mdip

I've been advocating for this for 12 years, now. I figured it out by accident after watching my 2-year-old niece on a "balance bike" and was like "duh, no pedals!"

My 3-year-old and 5-year-old learned in one day and the "pedals off" part took 30-minutes to an hour (more for my youngest). For the first few years, every time someone would pass my 3-4 year old riding a two-wheeler without training wheels they'd stare in amazement and ask me how I taught her to do that. I'd explain "training wheels until they can pedal/steer, then pedals off for an hour until they're balancing, back on with a 'hold the seat and let go' and that's it". A couple of weeks later, I'd see that same child rolling down the sidewalk without training wheels. I taught every one of my nieces/nephews using the same technique. I've yet to find someone it doesn't work on.

Neither of my kids fell the first time. Both of them understood I'd be letting go on that "saddle holding/running part" at some point without telling them when. I just warned them "if you see I'm not there, DON'T PANIC(tm), because you've already been riding on your own for a while by then!" Every single kid had the same thing happen ... they'd see I'm a house behind them catching my breath, they'd get a look of terror in their eyes, the bike would "dip" a little and they'd catch it, then the look would change to a ridiculous grin as they realized "I did it!"

It was one of the best experiences as a Dad and I'll admit I choked up with each of my children when they nailed it, especially my autistic son who has a really hard time with anxiety/fear related to learning skills that might involve getting injured in the process.

I have to say that nothing in my life compared to having children. I have a 15 and a 17-year-old, today.

I think the biggest factor was the shift in self-preservation instinct. Before my son was born, I had "believed" that I'd be the kind of guy who -- barring alternatives -- would jump in front of a bullet, sacrificing my own life to save my child.

But I'd been on Earth for 29 years at that point and during that time, one of the things that's sort of wired into you is "avoid, at all costs, the path of projectiles fired from guns." Though I recognized that this sort of thing doesn't happen to the vast majority of people in my position, I'd wondered whether or not that instinct might kick in should that occasion ever occur.

Shortly after my son was born, after the haze of sleepless nights ended, I realized something -- really, everything -- had changed. Replaying that scenario in my head, I no longer worried at all about how I'd react. I knew that there would be no scenario, ever again, where my safety would take precedence over that of my son (and later, my daughter). It wasn't the complexity of knowing I would have an impossible time living with myself if I survived and my son had died; it was like my brain had rewired a new instinct.

And as any parent with children of sufficient age has probably experienced, it was tested time and again, though thankfully in much less serious ways. I remember teaching my daughter to ice skate at age 5 and upon watching her lose her balance, watching as my body lurched forward and dove under her, clumsily catching her and breaking her fall.

"Watching" is the way I describe it because I don't remember ever having a thought in advance of doing it nor any control over my body once it had made the inevitable choice. There was no planning, no strategy, no honest understanding that a guy who'd never slid into first base, dove to catch a football or been skilled in any way when it came to sports along with not being particularly good in a pair of hockey skates[0] had a greater chance of injuring myself in the fall than my daughter had of injuring herself in five layers of padded cloth falling a couple of feet to the ground. I remember the moment I'd "saved her" in triumph and the subsequent feeling of defeat during the hours spent in the ER diagnosing my fracture rib.

I often compare the kind of parent I thought I would be against the kind of parent I ultimately became. I had put off having kids mostly due to my sister-in-law's 4-year-old terror (who turned out just fine). I would be the strong, stern Dad who didn't let their child misbehave. I would temper this by being the loving, affectionate Dad that my own was. And while I became the latter, I quickly realized how much more effective it is to call out and encourage the good behavior. I learned to have "sit downs" and discuss the bad behavior but to be gracious with it. I understood how poorly I reacted to negativity as a child and how discouraging that was to my success when I saw my son respond like I did.

Somehow, through a divorce and ensuing turmoil in my own life, I managed to end up with two teenage children who love nothing more than to spend time with Dad. We have a less-than-perfect parenting time schedule that the laws in my state make impossible for me to change (despite my flexible schedule and my children's desires) but my kids would rather schedule friend time on Mom's clock and invite friends out with us on my time. My kids both call me every day after school and we talk, sometimes for hours. We play Fortnite five out of seven nights an evening -- a game I'd be unlikely to touch without them[1] but one I'm thankful that we "play on the same team" and use mostly for talking to one another over twelve miles.

I realized that up until about age 12, I could read their minds and understood them better than they knew themselves. Sometime in their teen years, I discovered that -- in some ways -- they are more brave, more honest and better children than I ever was at my best.

I remember thinking "I'm not going to push programming on them" because I really respected the fact that my Dad didn't push what he did on me -- he wasn't a programmer, but he supported my second love as if it were his own. And I remember how proud I was when my daughter signed up for programming class in 8th grade and yelled at me when I suggested she might enjoy "art" (her passion and offered at the same time) more "I'm NOT doing this for YOU, Dad!" That's my girl.

I think the biggest adjustment, though, is realizing that they are the entire reason I'm here. Every single thing I do comes with the question: "How does this affect them?" I might have looked at a man who behaved that way and thought "that's the kind of Dad I want to be" but I know there's nothing special about that with me -- it was a re-wiring. I fear my own death only in that I know how it would affect them were it to come suddenly in their young lives.

I, like most boys raised by stereo-typical "Family Ties" or "The Cosby Show" parents learned "men don't cry" and rarely had the temptation to do so until after they were born. Last month, "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" was released and I made it a point to get through it alone before watching it with my kids. I sobbed -- and I mean ugly cried -- through the whole thing sitting alone in my bedroom. I didn't do much better the second time with my kids[2]. I'm blessed that I've never lost my composure over my own life and its struggles but I can imagine how devastating and permanent losing one of my children would be.

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it would be like to have kids, I thought I had a lot figured out before I had them. There are few things I had more wrong in my life. Maybe it's possible for some to accurately imagine/prepare for the experience but I had absolutely no idea. I didn't have the arrogance to pray for the kind of teenagers I raised. My son and daughter both share so much of my brain, the way I process things and the like but they use it differently. When people say "your kids teach you as much as you teach them", that's what they mean. You watch your own struggles get adapted to differently, quite often better, than you did. My son processes things with deep empathy. My daughter errs toward logic and reasoned argument. More than a few occasions, I'm stuck thinking "dammit, they're right" and find myself demonstrating the act of apologizing. That's a humbling experience.

