wink

I'm much more interested in the power story here. Software is easy ;)

  - did it come with a wall plug?
  - do you trust that wall plug to be on 24/7? (I've had terrible ones)
  - did you have to buy any extra cables? ("I had them" does not count)
  - how much power does it draw?

I found my German curriculum to be a lot worse at this. Basically zero books I read in German classes that I liked, compared to most of the "classics" in English lessons I all found ok to good. Maybe because some were more accessible or at least relatable or closer to my interests, but we're talking about educating teenagers here. (E.g. Animal Farm, 1984, Poe, Shakespeare (quite some overlap to what people read in their native English)) vs ... I don't even know which of the ones we read are known to an international audience...

Without trying to make it sound judgemental I know literal dozens of people who stopped smoking and it hardly comes up in conversation anymore - I think I have like 2 friends left who smoke, out of... more than 50%? And several of them smoked for 10 years or more.

Maybe it's because most people don't just randomly are offered cigarettes or because it went from a "50% of the population" to "10% of the population in this age group".

I'm not saying that sober alcoholics are making a big deal out of it, it just feels different - maybe because it is seen as a lot more problematic than being a smoker? Or harder to quit. Or because it's rarer.

That's a really odd thing to say.

I don't really care about this but here's an example:

I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP.

Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.

Just by being written in JS/TS and using node I suppose keeping it running is a task of its own (or keep a node_modules folder of 500MB) - compared to a hugo binary that will most probably work on any linux or mac for the next 10 years.

(I see what you're getting at but Astro has to be _the worst_ example. I have migrated off hugo to my own SSG but I don't hate it)

Ha, Germany is safe. Not because the postal service is/is not/has to be profitable but because our government fucks up everything digital.

I have used perl oneliners on and off for 20 years and because I don't need them every day I have to look up stuff every time.

Not sure your time-saving thing really works, especially if 99% of problems you have are not solved by a perl oneliner.

Several German banks (at least mine, one of the bigger ones) exclusively have you use an app for 2FA, you can still log via the website if you are lucky (as long as you have that one saved) but not do any transactions. So I would call that required.

If I want a bespoke table crafted by a woodworker I need to pay material and labor costs and thus it ends up costing quite a lot more than grabbing one at IKEA.

Most people would agree that for many criteria the more expensive one would be better than the mass-produced one, and yet we've long passed the age of "ask a local woodworker or do it yourself".

Maybe software is the same and shareware and indie software was just an outlier in the first place. spend a month building it, then make free copies and try to sell (labor costs) / (copies) because no one would pay just the labor costs.

But now where does FLOSS software come into the picture, competing with indie software on price (free), often quality (sometimes best in show), less of a bus factor (traditionally small indie teams) and repairability (the source code is there).

So yeah, maybe call me pessimistic or jaded or just an asshole, but there's a reason I have earned money writing software for about 25 years and never even thought about making and selling an indie product because I never felt it was feasible. Happy for all the people for whom it has worked so far.

Unfortunately this table doesn't show us where the em-dash users are coming from and if they are native speakers.

It's not that it doesn't exist in my native language, but I don't remember seeing them very often outside of print books, and I even know a couple typo nerds.

Maybe I'm totally off, and maybe it's the same as double spacing after a '.'. I had not heard of this until I was ~30 and then saw some Americans writing about it.

I had a native English coworker who used to pronounce it Ü-Bahn and when corrected he insisted that it sounded exactly the same then when I said U-Bahn.

He was perfectly capable of making the same (German) u sound when saying other English words. Apparently it is very subtle, sometimes even for specific things like start of the word and length of the vowel. I just don't know.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but I especially find verb tenses to be the least important part of learning and having a conversation. People will get the meaning if it was in the past or the future if you know words like yesterday/last week/tomorrow/next week.

Of course this is just a stepping stone, but why try to duplicate (or more) everything when what you most need is proper sentence structure in the present tense and vocabulary.

Although maybe there are some languages where this is not true, not the ones I studied (briefly or not). But in my experience it is also true for people speaking bad German (talking mostly self-taught or from basic courses, not for white collar jobs with large amounts of written text) - perfectly understandable, just no tenses.

That's so much not a fitting comparison.

The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.

Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.

I was very confused because this does not seem related to WoltLab Burning Board and it's a Fedi server and not a forum.

One of our products had a proper contact page (just a select box box to decide on something, then one outcome was a contact form) and now it's a fuck off contact page.

Sometimes (like here) there are even some good reasons (e.g. we host this product and the first point of contact is in fact another business entity, so they get to decide) and apparently their MO is "you will use this ticket system no matter what you want, so only if you are a certain customer with a login it will work" whereas before you could at least write a "hello, here's a technical problem" that would reach us and not them. Ah well.

