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cybervegan

99 karma · joined July 25, 2017

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cybervegan··on Toothpaste Null-Terminator
This wouldn't work in a situation where not everyone agrees to abide by the arbitrary rule of using toothpaste (or whatever) in as specific order. In a computer's memory, or storage media, the ordering is intrinsic, but in your bathroom cupboard it is not, and would have to be enforced by convention or some other contrivance. If someone decided they wanted to open the "special" one because they prefer it, or don't care about your weird toothpaste order kink, it all breaks down.

Not all things we do on computers translate well to meatspace.

cybervegan··on Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?
First experienced in 1989 on Xenix grep, later more on SunOS (5 I think) in the early 90's, then Linux in the mid 90's.
cybervegan··on Initial details about why CrowdStrike's CSAgent.sys crashed
Boy is crowdstrike's software going to get seriously fuzz tested now. All their vulns will be on public display in the next week or so.
cybervegan··on Inside the Three-Way Race to Create the Most Widely Used Laser
Yeah I saw that too - I'm sure they meant gerManium, but it's cool to think I could turn my geranium plant into a transistor! Of course, it would be a PNP transistor - Pink N Pretty.
cybervegan··on Firing Myself
There's a lot of responsibility there resting on your superiors because they weren't following "best practises". Sure you fucked up, but if they had backups, it wouldn't have been such a disaster, and if you had a Dev environment to test against, it would have been a non-issue entirely. Straight out of Uni, you shouldn't have been expected to know that, but I bet you grew as a consequence.
cybervegan··on Ask HN: Tell me your stories of taking lower paid work to be happier
I left a decently paid managed service 3rd line linux/foss admin position in 2019 to do projects with a friend. The pandemic happened, and things changed and got weird. I did a stint as a contractor again for nearly a year, doing deskside and infrastructure support (general IT dogsbody) part time, for a small startup; after they got bought out I ended up doing part time digital service delivery (laptops and mobile device support with a bit of MS stack admin). Much lower stress levels and more predictable hours. Not looking back.
cybervegan··on Inclusive Sans: Text font designed for accessibility and readability
Any reason why "Pp" is missing from the typeface sampler?
cybervegan··on Juice – Oberon JIT browser plugin (1996)
I actually used that a bit at the time, but it the web was too young and browsers and HTML were too immature to support it well.
cybervegan··on I Have No Mobile-Friendly Pages
Looks like he's done some interesting stuff, but: Some of his views I can't stand: No gun control; No freedom from religion; Contradictory views like "Government must not adopt policies that are offensive to any religion" - how does that work where two all options are offensive to some religion?

Sounds like a conservative kook.

cybervegan··on The Married Introvert
Welcome to the fold... though I bring my own nuances.

Backstory: I'm a late-diagnosed Aspie, 56 in a couple of weeks, only diagnosed in my mid 40's. Had a small number of long-term relationships, and had trouble understanding why the earlier ones ended, until I was diagnosed. Nerdy as a kid, with few friends. Avid D&D player until my early 20's (same set of low maintenance friends, with a well understood social contract). Computer geek; SciFi nerd; etc.

I am the architypical introvert - uncomfortable in large social gatherings. I went for nearly 10 years without anyone other than my partner that I could call a friend, but was "mostly happy with my own company". Most "friends" were partners of my partner's frienship circle.

About 5 years ago, I started up a makerspace, and kind of "instantly" gained a friendship circle in a town where I basically knew nobody, and that was "fine" but occasionally tiring, until this summer when I basically burnt out and quit. I still have some of the friends, but I'm seeing far less of them now we have no common interest in the makerspace. I'm still trying to work out what my "next big thing" will be. At least I now know how to go about starting whatever it will be up...

But I think the main issue is that I find the social aspect really tiring (I think it's masking fatigue). I just can't handle large amounts of the social stuff. Fortunately, my current partner of about 15 years is very supportive and understanding, and decidedly not introverted.

cybervegan··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
I was wondering when someone would cite this: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

But since nobody else seems to have done so, I will. Globally, names don't follow any common format or concept at all that you can reduce to a formula. My takeaway is that it's best to have a free-format "full name" field, and another "preferred name" field so you can allow people to choose how to be referred to.

cybervegan··on Floppy Disk Museum on a Bootable Floppy serving from a 286 PC
"... to 750 KB for the largest capacity Zip disk." I think they meant "750 MB".
cybervegan··on Sydney CBD is bringing back pedestrian “beg buttons”
Sorry dude, it says exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
cybervegan··on Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop
Pity it's only available as a tarball or .flatpak. I've never got flatpak to work before, and it doesn't work this time either. :-(
cybervegan··on Another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis
This little eggcorn in the article made me chuckle "little to know" (should be "little to no").
cybervegan··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2022)
SEEKING WORK | UK Remote | Part-time

Tech: Linux, FreeBSD, Python, BASH, Shell, GOLANG, C/C++, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Perl, PHP, HTML, Apache, NGINX, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NAGIOS...