[0] This was a wet indoor rink and though I could handle myself OK on outdoor lake ice and was very proficient with inlines on cement or gravel.

[1] My gaming days are behind me, frankly.

[2] My Dad, who was -- in every way -- a stereotypical "He-Man" is exactly the same way.

IIRC there was something with the way zparseopts worked that caused it to not be able to parse the CLI I had setup -- I can't remember what the drawback was, though, and it's one of those one-liners I've just used blindly after I got it to work. :)

Uncoolness is a bigger factor than people give credit to. I remember when I was about ten years old my parents having a conversation with the new neighbors about cars which bled into how they'd "never ever own a Station Wagon." I remember the conversation because the neighbors had not fully moved in and the following day pulled up in their 80s (was it a Caprice Classic) Station Wagon complete with that weird wood door stripe (later making an appearance on minivans!) It even had a Barry Manilow bumper sticker on it!

My folks didn't do the Minivan, either, but it was just the 4 of us. Growing up, everyone I knew spoke about minivans like the Station Wagon. Ironically, all buying up things that are generally classified as Station Wagons, look exactly like station wagons but are now marketed as "crossovers." I doubt that would have worked in 1989, but style is fickle.

All of my data is anecdotal, but everyone I know that "chose to get a car that a Minivan would have served better" did so because "they hated minivans." Sure, they'd usually come up with a reason or two beyond "they're uncool" but the reasons were superficial and usually came with more sacrifices on the crossover/SUV side (not the least of which was fuel economy).

But one of the better driving experiences I had was in a fully loaded Chrysler Town and Country Anniversary Edition (the last year they made them) which I owned for a few years. It had a lot of power, reasonable fuel economy, was incredibly comfortable and had every convenience gadget you'd expect to find in a solid luxury car and then some. Plus, the kids can't slam a sliding door into a car or pole in the parking lot.

I have some pretty strong feelings against government bans of these kinds but I had an experience at ALDI, yesterday, that caused me to reflect a little bit on this.

Bear with me (if you wish) for a second ...

I love ALDI -- mine even has the new "self-checkout" which I thought "was the end of ALDI" -- one of my previous reasons I loved the place was their checkers are ridiculously fast and "except for bagging your own crap", getting out the store is fast. But the line at the checkout was long so I did it myself.

You bring your own bags or pay for theirs (with quality bags, most intended for long-term re-use, and I want to say they're $1 or $3, not $5 or $10 like is often the case for worse bags elsewhere but it's been a while). When I started regularly shopping there, I had forgotten mine, enough that I ended up buying a few and always went with the re-usable because they just weren't much more than their (otherwise fine/durable) disposables their large reusable ones seem massive[0]. It's been a while, but I never need more than 4, rarely more than 3 for a whole cart.

Yesterday's trip changed something for me: In self-checkout the big space they give you to set your groceries is sized such that my old bags fit perfectly, all 3, on the tray. Every one of these miserable places is making me self-check, anyway, but they've got the most hassle-free setup (camera-based, doesn't complain every time you things shift -- no weight sensors). But the simplest things make all the difference: I could set three bags next to one another, opened flat ready to receive scanned groceries. Mix in ALDIs ridiculously large barcodes and I've got "Fridge", "Freezer" and "Other" and I'm grabbing an item, whipping it across the "scanner", getting a "ding" 100% of the time and tossing most of the groceries into the appropriate bag. It was the least hassle checking out of a store I've experienced to date and part of why it was so convenient was "the re-usable bags". You already have to bag your crap at ALDI (you can finagle getting your bags setup in the receiving cart when the checker starts but nobody remembers in the chaos of the ALDI check-out experience) and moving your full cart over to "the table", setting your bags and the like is far less convenient (the table, for one, is higher -- the self-checkout bagging area is easier to get bags in/out of).

If every company executed on it like they do, I'd stop complaining about missing the "free plastic tissue things" that I don't know are appropriate to call "bags" any longer given how little they successfully carry. Especially since I could bring in an entire cart of groceries (with the bread and eggs resting gently on top) in three large bags with exactly zero concern that I'd be picking groceries up off of the lawn. As it stands, I can't believe I'll probably use ALDI self-checkout every trip despite my love for how well their checkers rip through a cart full of groceries. They introduce a handful of inconveniences but at a certain point, the problems they "solve with those inconveniences" end up making the experience better with them. For example, I can't think of a time I've gotten a busted up cart at an ALDI, or found an empty cart vestibule in an ALDI store that wasn't so packed I wouldn't want to go inside, anyway. The prices reflect the inconveniences generously enough that you don't spend as much time fussing over cost and just buy the things you want/need.

So while I don't support government bans like this (nor do I support it specifically in this case), if most companies handled "the experience of bringing my crap home" as well as ALDI does, I'd find little reason to complain about it.

[0] My daughter uses one to bring her mid-size (not small by any means) tower PC to and from our home weekly; same one for going on a year, now ... I check it every week when she packs it and the stitching looks great.

  > Nighttime is stigmatized

I think this is a stronger factor than we give credit to. For example, I live in a very suburban, low crime, safe area. Crime mostly centering around property theft.

When I was younger, a few cities got together and decided to rip up the tracks and turn them into nature trails. Everyone ... except for a handful of homeowners who's homes backed up to the tracks ... loved the idea. I was a roommate to the child of one of those homeowners and ended up paying way more attention to the whole thing than I should have.

The fear was that it provided an excellent route for thieves (back patio sliding doors, dirt-bike accessible path) which would be used to "sneak in and sneak out", making off with their Hi-Fi/probably Packard Bell desktop. I can't remember what eventually calmed the homeowners down (some weren't, of course) but I believe a lot of it amounted to a commitment to enforcement of dusk-to-dawn usage rules and some poles to make it impossible to travel the trail by car (dirt bikes are still a problem).

I could understand the argument back then[0]; most cameras on businesses were dummies due to the cost of "real ones" (let alone maintenance), weren't night vision and "the cover of darkness", when most are sleeping, is more favorable to crime (and more likely to have a higher percentage of intoxicated individuals).

