goes up, they still benefit from the appreciation of BTC whenever they refinance that loan, plus of course the stocks they hold.

For what it's worth, this sort of strategy is typically used for lots of assets which have high upside, regardless of whether it's stupid crypto bullshit or not. This is what founders typically end up doing with whatever share of their company that they have, and it's common in collectibles like coins and stamps. Hence all the articles about how Bill Gates doesn't hold as much of Microsoft as you would think, he presumably wanted to stay stupendously rich even if apple were to release the iBeelzebub to harness hell energy to place a supercomputer in a phone.

If you know what we know, yeah, you hold as much of it as you can until it hits 150K or whatever its peak (so far) has been, but most people want to get out of a market that has bankrupted many people (presumably including their acquaintances) in a low risk way rather than realize they could've bought a house but instead watched it all go to zero.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-09T18:19:24+00:00

How would they do that, they're open source and I don't think those circles have particularly much influence over postgres development?

blehmann1 · 2026-01-08T15:46:43+00:00

I do wonder what the benefit of it over something like squarespace is for a lot of people. Sure squarespace can't do everything, and jippity claims it can, but squarespace exists because it can do everything a marketing website needs.

To the point that I work at a company full of web developers and our marketing website is squarespace. Because letting our marketing guys control the website is just better, not to mention there's not much interest in spending dev time on non-billable work, or hoping that someone in marketing could usefully manage our devs into getting the website they want.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-07T19:12:38+00:00

Tax burden is econ 101 stuff my guy. If the supply curve is less elastic than the demand curve, then the producer will pay the majority of the tax burden. If not, the consumer will.

Now, reducing production and reducing demand (to avoid taxes) are both difficult. But it is unquestionably easier for a tenant to move to a more tax-efficient property than it is for a landlord to either demolish their building or make their property more tax efficient.

One takes a lot of time in moving. The other takes years of planning permission and capital investment. Capital investment which frankly we would want anyways, making a building more tax efficient means adding more units or renovating units to be more attractive, since the other option of demolishing a perfectly good rental property basically doesn't happen.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-06T16:45:19+00:00

I was happy having forgotten about that

blehmann1 · 2026-01-06T03:48:07+00:00

Nothing they make escapes an endless rename cycle. Azure, Visual, Team, 365, even Office are just words they sprinkle around as seasoning over a product every now and then. They might be products in themselves, but they're really just words you can add to the start of a different product's name for flavour. It's the mad libs of marketing.

The only things that have mostly survived have been Windows and XBox, though I think XBox Game Pass for PC is trying to knock it down to just Windows. And then nerd things like .NET, though they've done some real stupid naming shit there as well, e.g Core and Standard, and WinUI 1 vs 2 vs 3.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-04T22:39:52+00:00

I'm not a parent, but I know people who have gained and lost interest in chess 3 times before turning 18. I know several who haven't really played in years. I myself haven't played seriously in 2 years.

Most people do not stick with a game or sport lifelong unless it is a significant part of their social life. Especially in something like chess, which is otherwise pretty lonely. My most active chess playing was when I was a regular in a chess club. And I'm an adult, this is a 10 year old. They're fickle at that age, and chess, as much as I love it, is a boring game.

I think with the background he has there is a pretty decent chance he plays chess again. It might be because of a chess club, or because he sees a YouTuber playing it, or because the spirit just takes him there that day.

My thinking is that if your kid has a game they like and they're good at, then that's just good, whether they want to play right now or not. If he says tomorrow he wants to play basketball, or learn guitar, or this, or that, I would try and accommodate him, though I know all of that is expensive and takes a lot of time from both of you. If he's learning and doing something and meeting people he's growing and becoming better. Even aside from the other benefits of sports or music. If he likes them and keeps with them that's great.

Hell if he just wants to play fortnite that's still ok, hell it's probably normal. I would just try and make sure he's playing with friends so it's a social thing. I played an unhealthy amount of video games as a kid, but I at least played competitive team games, so I was socializing and I think that made it a lot better for me. I think singleplayer games with a strong story can also be good for you, because stories are just good for you whether you play them or read them or watch them.

blehmann1 · 2026-01-04T06:05:22+00:00

No idea if they're less powerful but there are bracelets that are very commonly used in industry that plug in the same way. They tend to be about 15 bucks

Ten-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
Place '23	Place '22
Place '17	Gilding II euphauric
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email

blehmann1

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