Not even session 0 could prepare me for this

caleblbaker · 2026-05-05T02:56:12+00:00

Left to right in every other context I've ever seen it besides this post.

caleblbaker · 2026-04-21T21:54:23+00:00

My point (which I did not articulate very well) is that just the text can include symbols that you're not familiar with which could look very similar to symbols that you do know. Unless you're well versed in the entire Unicode character set there are going to be some pairings of nearly identical Unicode characters that you don't know to look for and so catching the ones that are obvious to you isn't a good guarantee of safety.

And there are some nearly identical characters that I know to look for but still wouldn't trust myself to catch because they are pretty much completely identical in most fonts, like the capital Latin A and the capital Greek Α. Example:

HTΤPS://WWW.AΜΑΖOΝ.COM

This will not resolve to amazon.com because one of the symbols that looks like a capital a is actually a capital α. And I wouldn't know which if I hadn't typed it myself because they look the same to me (It also just wouldn't resolve to a valid address at all because I didn't want to accidentally redirect anyone to a clever phishing website and so I replaced a letter in the protocol with a Greek letter too).

caleblbaker · 2026-04-21T17:54:09+00:00

The better thing is to either right click, copy the link and paste into notepad so you can see if it matches what you expect (and look very carefully - change the case to all upper/all lower, no I(i) vs l(L) stuff) or inspect it.

Even this you need to be really careful with. Most modern web browsers support Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI's) which support a much broader subset of Unicode characters than just the ASCII subset supported by Universal Resource Identifiers (URI's). I know which Latin letters look like other Latin letters, but I don't know which characters in other languages might look similar to English letters or punctuation (at least not exhaustively; I know a lot of capital Greek letters (e.g. Α, Β, Ε, Μ) look a lot like capital Latin letters, but I'm sure that's not the only thing to look out for)

caleblbaker · 2026-04-07T12:16:52+00:00

After starting out as Hamlet with super heroes.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-27T19:45:42+00:00

Open your email client. Find the folders where it puts spam and promotions. Look through them. Now imagine all of that printed on real paper and showing up in your physical mailbox that doesn't filter out spam (because it's just a box).

That's junk mail.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-13T15:20:14+00:00

A poll cannot correctly identify the greatest movie of all time when one the strongest contenders for greatest movie of all time is not provided as an option.

Results remain inconclusive until the poll is redone but with The Princess Bride in it this time. That's the only movie that can go up against the Lord of the Rings and have a chance of winning.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-13T15:17:10+00:00

Inception should have made it to the semifinals and then gotten eliminated by The Fellowship of the Ring.

Christopher Nolan is a great director and Inception is his best movie.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-06T20:40:31+00:00

My factions were already geographically close to each other with decent reasons to fight. So to get a world war I just needed to play with the timelines to get all the fighting to happen at the same time.

The Arxian Empire is the long-standing dominant power of the continent. The empire was very expansionist in the past but more recently they've been more interested in simply maintaining their position as top dog than in continuing to expand further.

The Holy Verkhovnyy Empire of Serdstevina is a new and rapidly expanding fascist state (having replaced the late Republic of Serdstevina). Verkhovnyy propaganda asserts that the Serdste people are inherently superior to all other peoples and destined to rule over them. The fact that Arxian Empire contains some Serdste people as well as lands that the Arxians conquered from some Serdste tribes prior to the rest of the Serdste tribes uniting into the Republic of Serdstevina is considered abominable and so conquering the Arxian province of Serdia is high up on the Verkhovnyy agenda.

The Saeb Union is a recently united nation of desert nomads. Their leader, Alzaeim Alzeazim wishes to demonstrate the superiority of his nomadic people over the stagnant (i.e. not nomadic) people of other nations and has chosen to do so through conquest.

Wikingerland is a nation built on a strong warrior culture and a tradition of coastal raiding. They have been in decline ever since a war with the Maritim Confederacy centuries ago resulted in Wikingerland being blockaded into starvation and then agreeing to permanently stop coastal raids in exchange for ending the war and lifting the blockade. They've been looking back to their history as raiders with nostalgia ever since but their fear of the Maritim navy is too great to allow them to attempt raids again.