I was surprised at how well prepared the county was for the NIMBY response, though. I recall some stat that basically pointed out "there hasn't been a murder in a decade or any violent crime that wasn't domestic, under ten home burglaries (where they "entered a home", i.e. not an unlocked car in the driveway with an expensive stereo) but as they went on and on the message was clear "you're not going to be robbed."

The puzzling thing, for me, though was -- they had abandoned railroad tracks behind their house, before. They were very usable as footpaths, already, except that "your average township citizen" didn't do that. None of it was properly posted/signed/fenced and part of the motivation for converting it was that the county spent money on maintenance[1] for something abandoned.

As I've gotten older, many things have changed. $5 IR cameras, LED lights so pervasive in the town that what qualifies as "night" these days, just ... isn't. It had always been the case that "having people generally around" is a good crime deterrent. Nobody wants to get caught. And, of course, if you're on foot or on e-bike, these trails make for extremely convenient paths to local businesses (avoiding a mile or two in distance in some cases due to the way they cut through things) so they'd be very convenient to use any time if you're not traveling by car.

Also ... as I've gotten older, I've reflected on the reactions of those families freaking out about "having the county give you back yard access to a multi-county hiking trail" in an area where "being concerned about being a criminal victim in your home should be right up there with other things that aren't going to happen to you" and I realize that the only way those trails would ever be opened at night is if they were draped in cameras front to back and actively monitored. And, unfortunately, there's probably a plan to drape those trails in cameras and have them actively monitored. And they'll still keep them shut at night, especially since just a few years ago there was a brutal murder/assault of a young girl "in an area that hadn't seen something even close to that in half a century or so" (in daylight with people nearby).

[0] The date escapes me but may have been as far back as the late 90s

[1] Mostly handling major problems like downed trees; but I understand it was mowed or otherwise maintained in a manner that made it "already a concern for crime that hadn't crept up in a decade" due to some weed or beetle or something like that.

Well, that'd be too easy, then, wouldn't it. :)

Due likely to extensions in Firefox, I get empty image previews on X (I believe I deleted my account several years ago). It's not always clear when there's more than one so when I clicked, I saw the response, not the reason. So the one other person on Earth with my wonky setup might get some help ;)

I had no idea what this was, so I did a quick search. They include a prompt in their job listings instructing LLMs to write Banana[0].

Thought I'd share in case others were lacking context. :)

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-ph/money/technology/i-m-a-tech-startu...

At a former employer of about 15K employees, two tools come to mind that allowed us to do this on every Windows host on our network[0].

It's an absolute necessity: you can manage Windows updates and a limited set of other updates via things like WSUS. Back when I was at this employer, Adobe Flash and Java plug-in attacks were our largest source of infection. The only way to reliably get those updates installed was to configure everything to run the installer if an old version was detected, and then find some other ways to get it to run.

To do this, we'd often resort to scripts/custom apps just to detect the installation correctly. Too often a machine would be vulnerable but something would keep it from showing up on various tools that limit checks to "Add/Remove Programs" entries or other mechanisms that might let a browser plug-in slip through, so we'd resort various methods all the way down to "inspecting the drive directory-by-directory" to find offending libraries.

We used a similar capability all the way back in the NIMDA days to deploy an in-house removal tool[1]

[0] Symantec Endpoint Protection and System Center Configuration Manager

[1] I worked at a large telecom at that time -- our IPS devices crashed our monitoring tool when the malware that immediately followed NIMDA landed. The result was a coworker and I dissecting/containing it and providing the findings to Trend Micro (our A/V vendor at the time) maybe 30 minutes before the news started breaking and several hours before they had anything that could detect it on their end.

Kind of a big thing most people don't understand about the various forms of "Business Insurance." For the most part, businesses have whatever insurance whatever they are doing requires them to have. Those requirements are set by laws/regulations applied to those entities and the various entities they want to do business with.

At every small shop I've worked when the topic of Business Insurance came up with one of the owners, the response was extremely negative -- basically summarized as "it's the most you will ever pay for something you won't ever be able to use".

It's funny how that works.

Leave FAANG and most internal developers at large corporations are running Windows. It wasn't until I started at a smaller shop that I found people regularly using Linux to do their jobs, usually in a dual-boot or with a virtual Windows install "just in case" but most never touched it.

I'm presently working supporting a .NET web app (some of which is "old .NET Framework) but my work machine runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I can't see that flying at the larger shops I have previously worked at. I'll admit, that might be different -- today -- I haven't worked at a large shop in more than a decade.

While I appreciate the advice and I've always felt my diet qualifies as an "eating disorder".

Here's the problem I have, though. I'm in my 40s and this is a circumstance of my life that I've experienced since I was about 12. When this topic comes up with family and friends, I hear "You can't eat like that, forever?" (I'm 40), "That'll catch up with you" (you've been saying that since I was 25), or "I used to be able to do that, too, when I was young." (you stopped being able to do that at 25). People of certain generations are so wired into the whole Cholesterol thing that even after I've mentioned my numbers they'll still reflex into "but, your heart!" (sometimes cutting themselves off with an "oh, I guess you're OK there, but ..." (and my HDLs and Triglycerides are fine, too)).

I have been seeing a therapist for about a decade now, and strongly recommend it to anyone. I started seeing one after a divorce over a decade ago and when that was worked out I started going about monthly despite not having a "thing going on right now that's prompting me to go", I find taking an hour a month and talking to a "disinterested third-party" about life is one of the reliable ways to get unfiltered truth. Obviously, it depends on the therapist and I've had a few that I feel like I'm paying someone to hear myself speak, but having someone who helps you see blind spots and give you honest feedback is worth the money when you find the right person. I never realized how valuable and rare that is. I had a realization a little ways into my career after I was living on my own: people will almost never tell you, directly, when something you're doing annoys, upsets or otherwise rubs them the wrong way[1]. If they do, you've been doing something so obnoxious to that person for so long that "now it's a big problem" and you may end up discovering you have damaged a relationship beyond repair without realizing it[2]. Most people won't even help a stranger out by informing them that they have a poppy-seed in their teeth out of fear the stranger will "be angry with them for noticing it." Over time, my therapist and I have gotten to the point where he has become a good source for identifying these blind spots (and is quite a bit better at delivering the news).

