kody

Edit: the no-fly list as a DHS entity, which I just learned about, is absolute horseshit. I assumed no-fly lists were per airline and I stand corrected.

Terrorism is an over-applied label that is used to stoke FUD and expand executive power; yep I agree with that and I don’t use the term lightly.

Joining an organized movement to overturn a legal democratic election, breaking into the capitol, armed, and bludgeoning an officer to death is terrorism and a private company has every right to deny these people the privilege of flying on their airlines.

Terrorists are usually added to no-fly lists, yeah?

I wrote a Python script to post Markdown files to Confluence but ran into similar problems with retrieving and editing existing documents.

Very nice! I've tried to switch over to a terminal-based workflow but Qt Creator, VS Code, and Firefox for Atlassian products have been the main holdouts for me. I can't see myself moving away from Qt Creator, but I would kill for an ncurses app for editing Confluence pages and reviewing pull requests without 1200ms between every. single. click.

At the very least this article has given me the itch to dust off the old dotfiles and start fiddling with zsh again!

If I could change one phrase in the developer vernacular it’s MVP to <Justifiably/Actually> Useful Product. MVP so often manifests as “a product that we need to deploy NOW, definitely won’t scale, but it exists and therefore is superior to nonexistent solutions”.

Right. I grew up hearing that COBOL and Fortran devs would become extinct and extremely valuable in my lifetime.

The Economist and Real Simple. Great recipes in the latter.

As someone who has never used an Adobe product (other than read-only), you get used to it and learn to love it.

The first time I downloaded the GIMP was when I realized that MS Paint wouldn’t cut it for making convincing Runescape “fakes”. I was too chicken to pirate Photoshop but knew that I needed better tools to do what I needed. I went on to use the GIMP to make Runescape forum signatures (proud member of $clan, $skill in woodcutting, etc). That was the first time I had people PMing me, asking me to make something for them. The first time I “sold” anything. A thrill I don’t experience anymore.

I went on to use the GIMP to make textures for Morrowind mods, diagrams and design mockups in college, and my wedding invitations.

Today I use the GIMP to design software architecture diagrams, mockups, and my D&D battlemaps.

I don’t mean to beat the dead Free Software horse, but this tool was indispensable for my creative young self. I’m gonna go give them some money now for the first time in 15 years of using the software. Thanks for sharing this.

Anecdotally, all of my father friends felt the exact same way.

My wife and I are working from home and raising our 6 month old daughter, and the -only- distraction that brings me to a grinding halt is my daughter's crying. Even with noise-cancelling headphones, if I hear any crying at all I feel an incredible emotional reaction that totally prevents me from focusing on work until she's calm and happy again. I'm also glad to read that there's a natural (hormonal?) explanation for the disproportionate effect that her crying has on me.

I don't see "so and so Liked this tweet" in my feed, and I only see get a handful of promoted tweets, so it feels like they've eased up on adding noise to our feeds. I also set my location (arbitrarily) to Cook Islands, and now my "$LocalArea trends" widget is empty (thank God), so with aggressive culling I now have a Twitter feed that shows me what I asked to see.

I have found marriage & kids to be a good litmus test for character quality. If you say 'no' to a request and they blame the 'ball and chain', red flag.

So the first term I searched was "cognitive". Search for it yourself, and click the first result.

Go back and click "cached".

That was a cool experience.

By choice?

Great point. I hadn’t considered that at all.

Yeah, in my experience the difference between 8 and 10 hour workdays were negligible (except certain times of year where I'd get to my desk before sunrise and leave well after sunset). Anything I'd do with my "extra" 2 hours per day I'd happily batch into my free Friday.

Oh for sure. I'd bet that people working 4x9s or even 4x8s are equally/more productive as 4x10s and 5x8s and are happier. But if I'm choosing between 4x10 and 5x8 I'd take 4x10 any day.

Yeah that sounds way too inconsistent on a weekly basis for me

I agree that it's hard for some people (managers) to see a relaxed, happy person and believe that they're also totally productive.

I don't blame them either; I feel like the image of overly-caffeinated, stressed-out people is embedded in our collective consciousness as representative of High Productivity and our lizard brains can't seem to be able to reconcile that with the data that is saying "relaxed people who make enough money, are treated well, and have the freedom to live satisfactory lives outside the office will most probably be more productive, focused, and effective at work."

I worked 4x10s when I worked for the Army and it was awesome. 3 day weekends take off so much pressure, and come Sunday night I was starting to feel the itch to get back into work rather than the dreadful feeling that I 'wasted' my weekend. The only work experience that was better than this was 100% flexibility to work remotely and/or flex hours.

So there's my anecdata for you :)

Do you have any recommended reading on the 'history of packaging'? That sounds really interesting.

I just tried searching for a file with Spotlight and it found the file by name.

It's also interesting how most of the comments disagree with that one, yet it still has positive upvotes.

Or are trying to follow fads so they're more employable (resume-driven development?) Which is a strategy I am not criticizing in the slightest. It can suck when it means the whole team has to learn the fad framework, though.

"Don't feed the trolls" has been my strategy for as long as I've been on the web, but what disconcerts me the most these days is the doxing and death threats. A reporter can simply retweet a news article and instantly be flooded with death threats and see their address posted to the web. There's no way I could tell that person "don't feed the trolls". That's a real problem with real life consequences, and I have no clue how you could begin to solve it, aside from total anonymity.

Good point. I was framing the conversation with 4chan as a whole, not just /b/. Big difference.

We definitely had different experiences, then! I would say most forums, even a lot of the mainstream ones, tolerated some level of 4channess. Facepunch forums ~2009 was the first time I thought "wait, are these guys actually Nazis or just think it's hilarious to act like they are?" Stickpage.com forums ~2005 taught me an important lesson in not clicking URLs from domains I don't trust -- ESPECIALLY if they end in 'hello.jpg'.

Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.

I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.

It really is interesting that our anecdotes can be so different. I'm assuming you're older than me (25) since you mention the pre-web internet, so I'd also guess that by the time you were on the web/pre-web internet you would've had a more developed filter than I.

My introduction to the web progressed roughly with watching my dad use BBS -> playing Neopets and Runescape -> becoming very involved with Runescape forums -> running a Runescape forum (first introduction to moderating user-submitted content at the age of 10. Yeah...) -> getting involved with video game modding communities, which meant I was spending all my free time browsing forums, following every link, completely absorbed by everything the early web's computer game communities churned out.

My experience probably would've been very different if I hadn't been able to get around the parental controls my parents used, or if I had been interested in different hobbies with a more approachable web presence.

I've been nostalgic for the "old web" lately, but I'm also very, very grateful that I haven't clicked on an inconspicuous URL that turned out to be a jumpscare, virus, weird porn, or gore in quite a while.

EDIT: I don't want to imply that the Disturbing Web == Videogame Web; that just happened to be my experience.

When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.