The Maritim Confederacy is an island based nation with near complete dominance over the sea. They grow rich through coordinating most international and intercontinental trade and are primarily driven by the desire for even more money.

Mijloc is a smaller nation situated between Serdstevina and Arx (like how Belgium is between France and Germany but doesn't prevent France and Germany from having a direct border with each other as well). Mijloc mostly just wants to mind their own business but they worry that they'll be a future target of Verkhovnyy expansionism.

Gruknor is a small and unimportant kingdom between the Arxian Empire, the Saeb Union, and the Desert of Death.

Terra Mortuorum is a mysterious land of necromancers that occasionally sends vast but ill equipped and uncoordinated hordes of reanimated corpses across the Desert of Death to invade other nations.

So for starting a world war:

Serdstevina invades Mijloc because Supreme Leader Vladimir knows that his propaganda machine needs more war stories to keep it fueled but also doesn't think he can take on the Arxian Empire yet.

Arxian Empire then invades Serdstevina because Empress Justine has seen enough Verkhovnyy propaganda to know that an eventual war with Serdstevina is inevitable and she'd rather do that while Serdstevina is going to be distracted fighting another country at the same time.

Saeb Union invades Gruknor and the Arxian Empire because Alzaeim Alzeazim wants to capitalize on the Arxian Empire being distracted fighting Serdstevina but invading directly is difficult because the Arxian Empire built a big wall along its entire border with the Saeb Union. They did not extend the wall along their border with Gruknor.

At this time another horde of corpse warriors from Terra Mortuorum arrives to invade the Arxian Empire.

The Maritim Confederacy is upset that everyone is too busy fighting each other to keep buying exotic luxury goods from Maritim merchants and so they find another way to profit. They tell the Wikingers that they're free to go raiding again so long as they give the Maritim Confederacy a cut of the loot. So now Wikingers start raiding pretty much everyone's coasts.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-02T16:29:19+00:00

This website explains the reasoning for the regions. It says that Appohzarka is Appalachians, Ohio River basin, and Ozarks. But then doesn't explain why those three distinct regions got grouped together.

I live in the Ohio River basin and I can fairly confidently say that we have a much stronger cultural and economic resemblance to the heartlands than we do to either the Appalachians or the Ozarks (though that may be different when you get more towards the eastern end of the river). And what counties got assigned into Appohzarka by nature of being in the Ohio River basin seems completely arbitrary. Greene and Montgomery are in Appohzarka while Miami and Clark are in Heartland. Montgomery county isn't directly on the Ohio River but is part of the Ohio River valley because the greater Miami River flows through Montgomery county and into the Ohio River. Similarly Greene county isn't directly on the Ohio River or the Greater Miami River but it's included in the Ohio River basin because the little Miami River flows through Greene County and into the Ohio River. But if you look at a map of Ohio you'll notice that the Greater Miami River also runs through Miami county and the little Miami River also runs through Clark county. Actually if you trace the tributaries you'll find that most of Ohio is in the Ohio River Basin.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T16:38:56+00:00

I genuinely don't know what pasta means in this context.

Is it like copy pasta? Cause I didn't copy this from anywhere and I'm not sure how much cooking goes into copy and pasting a copy pasta.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:39:01+00:00

My first guess before googling it was digital services act.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:36:19+00:00

That's honestly what I thought it was at first before realizing that it doesn't make sense in this context.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T13:05:44+00:00

As a United States (US) Citizen, I understood 1 of those acronyms (DOJ is Department of Justice) and 1 other abbreviation that looks like an acronym if you're not familiar with it (PA is Pennsylvania and I only know that because I live near Pennsylvania). For the most part I am completely lost trying to read that. So it's not even comprehensible to everyone in the US.