All of that said, about two years in the topic of my diet came up due to a large bag of candy being visible in frame during our video session. It worked out that I'd had a physical two months prior so I had my numbers handy[0] so after the initial alarm, I remember I got done explaining everything and he was staring at his camera almost like he had spaced out. I finished talking, he continued looking into the camera and after an awkward silence he said, "so .. that's it?" It's hard to get the effect writing it down because reading it, "it sounds sarcastic" ... and I got the impression the expression on my face might have been one of the "fart in church" variety. And after he quickly stumbled over an apology with a weird explanation that escapes me, he said something along the lines of: It's not any kind of eating disorder he'd ever heard of. People struggle with over-eating and varieties of conditions (anorexia, and friends) related to controlling their weight. And in a considerable number of cases the need to binge/purge or fast is something that's done in a subconscious attempt to fight an unrelated psychological trauma[3]. My "problem" is -- in a lot of ways -- the opposite. I manage my diet without any forethought or planning -- basically, subconsciously -- yet I have been within ten pounds of my weight as a teenager (which is ideal according to the flawed BMI scale but correlates properly with other medical tests). I do tend to not eat when I'm depressed or anxious, but it's not a conscious desire to control my diet -- it's, literally, "I don't feel hungry". And when that goes on too long, my body responds by making me too hungry to ignore eating. During the worst depression I've gone through I went from my heaviest to my lightest over a period of four months but it still amounted to being 10 pounds heavier than High School "before" to 10 pounds lighter and in both cases my weight was within the range of "ideal" for my height.

So, basically, trying to fix this with therapy has at least some probability of damaging my health. And fixating on what I eat needlessly adds stress to my life when "not fixating on what I eat" results in my health being fine. I would put exactly zero thought toward this problem -- for myself -- if my son weren't struggling to maintain his weight "following my lead."

[0] I always have to look them up separately to get a better explanation, the doctor usually says "your Cholesterol is fantastic, keep doing what you're doing" and moves on to the next thing. I have to ask for the numbers when they're good and there's no point in remembering them when there's nothing to fix.

[1] Except for the handful of individuals that only communicate in this manner. Most of the people I worked with in security were like this.

[2] The specific event that comes to mind was when I shared a large office with 5 other guys (two worked for a completely different division in the company). One guy, a few times a week, would get up from his desk, grab onto the shared office door and nearly knock it off of its hinges with how hard he slammed it shut. He'd then walk back to his cube a few feet away and resume work without saying a word. The first several times it happened, I thought it was an airflow situation or accident because I couldn't imagine an adult acting that way on purpose. This went on for two or three months before someone finally said "what the hell are you doing that for, dude?" It turned out that the AC chiller (we were in a datacenter) was right next to the door and was very loud in his cube. He was upset with how inconsiderate we were being leaving the door open as we came and went. What he didn't know was that we were leaving it open to be considerate because the far end of the room where three of us sat got a bit warm when the door was closed. We had cube walls setup in the shared office so the noise didn't affect us so we truly had no idea our attempt at being considerate was being received as some sort of passive-aggressive attack. Had he just said the words "could you guys close the door, at least when I'm here, because of the noise" we all would have complied (it wasn't that hot and despite the noise not being terrible in our seat, the heat wasn't as bad as the noise so we "mostly didn't care about the state of the door" we just wanted it to be in a "non-controversial state"). And once that was understood, the door remained closed. I don't read angry subtext and passive aggression well.

[3] I am not a psychologist but I had a roommate for a year who struggled with anorexia. She'd stop eating when she was stressed out and she learned that she does this out of a need "to exert control over something in her life" when she's experiencing high-anxiety. She'd experienced some trauma as a child that she felt was "the trigger" but everyone's circumstances are different.

My son is struggling with this right now and it's entirely my fault.

I've never been outside of 15 pounds what I weighed in High School and I was underweight in High School. As a man in his 40s, I'm in better shape than I was back then, lower body fat, slightly more muscle, triglycerides/LDL/HDL better[0].

I eat how a 10-year-old kid would eat if he didn't have parents. All of my breakfast foods (which I never eat in the morning) have cartoon characters on the box. Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, Honeycomb, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Gluten-Wheats, (of course) Cap'n Crunch ... actually, worse -- I buy the Malt-O-Meal generic versions of each that come in the cement bags.

I can't think of the last time I drank water. I drink Coca-cola, instead. At least twice a week I make a half-gallon chocolate malt and consume the entire thing. Sometimes that's dinner. It's the only reason I own a blender. It's the reason blenders last about 2 years, tops, for me -- typically with dead motors or a shattered carafe[1]. I make the whole carafe for myself (the kids split half of one). I rarely eat Breakfast or Lunch. Dinner is something frozen and tossed in an Air Fryer or ordered. I often add a meal just before bed that consists of several bowls of one of the previously mentioned cereals.

I do none of this with any sort of planning. I get hungry, I find food, I eat it. If I'm depressed, I don't eat. If I'm busy doing something else I might forget to eat. When I'd travel solo for work, I'd go through my receipts and find out I ate twice at the airport on the way out/in, and spend an hour looking for meal receipts until I figure out that -- yes, I actually did only pay for three meals that week. Yes, one of those "meals" was an Arizona Peach Tea, half of which was left somewhere and for some reason I felt it necessary to both get and keep the receipt for the $1.00 purchase but at least the expense department will be satisfied ... if not a little surprised.

My 16-year-old son is having success with a restrictive Low Carb/No Sugar diet and I've found myself at a loss as to how to help him, but many of the things the author mentioned (short of a vacation I can't afford) have worked very well.

My observation is that the author's top two items are the most effective parts if you can do the first.

My alternative to the "vacation" for him is distraction. He's a lot like me: an indoor cat who likes computers and video games and doesn't like sports. I focused on things he really liked that were active and upgraded him -- he got a better VR kit and we upgraded the OneWheel[2]. He learned the first few days that when he gets hungry, the best thing to do is use one of those and the one that gets him out of the house is the one that works best. Though we could have taken a vacation for the cost of the upgrade, he wouldn't be putting in ten miles on it every day.