So you're saying we need to speed up the generation of new oil reserves underground? :)

Yes, please continue explaining the job I did in the past to me.

It doesn't change anything, especially as I did not blatantly argue cloud=good,hardware=bad. That is a completely different question.

My point is that given some circumstances, you need a lot less specialized deep knowledge if all your software just works[tm] on a certain level of the stack upwards. Everyone knows the top 1/3 of the stack and you pay for the bottom 2/3 part.

I didn't mean to say "let's replace a sysadmin with some AWS stuff", my point was "100k per year on AWS makes a lot of small companies run".

Also my experience was with having hardware in several DCs around the world, and we did not have people there (small company, but present in at least 4 countries) - so we had to pay for remote hands and the experience was mostly bad . Maybe my bosses chose bad DCs, or maybe I'd trust sysadmins at "product companies" more than those working as remote hands at a hoster...

Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

I'm not even one of the "cloud is so great" people - but it you're generally doing software it's actually a lot less friction.

And while the ratio of cost difference may sound bad, it's generally not. Unless we're talkign huge scale, you can buy a lot of AWS crap for the yearly salary of a single person.

I am not surprised, from memory I only know like 3 people who ever willingly used 8.x. The active user base must be tiny compared to Windows 7 and 10 users (if we just stick to that range).

I have personally not used it for more than an hour total (on anyone's PC combined) and I have (co-)owned and used at least one Windows PC continuously since 1995.

Totally missing the amount of bananas one could buy every month. Oh wait, it was apples and oranges, not bananas.

Not a fan of his music but I remember this one interview where he (paraphrased) went "People say I just have a talent for music. No, it was hard work - listen to this terrible phone recording of me singing out of tune"

I faintly remember some service that would only let me add one YubiKey, taking the 2 in 2FA very literal.

The task bar not being movable is a huge (and also completely silly) example of stuff going worse.

I have some things that simply don't work anymore that kinda didn't bother me with easy workarounds on Win 10.

I would have to physically alter my desk setup for certain things with this new anti-feature. Not even sure how this could be argued as a win. (FWIW, I have 3 monitors and the bar used to be on the right one on top - so if I have a laptop half in front of it (no space next to the monitorr) I could do everything. open programs, look at the damn clock, etc.pp - now it's at the bottom and because of this annoying constraint called gravity I can't affix my laptop to be out of the way on top of the screen)

Forgot the name but at my last job the Linux client was something like "use this exact in-house patched .deb of $software in version X on Ubuntu Y/Z" - and that's all that worked, nothing else.

Kinda indistinguishable from "only runs on windows"

Lacking details, but people don't generally rsync a checkout of a git repo (including a .git folder) to their webspace, so you're right if the hoster did that, I find it more likely the people did that.

On the other hand just blacklisting .git/* is not great, maybe I want to publish something on that path, just like any other filename. It's prone to lead to false positives.

My pet peeve for search engines for content I use is that they regularly ignore 2-letter and 3-letter "words" or acronyms. If all I need is a search for "mp3" then stripping exactly that is not useful ;) (was just the first file extension that came to my mind, but "PHP" works just as well).

Yes and that's what people are criticizing - it's just an arbitrary and thus very bad rule. Completely unrelated to CloudFlare, I streamed a single TV series from a friend's plex account 1-2y ago, that's less traffic than some of my friends use in 2 weeks.

I'm not saying they can't have that rule, it's their infra - I'm just saying that "a boatload of bandwidth" can be anything, depending on who you ask.

There seems to be one odd case where I know zero details, but the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_University_of_Applied_S... - usually knows as "FH München" or "FHM" only rebranded to "HM" in 2007 (and then again somewhat in 2011) and yet they own hm.edu and they did own fhm.edu before that: https://web.archive.org/web/20070510152550/http://www.fhm.ed...

It's not exactly the same, but my reasoning for generally not donating money to FLOSS projects is that I kind of see it as a zero-sum game.

I maintain some stuff, I report bugs and contribute to several projects (with a varying degree of activity), you maintain some stuff and in the end we all benefit from it. And yes, of course some people do a lot more, but even more people do a lot less. And if you like donating money to people who like to accept money, sure, go ahead. (I think I received something from an Amazon wish list once, and we ordered some swag for some collective donation money once - which is overall not a lot for over 20 years of occasional open source work. Not complaining here, just for reference - I prefer not to be paid for doing my hobby stuff in my free time.)

"Just decide for yourself and be self-reliant... no, not like that!"