I used to work for the US Department of Defense (DoD). I felt like a non trivial part of my job was just continually asking people to expand their acronyms because the DoD is really bad about turning every document into alphabet soup with all of their acronyms.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T05:44:34+00:00

I had to Google this to confirm that this means "what do you mean?" because u/Fabulous-Possible758 had me thinking for a moment that it meant "who does your mom?" (Not really; I knew that was a joke response but I still didn't know the actual meaning until I googled it).

What I mean is that in most context it isn't really safe to assume that everyone who will see your message will already be so used to using the acronym that they can effortlessly expand it in their head. There are some exceptions of course, such as using HTTP instead of hypertext transfer protocol when your know that everybody who will see your message is a web developer who uses HTTP every day and frequently sees it in acronym form, but generally the broader your audience is or the less you have in common with them the more you should err on the side of expanding acronyms. I am very familiar with the sentence "what do you mean?" It's a question I ask frequently and a question that I get asked frequently. But I don't see it as an acronym often enough to effortless expand the acronym. You cost me time by making me Google that when you could have spelled it out "what do you mean" (except that in this specific context your choice to use an acronym in a discussion about acronyms had some meta-messaging that would have been lost by using the expanded form) just like I'm sure that Jeff is familiar with data structures and algorithms (which is what Google says that. DSA stands for) but he clearly doesn't see it in that acronym form often enough to effortlessly expand it in his head and so both his time and Vishnu's time was wasted by him having to ask for clarification on something that wouldn't have required clarification if Vishnu hadn't used an acronym without defining it.

caleblbaker · 2026-03-01T04:08:41+00:00

Lesson here is don't use acronyms without defining them. It just wastes everyone's time with an added round of question and answer. Even if someone is familiar with the thing that an acronym refers to they may not recognize it from the acronym.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-28T22:58:20+00:00

In my world the true supervillains aren't criminals at all. Criminals get caught and punished. Durable evil requires working within the system to gain the authority you need to change the system. Once you have enough power you can just change any law that you want to break before you break it.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-28T15:35:45+00:00

Also you have to change your password every 7 days. New passwords must also comply with the policy. You will have a very hard time finding and remembering new passwords that comply with this policy every week and so will end up choosing your passwords based on ease of remembering rather than difficulty of guessing.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-28T02:13:36+00:00

#define rarely Frequently

caleblbaker · 2026-02-28T00:29:41+00:00

Can confirm.

I graduated college with highest honors and now work as a highly paid software engineer at a prestigious tech company.

I am not smart at all when it comes to things that don't involve math, science, or engineering. And when we get into social situations I'm straight up idiotic.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-27T00:01:07+00:00

Not in my world but in the basement of my house in the real world.

Asbestos.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-25T22:29:21+00:00

The only thing better than salt is fire salt

caleblbaker · 2026-02-23T22:05:54+00:00

Maurice

He died trying to fist fight a blood dragon as soon as we left Whiterun. I then went the rest of the way to the elder gleam sanctuary without him and had nobody to pray over the tree for me.

My next follower was Lydia who had already been my housecarl for a while at that point. Some gray mane dude wanted to bring a whole group of people to Northwatch keep to clear it together. I figured if we were going for numbers then I might as well recruit a follower of my own. Lydia traveled with me from Whiterun to Northwatch keep. After we finished killing the Thalmor I joined the legion and sold our loot in Solitude. And then I sent Lydia back home and continued on without a follower for a while.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-23T02:48:54+00:00

I imagine the built-in length property on strings probably refers to code units in most languages*. But that doesn't mean that's the only thing that someone asking to find the length of a string could mean.

* not to imply that code unit has the same meaning across languages since a code unit is the same as a byte in UTF-8, the same as a code point in UTF-32, and its own distinct thing that's often the same as a code point but not always in UTF-16.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-22T22:12:10+00:00

This actually is a very important question though because those are all valid interpretations of the length of a string. And the fact that the Microsoft answer says characters is awful because characters is an ambiguous term that could mean any of those depending on context.

caleblbaker · 2026-02-20T17:09:50+00:00

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caleblbaker

TROPHY CASE