And I think that's part of it: finding something he loves to do which involves a lot of exercise. So far, that's the OneWheel GT (and I feel the same way). He uses the VR. It's about what you'd expect. The few games he enjoys aren't much exercise and the ones that are exercise focused aren't any fun. Luckily he doesn't get motion sick, but that was a pointless purchase for these purposes. And I assumed it would be: I've been through all of the previous attempts to make exercise fun with video games: Wii, every version of Kinect, various others dating back to the Nintendo floor pad with their weird Olympics game, both of which I destroyed in my youth. They usually make some form of exercise less effective while making "wanting to do that form of exercise" slightly more attractive for a brief period of time.

The optimal situation would be a game that can be played at home with low-cost equipment which "people want to play because it's fun to play" that happens to require a reasonable amount of physical exercise to use. Ideally, it'd be something that wouldn't be "more enjoyable with a more common control scheme", nor would physical strength greatly improve ones ability to master the game (so, like most video games, they're more mental strategy vs precision muscle memory) and would be multi-player. I've yet to encounter something that doesn't fall over on all of these points so badly as to make it worse than traditional exercise.

[0] I was a kid during a brief period when they advocated giving children as young as 10-years old cholesterol tests and then putting them on low-fat diets when they (generally) had "High Cholesterol".

[1] Which is only a problem if the carafe is for an ALDI Aisle of Shame $39 blender and finding a replacement is either impossible or almost as expensive. After every expensive blender I owned failed, I'd somehow end up finding a crappy one at ALDI figuring "The $200 one died quickly, might as well save the money this time."

[2] We had a Pint and we've gone through a few tires and about 9K miles on that one. When ridden hard, you come home soaked head to toe in sweat, but it's one thing that he enjoys as much as (if not more) than playing video games.

Michigan's housing prices vary pretty dramatically and we don't have a terribly low cost of living in parts -- especially real-estate. It's no SFBay, but it's rapidly getting worse.

You mentioned the 300,000 on 5 acres, and that's definitely possible, but you're not getting that in the desirable parts of Macomb or Oakland County[0], nor anywhere in Wayne outside of Detroit/Detroit-ish areas.

I watched a house on a busy city road (one where "pulling out of the driveway means an immediate traffic backup to the light" between 7-9 and 4-6 every day) which was 2,200 sq ft, 4 BR 2.0 BA, though it was new construction (relatively modern/upgraded interior) go for $550,000 in 2022 after multiple bids. The home I own (1800/3BR/1.5BA) which I purchased for $175,000 in 2001 and would have lost money had I sold it between 2007~2018, is worth about $330,000. This is partly due to the value increasing due to local changes and "what's happening everywhere in the country" housing prices-wise. I know folks who moved to Plymouth to a home with similar specs but paid a quarter million in 2017.

Cool. And because I didn't re-finance, I don't have a mortgage any longer. Except I want to upgrade. And had I done that in 2008, I could have afforded it. Now that upgrade is twice as much but my salary has not followed suit. My desire to upgrade went to near zero, already, once I paid it off. But now I couldn't even afford to if I wanted to. I figure I'll downgrade and move near the kids when they're older and take home some cash in the process.

One thing I love about where I live in Michigan, though ... it's rare that a house doesn't have a basement. Even in places you wouldn't expect -- our next-door neighbor on Lake Huron had a full basement with 12ft ceilings (and a hell of a system to keep it bone dry). And newer homes tend to have excellent ones you can make useful -- if not always up-to-code -- living/lab spaces out of. SFBay hacks in their garage. We hack in our basements.

[0] When people say they "Live in Detroit" that's probably where they live. Just like the Detroit Zoo.

I've lived here since I was born and I'd say I feel that way a lot of the time. There's a lot of downside: tight ties to autos (where I live) mean that a lot of employers -- even if "technically" they aren't automotive focused -- tend to have so many customers in that industry that "when something goes wrong at GM, Ford or whatever Chrysler is called, everyone around here gets it."

Best I've been able to do is work for employers out of state/country but I'm currently employed locally at a remote-only shop.

The weather. I get it. Everyone uses the same "5 minutes and it'll change" joke, but we're unique here. I thought I read somewhere that we see fewer cloudless days than the Pacific Northwest, but I can't find a reference so I suspect that's false, but we spend, basically, December to April with few sunny days. We live in a place of extremes, as well. Ten below (Fahrenheit) in the coldest winter days, 99 degrees a couple of days ago. Had one day in July when I was in High School where it was 85 degrees in the morning and in about a 15-minute period of time dropped to 45 due to a Derecho[0] rolling through (which almost picked me up off the ground due to 75 MPH winds and sent a large Oak Tree through our master bedroom).

We don't get Spring or Autumn, we get Winter, Summer, and a period of time where the two are at war and it may be Winter or Summer depending on what day/hour it is. A decade ago, I was in the ER on the first week of March. The hospital couldn't "turn on the Air Conditioning" at will, they had to switch over seasonally, so when we had an unexpected 85 degree day, that meant it was about 85 degrees in the ER. That was fun.

It is a beautiful place if you get out of the more populated parts, but I work here and that's where I live. Still, nice that it's an hour drive to get to something that qualifies as "Up North[1]"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho

[1] A phrase that has little to do with direction around here ... mostly just means "resort-ish small town, a lot of which survives due to summer 'Cabin Up North' folks." Ours is in Port Sanilac. But, really, Lake Orion and Walled Lake used to be "Up North" communities :)

Who'd a thunk there'd be so many Michiganders on Hacker News?

I'm with ya, I tend to rise with the sun and 5:00 AM gets very old. Morning's like "Can I just sneak by you? Ope[0], sorry 'bout that, didn't mean to wake you up"

[0] I couldn't resist.

Setting aside the concerns with this specific implementation and thinking more of "the idea" I think the biggest concern is this sort of application causing legitimate software to fail to run[0] and how one would "white-list" an application from seeing these "fake artifacts designed to trick malware."

The problem is "the fake components" would have to be prevented from being detected by legitimate software and the only way I can think to do that would be to execute everything in a sandbox that is capable of: (a) hiding some contained running processes (the fake ones) from the rest of the OS while (b) while allowing the process that "sees the fake stuff" to be seen by everything else "like any old process."

Applying ACLs (and restricting white-listed processes) might work in some cases; might equally just be seen as a permissions problem and result in a nonsensical error (because the developers never imagined someone would change the permissions on an obvious key), or it might be that the "trick" employed is "Adding a Russian Keyboard" which can be very disruptive to the user "if they use more than one input language" or "is one of those places where a program may read from there never expecting to encounter an error."

