I’m honestly not sure why he doesn’t just have all of SCOTUS murdered, and if anyone in Congress moves against him, have then eliminated as well. Do Trump in, whole he’s at it. Full on blood bath.

Tell me why not?

Wireguard really changed the landscape, for me, and my entire approach to networking. Suddenly, VPNs became fast and easy, and where previously impractical for casual (hobbyist) admins, it made creating enterprise-grade secure subnets easy. It’s astonishingly stable and reliable, such that my initial concerns about cutting off all access except through the VPN - once a truly nerve-wracking concept - is now a no-brainer. It’s made my network administration easier and more secure. My firewalls are simpler.

Wireguard is one of the biggest high-impact, low-visibility networking game changers I’ve seen in decades.

He says thank you, and you’re pretty, too.

Wages not tracking with costs and inflation is certainly a problem; corporate America and, specifically, Wall Street investors reaping the most benefits from growth is a cancerous tumor that will sink the country if not fixed. However, trade jobs are essential to the country. Not everyone gets their mommy to but them a car and pay for their degree. Not everyone wants to go to college, get a white collar job, and sit in a cubicle for the rest of their lives.

If you’re not getting paid enough, Unionize.

I love Zoey.

But do not tell my boys. One would probably love Zoey, too - he’s a cat’s cat, and a white-ish version of Zoey - but the other is fantastically jealous.

Friendly, pretty, outgoing, and wants to be involved in anything anyone is doing:

That tracks.

Cats are purely carnivorous. And yet we’ve had cats who’d regularly eat:

• lettuce
• potato chips
• popcorn
• canteloupe
• grass
• Hershey’s Kisses

The lettuce thing was a kitten phase; she stopped doing it as she got older. Potato chips and popcorn are “cheat” foods; most of the chips we eat have MSG, which is the “meat” flavor, and we put seasoning with MSG and nutritional yeast on our popcorn, so they probably think they’re getting meat. I’ve read many cats like cantaloupe; something in it tastes like meat, and it’s pretty common. Grass, well… I don’t know. Supposedly they eat it as an emetic, but this one just gnoshes on it and never throws it up. We have to keep a small lawn in the house for him; he’s just a weirdo.

The Hershey’s Kisses thing was odd. I know chocolate is toxic for cats, and we’d try to keep it away from him, but he’d find the bowl wherever we put it, pull one with carefully unwrap it, and eat the chocolate. He’d eat one or two at a time, and never seemed to suffer any ill effects from it. We’d re-hide the bowl, and when we discovered the wrappers around the house we knew he’d found it again. It was only around Christmas; Kisses in a bowl at Christmas was something my wife was brought up with. Anyway, strange cat.

Oh! We had another who’d dig through the trash for fast food wrappers and eat them. The paper. I think that’s because he was an older adoption and had lived on the streets and learned to live out of trash cans, though.

This has nothing to do with owls, but there’s a pure carnivore parallel and it makes me wonder. Are there owl individuals who pick up a taste for something omnivorous somehow?

I set up a wireguard VPN network between my computers and servers, and then firewalled off all services except Wireguard, and a few services on one server. That one server is my weak point, but even it has sshd firewalled off except through the Wireguard subnet.

It’s stupidly easy to set up WG subnetworks. I’m not a networking guy, and it was trivial for me to do. If u can run an ssh server, you can set up a Wireguard subnet: just do it.

Will owls eat pears, or are they strictly carnivorous?

The most perfect and delicious of pears, even! Asian pears are manna.

I make no excuses. We’ve seen what Trump presidencies look like; the last was bumbling and did massive damage to civil rights, the next won’t be. Project 2025 ensures that.

Biden’s biggest crime has been supporting Israel. His presidency was categorically and measurably better for the US than Trump’s. Aside from Palestine, he wasn’t a bad president. Now, if Trump wasn’t saying that Israel isn’t going far enough; if Trump were supporting Palestine, then there’d be something to talk about. But he isn’t, and he did terrible things to our country while in charge, and should never be allowed near the White House again.

The word has negative connotations, but I stand by it. I an not saying there result isn’t stronger, but if you extend cultural mixing out to the maximum - say humans and the planet survives another thousand years, and global travel is no harder than traveling to the next town over - what you end up with is homogeneity, and this would be sad, I think. Imagine it: the entire world speaking some pidgin derivative mashup of Mandarin, English, and Hindi, with essentially the same culture everywhere on the planet. Just as has already happened, languages are lost, because nobody speaks them natively anymore. All that’s left of the original cultures are some UNESCO sites and preserved old movies. I can’t say the world wouldn’t be stronger for it, but in the process, something irrecoverable is lost.

I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

Did they watch the same debate that I did?

Because people fear having their culture and race replaced by immigrants. Even if they’re not overtly racist, few people wish to become a minority in “their own country.”

The US is famously a melting pot, and yet we still have a bunch of descendants of white immigrants from Europe who fear that South Americans will take over; that Mexican culture will replace good old-fashioned hodge-podge Western European culture. That their language will become less dominant. That they’ll find themselves strangers in their own country.