Email: andy [dot] darcy [dot] jewell [at] gmail [dot] com

About: I'm a seasoned Linux admin and scripter/coder with literal decades of experience in the IT industry. I can do maintenance on your Linux server - esp Debian or RHEL derivatives, write utility or automation scripts for your business processes or write custom plugins for your vertical web app. I'm also pretty handy with tiny systems like Arduino and RPi.

cybervegan··on Telford Makerspace needs your help with our crowdfunder please
Please, denizens of HackerNews, I hate to beg, but we really need all the help we can get to bring this amazing resource to the people of Telford (in the UK). If you can help - even with a small donation - we would really appreciate it. I know you guys are renowned for helping out with needy projects, and you're the best online community I know of that shares our love of technology and innovation more than any other.

We are a small, local charity, and this is a massive step for us - we just need a boost to assure our future!

cybervegan··on Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
I do - it makes me read at about 1/10th the speed I normally do. Hate it.
cybervegan··on Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
Me too, I find it absolutely terrible. I read it at about 10% of the speed I usually read. In the sample I saw, I could read the plain version in a few seconds, but I just couldn't make any headway with the highlighted version. I'm used to syntax highlighting, which doesn't slow me down at all (might make in fact make reading code faster) but this just throws me for a loop.
cybervegan··on Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
No, you're not. I can't even read it. I can read colour-coded (i.e. syntax highlighted) text perfectly well though. This just completely shorts out my reading - might as well be hieroglyphics to me.
cybervegan··on Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
This simply doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I'm Autistic, but I can't even read text highlighted in this way. A friend posted up a side-by side example, and I couldn't read the first line in the time it took me to read the whole, plain passage. My eye simply won't follow the line - maybe I am getting distracted by the odd formatting. As a coder - used to syntax highlighting - this was very surprising, but for me, this is absolutely terrible.
cybervegan··on Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons
That's so unethical - and Alan Sugar is held up as an example of a business genius?
cybervegan··on Ask HN: I'm making like 0 friends at college, how to fix it?
There's a lot of good advice in that, but some of it would be too regimented for me, and I've never been able to handle too many social activities in a short period of time.
cybervegan··on Ask HN: I'm making like 0 friends at college, how to fix it?
What I have found works, is joining a group (club, volunteers group, sports team or whatever sparks your interest), and going as regularly as your schedule allows. In particular, help people out and do nice things like bring cookies or cakes (home-made is best if you can do it). Friendship takes effort, and requires maintenance.

I moved away from my home city about 20 years ago, and outside of work, I had no real friends apart from my wife, for about 10 years. Previously, I'd generally just "shared" my partner's friendship circles but this isn't ideal, as I've found don't have many interests in common with most of my partner's friends, which is awkward. I didn't consider myself isolated, or even recognise a yearning for friends in myself, but it does take a psychological toll.

I accidentally solved this problem by forming a makerspace and later, repair cafe - and this has bloomed into a decent, manageable (for me) friendship circle. I'm still not a massive party-goer, but then I'm in my 50s, so that's probably normal!

cybervegan··on Ask HN: I'm making like 0 friends at college, how to fix it?
As an autistic person (and I'm not suggesting OP is also an aspie), I can say that all the advice that amounts to "just put yourself out there" is worse than useless; you only see things the way you do because those interactions come naturally to you, and you instinctively know how to process and act on them. People who are socially awkward are often unable to do this. It's like saying to someone who is not good a maths, "Having trouble with arithmetic? Just calculate harder!"
cybervegan··on How to Deal with Complexity Like a Pilot (Part 1)
That's great, but it seems to ignore the fact that lack of communication during difficult manoeuvres (like getting the website back online) is often seen as a critical failure by the client to not keep them updated on progress. Sometimes you have to fly solo, and then you have to provide the updates yourself. If you have the privilege of having a wingman, they can do the comms for you, but in many cases, you don't.
cybervegan··on The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings [pdf]
As an autistic person, I think this is a useful lesson for the neurotypical population on what we go through in daily life. Zoom fatigue seems to be very much like the social fatigue aspies tend to experience - where non-verbal cues are scrambled and hard to interpret to the point you spend a large amount of mental energy to try to compensate.

Welcome to our world, "normies" :-).

cybervegan··on UK Rail services to come under unified state control
OP's URL doesn't work for me, but the article is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

cybervegan··on Shop Class as Soulcraft (2006)
Wow - such negative responses. Seems like bitterness or jealousy to me. Makerspaces aren't primarily about tools but more about community and skill sharing for the good of the local community. We do things together and at my local space, we are raring to go once lock-down here in the UK eases. Our user base has basically doubled over the pandemic, and we've done loads of collaborative (but remote) projects together over the past year, including making PPE for healthcare workers, helping local groups with props for events, xmas gift drives, and member's competitions.
cybervegan··on LeoCAD 21.03
Just gave this a try... why is it that when you rotate a brick, the x,y,z movement also rotates with it? What I mean is that once you have rotated a 2x4 brick 90 degrees clockwise, when trying to position that part, moving the mouse left moves the part forwards, moving it forwards moves the part right and so on. That makes no sense - surely it's a bug?
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