A lot of this seems like it would require use of containerization -- docker/docker-like -- for Windows apps. I'm familiar with a few offerings here and there, but I've worked with none of them and I run Linux more than Windows these days. So my questions really boil down to:

Where's Windows containerization at? Would it be possible to run an application in a docker or docker-like container with a Windows kernel which can have its environment controlled in a manner that is more transparent to the application running within the container? Is there any other approach which would allow for "non-white-listed applications" to run containerized and "see the Scarecrow artifacts", while allowing the white-listed applications[1] to run outside of the container in a manner that hides some of the processes within the container. Can it do all of that in a manner that would work if the same "check" were repeated immediately after confirming an Elevation dialog[2]? from the white-listed application in a manner that couldn't be defeated by repeating the same "check" after presenting an elevation dialog?

Again, that's assuming "this is a brilliant idea" -- and there's some evidence that as a concept, at least, it would help (ignoring this particular implementation of the idea), but it still suffers from its success, so the extent that it helps/is adopted equates to how long any of these techniques aren't defeated. And just from the sense I get of the complexities required to "implement this in a manner that legitimate won't fail, too", I suspect it will be easier to defeat a tool like this than it will be to protect against its defeat. In other words, the attacker is a healthy young cat chasing a tired old mouse.

[0] Anti-cheat being the most obvious, but those are often indistinguishable from malware. I'd encountered plenty of games/apps in the 90s that refused to run when I ran software to trace aspects of their memory interaction. I had some weird accounting app that somehow figured out when my own code (well, code I mostly borrowed from other implementations) was used for the same purpose.

[1] The assumption being that "a legitimate application which does these kinds of checks" is also likely to refuse to run within a container unless it's impossible to detect the container as reliably as everything else (and vendors are completely tolerant of false positives if the affected customers don't represent enough in terms of profit, or the solution is "don't run that unusual security software when you run ours").

[2] I've seen it enough with Easy Anti-cheat that I just click "Yes" like a drone. There was at least one occasion when it popped up after I had installed some developer tooling but not had a game update come down between launches. Because it was a huge install, it may just have been that the game detectedI have no idea why this happens -- on a few occasions, I had no update applied between loads but had installed other software so it could have been "to fix something that software broke" but it could also have been "to re-evaluate the environment as an administrator because something changed enough on the system to warrant a re-check that it is still compliant with the rules"

That's where I wonder about a tool like this interfering with legitimate software.

For example, I believe the anti-cheat software used by games like Fortnite looks for similar things -- my understanding is that it, too, will refuse to start when it is executing in a VM[0]. As a teenager (90s), I remember several applications/games refusing to start when I'd attached a tracing process to them. They did this to stop exactly what I was doing: trying to figure out how to defeat the software licensing code. I haven't had a need to do that since the turn of the century but I'd put $10 on that still being a thing.

So you end up with a "false positive", and like anti-virus software, it results in "denial of service." But does anti-virus's solution of "white list it" apply here? At least with their specific implementation, it's "on or off", but I wonder if it's even possible to alter the application in a way that could "white list a process so it doesn't see the 'malware defeat tricks' this exposes." If not, you'd just have to "turn off protection" when you were using that program. That might not be practical depending on the program. It's also not likely the vendor of that program will care that "an application which pretends it's doing things we don't like" breaks their application unless it represents a lot of their install base.

[0] I looked into it a few years ago b/c I run Tumbleweed and it's a game the kids enjoy (I'm not a huge fan but my gaming days have been behind me for a while, now) ... I had hoped to be able to expose my GPU to the VM enough to be able to play it but didn't bother trying after reading others' experiences.

Outside of the authorship/open-source fears[0], this is one of the more interesting ideas to surface in anti-virus.

Facing reality: anti-malware tooling is inadequate -- so inadequate, I haven't found a reason to purchase it for the one Windows machine I still have. People say "Defender works well enough, now!" and I think that's a pretty adequate way of describing it in that anti-malware has an impossible job and that is evident by every vendor's failure to succeed at it. So why pay for it?

It's always a cat-and-mouse game. This is an interesting approach, though, because it could shift the balance a little bit. Anti-malware's biggest problem is successfully identifying a threat while minimally interfering with the performance of an application. A mess of techniques are used to optimize this but when a file has to be scanned, it's expensive. It'd be interesting to see if it'd be possible to eliminate some variants of malware from on-demand scanning "if this tool defeats the malware as effectively", pushing scanning for those variants to an asynchronous process that allows the executable to run while it is being scanned.

I can see a lot of the problems with this kind of optimization[1]: it turns a "layer in the onion" into a replacement for an existing function which has more unknowns as far as attacks are concerned. Creating the environmental components required to "trick the malware" may be more expensive than just scanning. White-list scenarios may not be possible: I suspect anti-cheat services and potentially legitimate commercial software might be affected, as well[2] ... getting them to white-list a tool like this won't be easy unless the installed base is substantial. I suspect that "hiding the artifacts this tool creates to trick malware" from a white-listed processes might be impossible.

For at least a brief moment, this might be a useful tool in preventing infections from unknown threats. Brief, because -- by the author's own admissions (FAQ) -- it will devolve into a cat-and-mouse game if the tool is popular enough. There's another cat-and-mouse game, though. If this technique isn't resource intensive while offering protection somewhere in line with what it would take to implement, all of the anti-virus vendors will implement it -- including Microsoft. And they will be seen by customers as far better equipped to play "cat" or at least "the choice you won't get fired over."

And that's where it makes a whole lot of sense to open-source the product. It's a clever idea with a lot of unknowns and a very low likelihood of being a business. Unless it's being integrated into a larger security suite (same business challenges, but you have something of "a full product" as far as your customers are concerned), it's only value (outside of purely altruistic ones) would be either "popping the tool on the author's related business's website" to bring people to a related business/service or as a way to promote the author's skill set (for consulting/resume reasons). I'm not arrogant enough to say there's no way to make money from it, I just can't see it -- at least, not one that would make enough money to offset the cost of the "cat and mouse" game.