It’s usually an indistinct fear. It seems obvious from the verbiage in the dog-whistles, but white European immigrant descendants don’t want to become second-class.

Now, if we treated our own minorities well, they wouldn’t be so afraid. They wouldn’t be afraid that they’d be the ones with Hispanic cops kneeling on their necks; or that Hispanic immigrants would be living in giant homes and they’d themselves be the ones having to eak out a living as seasonal workers.

I think it’s not despicable to want to preserve your cultural heritage, your cultural language, and to have your country legislated with the values you grew up with; but people react poorly when they think it’s happening.

What I most despise in the Republicans in the US is that they’re advocating for preserving cultural values that never existed broadly in the US. The closest subculture to what they’re pushing is a return to the Confederate South: religion, and white supremacy. The Confederates got their asses handed to them, but the racist fuckers never gave up their values, most most Americans are blind to what their real agenda is. And they’ve been good insurgents, cleverly taking advantage of weak areas in our democracy to return power to a minority: themselves. It’s been said and it’s true: if America was a true democracy and we selected leaders by popular vote, no Republican under their current platform would ever be president again.

Anyway, getting back to your question: immigrants bring their own culture with them, and very few completely abandon it and adopt the culture and language of their new country. This dilutes the host country’s native culture, and people are afraid of that. In the US, it’s the highest form of hypocrisy, because our native culture displaced the indigenous culture, and now we’re afraid of someone else doing the same to us.

Dude I mean in this in the most genuine, kind way

No offense taken.

a significant aspect of being a successful programmer is using the tools in your environment.

If I were a professional programmer, I’d be doing this. I was a professional software engineer for 20 years before I took a management role, then managed software teams, and then organizations, for another decade before I chose to do something else. One of the things I decided was that I wasn’t going to work on, or with, technology I didn’t like anymore - as long as I had any choice, and since all my software development is voluntary pet projects, I’m able to do this. It has, in the aggregate, greatly improved my mental well-being to not have to work with crap anymore. I mostly avoided having to touch Windows in decades; I had only a brief brush with JavaScript that left only minor scarring, and with WASM there’s every hope I can even do web-based projects should I get the itch without killing brain cells with JS. Having spent years with C++ and decades programming Java, I’m convinced that I’ve learned enough about what’s horrible in software, and don’t really need to spend more time being taught about new ways developers can screw up the software engineering space. SOAP alone covered most of the bases of bad design and architecture.

So now, I get to select where I play. I can focus on learning new things that I think are good, rather than being forced to figure out ways to work around the bad.

My original plea was simply: if you can use defacto standards, please do.

If you can’t do something without bringing in your Tool of Choice you’re artificially limiting yourself.

Insofar as the technology limits me in what’s available, absolutely. Mainly, though, I choose to focus on supporting projects and products that support standards. If a project wants to be a Special Flower and use BrainFuck as it’s tooling language, good for them! But I’m going to look for alternatives.

I would prefer, however, that projects - when they’re using software that could be more standards compliant by using a few more MB, and have the space to do so, simply be compliant and ship something less stripped down.

In this case you’re myopically focused on not even a specific language, but the language agnostic feature of regex capture groups.

To be precise, I’m focused on the fact that, in a toolset where usually at least one of many standard tools provides a functionality, none do. I’m not complaining that ash doesn’t support regexp string matching with groups; in complaining that BB was compiled such that none of the standard tools do.

You should be asking yourself if there’s any other way to accomplish your goal without this (spoiler: there are probably dozens of alternatives)

Yes. I tried 3 or 4 of the standard, usual ways to break out and parse data. My next attempt was going to resort to field cutting, hoping that that also hadn’t been stripped out.

Eventually, I hacked a solution together in Lua, which will be useless the next time I encounter a stripped down BB that isn’t in OpenWRT, and I’ll have to waste time trying to work around broken tooling again.

Yup!

On the OpenWRT issue, I ended up hacking a solution up in Lua, which won’t help the next time I encounter an issue with a limited BB in something that isn’t OpenWRT. And, in a month I won’t remember the tiny bit of Lua I learned, because this is the first and probably last time I’ll be forced to use it.

Nothing against Lua, per se; I’d just prefer to keep working with ubiquitous standards for simple stuff, and use strongly typed compiled languages for anything nontrivial.

It’s the angle. Can you hold your weight with your arms straight out to the sides? Sure, you can do push-ups, but can you do this?

or this?

Most people can’t.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. But I also want a president who’s not just going to take amphetamines so he can perform well past his bed time.

I’m not saying either of these guys is my first choice. I’m just saying that it was late, Biden had a cold, and he was probably taking Nyquil or something - he would want to be up there sneezing and blowing his nose. If you compare his performance in the debate to his speech in N Carolina, he certainly wasn’t at his peak. Good knows how much cocaine Trump had snorted before the debate.

Yeah. When I think of Linux, I think of the terminal. It’s the only constant over the years.

My septagenarian father thinks Linux looks like Linux Mint, because that’s what I first set up for him, and that’s what I walked him through installing on a new computer.

Viva la difference.