[0] Which, yeah, "I wouldn't run it on my computer" but I give the authors enough of the benefit of the doubt that "it's new"

[1] Not the least of which being that I do not author AV software so I have nothing to tell me that any of my assumptions about on-demand scanning are correct.

[2] It used to be a common practice to make reverse engineering more difficult.

Kind of sparked a thought in another comment but my thinking is that the best action in this situation is to simply not reply to the scammer.

The author didn't explain "how the scammer was texting her". I don't own an iPhone. On my Android device, they'd have to have my phone number which I don't know how they'd get from the locked phone. Of course, I -- like many -- provide an alternate number on the screen for "helpful people who might want to return, rather than re-sell, my crappy old Samsung phone." And I'd imagine that would be the way to get "the first reply".

But if you could avoid that[0], it keeps you from feeding a likely gambling addiction, or at least makes the game a little less satisfying. Consider that they've got a box of bricked phones. Every text is a chance to turn one of those into a few hundred dollars. Every reply is a small "high" that they're still in the game. Every message that goes off into the Ether, ignored, is "additional confirmation that this phone is a permanent brick" and you don't even get the satisfaction of feeling like maybe you intimidated someone a little.

[0] And to a lesser extent, even if you can't. I've blocked scammmers and seen the progression of repeated "Hello?"s ... somewhere in there it's connected that whatever they're trying to send me is not meeting my eyeballs. Had a funny one that was like 30 messages in a row, followed by "whatever" and "ass hole" ... I remember thinking it was odd that it was always lower case and that they put a space between ass and hole. Not necessarily like a person with a lack of English language skills, but like a tween just learning how to wield profanity.

It's why I have the "general rule" of: Don't reply to any text from anyone that I don't know. And if what I'm receiving "seems off" reply with a subtle "challenge" (mention a fictional pet that passed away ... the scammer will play along, your friend will probably send you a "?" to which you can ... carefully ... explain "I wanted to make sure you weren't a Nigerian Prince posing as Alice").

I know my personality would make it very tempting to reply to a message coming from the person who stole my phone, maybe taunt them a bit, but you're kind of giving into their game when you do. I mean, best you can do is burn a little of their time, which is probably much less valuable to them than yours is to you and put up with increasingly hostile threats[0]. Contrasted with completely ignoring any text that arrives regarding the phone (immediately blocking any arriving from accounts from social media) they're left assuming -- for whatever reason -- you're not even getting the threatening texts.

And, of course, if the scammer were planning on following through with the threats it'd be a very labor intensive, high-risk, low-reward operation -- not the "make a quick buck" that stealing and reselling a high value piece of electronics is supposed to be. There are too many legitimate ways to make more money that involve less work and less risk to pick "crime" as the choice. And while that means it's unlikely the scammer will follow through with the threat, that assumes the scammer is intelligent enough to understand how stupid it would be to expose himself to make a few hundred dollars and tends to vary depending on the amount of illicit substances the scammer is trying to manage the withdrawal symptoms of at that moment. It also assumes that the scammer isn't the actual thief, and the thief isn't some gang thug who'd be more than happy to follow through with the threat simply because "your mean words hurt their feelings"[1].

I figure, ignoring them is the quickest/easiest path to applying at least a tiny bit of pain.

They're gambling; you and every other one of their victims is "the iPhone game". It starts with a box of bricked iPhones. Find the owner, send them a combination of words gleaned from a forum that other scammers have had success with and text your target. You win when you crack the right combination of words that causes a bricked iPhone to become almost instantly convertible into anywhere from a few to several hundred dollars. I'd imagine most slot machines would hit less frequently and pay out less when they do. Enough bricked phones have to become "a few hundred dollars" to feed the player's gambling addiction[2] so you're providing the lever "pull" of the slot machine -- free entertainment for them. By ignoring them, you're taking away that tiny high that comes when they experience "Hope" -- the "hope" that your "pull" will pay out.

Take that away ... block 'em ... but maybe peek into "Spam" every once in a while if you want a little ego satisfaction.

Maybe they sent you a few hundred messages of the "Apple Pay" variety. Now close your eyes and imagine your lone scammer with a box of locked iPhones (it's your fantasy, make him a lonely middle-aged white guy living in Mom's basement who hasn't showered in 2024), checking each bricked phone "to see if you've won", then the messaging app to see if anyone is going to give you a chance to play further ... only to find your fourteenth "Apple Pay" message disappear into the dead Ether ("And they sent the last one from RUSSIA, how could they ignore RUSSIA!?"). If they are the kind with a glass ego, nothing will make you feel less adequate than copying/pasting fourteen unanswered messages as imagine the answer you're not going to get to number fifteen.

Short of maybe social engineering them to click a link to malware[3] and maybe turning the tables a little, I can't think of anything more effective.

[0] And the stones on the thief -- or did your sister leave it unattended? I have spent no time in Austin, specifically, but a lot of time in Texas. Some places it seems everyone is carrying, right out in the open, carefully concealed (if you know where to look) ... whatever. At least a few of my buddies carry hoping for a reason to use it. I suspect in the parts of Texas I'm familiar with, if this happens at all, Find My yields it quickly recovered without police involvement, and maybe the thief's trailer/truck got a little fscked up during "pick-up".

[1] They'll talk about being disrespected but at the end of the day, the problem comes down to an adult who would still fail the most basic parts of Kindergarten (don't misread that statement as implying anything about my feelings regarding the cause/reason/fault of such things; let's just walk away from that one for this footnote).

[2] I couldn't find the study but over a decade ago I recall reading a that people with "clinically diagnosed kleptomania" (naively: "stealing for fun, regardless of need") had extremely strong tendencies to be gambling addicts, but that gambling addiction couldn't be correlated with a higher frequency of kleptomania (gambling addicts do skew higher for theft, but are often thieves out of perceived necessity, limiting to kleptomaniacs was intended to identify the similarities between the underlying psychological disorders).

[3] This is a little tricky and comes with the "you're probably breaking the law, now, too" problem ... tricky because the scammer is probably using a texting app/web service. As a result, there's a larger number of OSes involved -- it would be less unusual for your sender to be texting you via a browser in Windows than you'd probably experience, otherwise, so if you, say, somehow convince them they need to "click that link" in order for your phone to complete unlocking, you're going to also have to work out a way to get them to reveal what OS they're sending from.

I have to go back to around 1992 or so for this one ... not that I don't have plenty of newer humbling learning moments, but this is the one I tend to think of as the most obvious "how did I do all of these things without knowing something so basic."

Background: I was in the 7th grade, hosting a BBS and wanted to simultaneously host two different BBSes behind the same modem (and both with a working FIDO feed). I can't remember specifically why, but it had something to do with how one of the two BBS systems detected if it should ingest messages or if it should return a user session. I believe I was handling that detection manually but still had to have the BBS setup in such a way that it would look for a specific exit code from FIDO and if it saw "0" (which was what it always saw in this configuration), it never provided a user session in response.

Let's start with the first problem. I had a non-working understanding of what an exit code actually was. This was all-together weird. I'm in 7th grade, but I'm taking AP Computer Science at the High School. I mean, I think by then I could actually make Wing Commander start or some equally heroic juggling of HIMEM statements with the various TSRs. I was writing actual software in Borland Turbo Pascal 4, compiled to an executable file, every one of which returned an exit code. I'm fairly certain the last statement of many of my programs was something along the lines of "RETURN 0;" if memory serves. I had even processed command-line arguments at this point!

In what easily made me look like the 7th-grader that I was, I called another programmer I had met on a local BBS (after 10:00 PM, no internet, long distance was expensive) who was writing a BBS application in "C" ... and asked him if he had any time that week to write me a quick program which took, as a parameter, any number 0-255 and exited with that exit code. You can't imagine how thankful I was when he was uploading the program to my second node before we had finished talking.

You can't imagine how stupid I felt when I found the seven hundred other ways this could be done, including with a BATCH file, that I had just never had any real reason, up to that point, to properly connect with the words "exit code" (it was an ERRORLEVEL, you could set it directly (?) in DOS).

I had 2589620 ... I have the password, somewhere. :)

Anyone keeping current with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed got a update...downgrade. Prior to `zypper dup --no-allow-vendor-change` I had 5.6.0, now I'm at 5.4.6.

Just keep hanging around here and you'll start understanding more of them ;)

They've been in use since the 90s, actually[0].

My understanding is that the earlier rolling code systems are easily defeated and I think this can be done (possibly with stock firmware) using a Flipper Zero.

Prior to that, garage doors had a set of DIP switches (16, or 32, I can't remember). You matched the switch configuration on your opener with the switch configuration on the controller. And as you might imagine, in a typical suburban area about 80% of the garage doors are set to all zeros.

Because the range of the devices was "lucky if you can open the door from the bottom of your driveway", most people didn't notice this. Of course that meant you could open a large number of garage doors by sending the "0" signal for each manufacturer with enough wattage.

Compatible models are made by reverse engineering each individual model's rolling code implementation (in the early days) and making an accessory that had the necessary seed value or other component to allow it to be "paired" with a compatible door head unit. Considering it wasn't uncommon for the higher-end models to charge $150 for an accessory remote, manufacturers had a bit of incentive to roll their own slightly incompatible implementations.

This is from memory and minimal memory at that, but -- late 90s or early 00s, I think, "HomeLink" was created, which basically allowed car manufacturers to integrate a door opener into the car. If you bought a higher-end model, your visor might have the buttons in it. I believe licensing allowed third-parties to easily create fully compatible accessories at that point (pay a fee, get the patent license/datasheets sort of arrangement).

[0] Genie thinks they were first in 1995 but I seem to recall we had a rolling code door installed as early as 1993.

Of course -- and all of that has lead to the display technologies we take for granted these days and a number of other advances (low cost, low energy, high output LED lighting, for example).

This is an example of the reaction to any new technology -- electric cars catch fire and we suddenly forget we drive around in vehicles carrying large quantities of explosive gas (and work via controlled explosions). They get stuck in the winter and we forget the few times a winter we had to jump our gas car to get somewhere. I remember actual indicator lamps ... granted, they tended to serve very temporary lighting purposes and despite that were still often burned out (if your elevator in the 80s had floor indicator lamps, 25% or more were dead).

When it's good new technology, as the blue LED objectively is, it becomes mass produced and then mass adopted as "the cool new thing." And it was the cool new thing -- I remember thinking how neat the deep blue LED on my first AV receiver was. And then it becomes over-adopted. Most of the LEDs I have covered up in my bedroom aren't blue -- they're cool white[0] and oh so much brighter than the various-shades-of-blue ones that adorn other equipment throughout my electronics stuffed house.

[0] If they were warm white, but dim, I'd probably have a similar "that's neat" if they looked like earlier indicator lamps (but cleaner).

As I read your statement sitting in my "bedroom office", I notice:

My Vizio TV which has a piece of white electrical tape[0] with aluminum foil underneath. Incredible failure of engineering that has a setting to disable the power LED, however, that setting is ignored if you use the "black screen" option that kills the screen while the TV continues playing ... a feature you are likely to only use if you like to sleep to the noise, but not the light, of the television.

My switch has a sock wrapped around the front with a piece of cardboard jammed in it to keep the blinken-lights from creating strobe effects all night.

My monitor, multi-USB charger, have similar black-tape treatments that the TV received and the power outlet next to my dresser has a piece of white tape on it -- it's a smart plug and I'm guessing there was an indicator light under that.

The thrown together solutions indicate the worst part. You tend to not discover it's a problem until you wake up at 2:00 AM and you can't get back to sleep because it's bright as early morning in the bedroom.

[0] It was all I had at the time.

That's the winner!

Oh man, we have a place nearby that has easily 40 machines, and some serious classics (they had the Elton John machine with the recalled artwork). They've been around for a few years -- simple setup: $20 gets you a wrist band and you can play for 4 hours[0]. And I think that's the crux of it: I am unwilling to pay a buck a play for pinball only to -- often -- find out that it has multiple mechanical imperfections (like a side bumper being dead) that make it nearly impossible to play.

There is a bowling alley nearby that bills itself as a Pinball Museum (with 20 or so machines) but they're all quarter driven. I went once, dropped $15, got annoyed and never returned. My kids and I go to the other place every other month or so.

[0] Except for one machine -- they have this giant thing that uses a pool cue as a ball -- it's a Sega game ... Mammoth or something, and apparently very rare