I don't live in a vacuum. I need to open an occasional Adobe bs format file (Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop). An occasional MS Office file too (Access, Word, Excel, PowerPoint). And don't tell me LibreOffice supports .docx. It doesn't support edits suggestion mode well enough. I needed AutoCAD for a period of time.

Desktop Linux people, what do you want me to do? Go to devRant and post “windows bad” rant? Go cry on Reddit?

I too think Windows is evil and 11 is essentially malware, but when I suddenly need those things done yesterday, and my livelihood depends on that, I have no choice.

(this is part 2 of this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/10703825/...)

The reason I don't use Linux on my desktop is its hobby of saying “fuck off” spontaneously and without warning when I need it the most.

A designer friend shares his After Effects project and asks to export that to Lottie? Fuck off.
Your Android phone decided to brick itself with an OTA update (yep, happened to me, thanks Sony), and you need to unbrick it? Fuck off!
A musician friend wants to connect his audio card (that of course has no Linux drivers) and record some bass riffs? Tell him to fuck right off mate.
Your boss suddenly asks you to check an MS Access file for him as he's en route to an important meeting? Yep, you guessed it — fuck off.
Your government now requires your tax papers to have digital signatures? Fuck off, it only works for Mac and Windows.
Want to connect an old digital camera? Would you please fuck off?

I know I'm gonna get heat from Linux fanboys, especially on this platform. After all, a designer should know how to export to Lottie if he's a real designer, you should've bought a better phone, your friend should've had his laptop with him, your boss should've used open source tools instead of MS Access… Wait, he was tasked that from above? Then his boss should've used open source tools! Government mandates digital signatures? Well, tell them to port that to Linux! Start a riot! Get a better government! Move to a better country! Digital cameras? Who uses them in 2024, especially old ones! Are you some kind of hipster?

I know preparing for corner cases is bona fide premature optimization, but that's the whole point — with Mac or Windows, you don't have to prepare at all. You always have options. With Linux, your number one option is to have Windows handy if need be.

Linux works perfectly on my server, but not on my laptop.

S/HE IS HER/E

Task: blinking light.

Boomers: One lightbulb, one bimetallic strip.

Zoomers: LED (D13), Atmega328P, Atmega328, 5V, 16MHz, 2KB SRAM, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, FT232RL, 19.0mm x 43.18mm, 16 analog pins, 14 digital I/O pins, 6 PWM pins, 2 resettable fuses, 8MHz external crystal, 16MHz external crystal, 12MHz crystal, 0.5mm pitch, 0.1 inch headers, 1.27mm pitch headers, mini-USB, 3.3V regulator, 5V regulator, 16MHz ceramic resonator, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 47uF capacitor, 100uF capacitor, 10uF capacitor, 100nF capacitor, 0.1uF capacitor, 22pF capacitor, 1N4007 diode, 10K resistor, 4.7K resistor, 330 ohm resistor, 10uH inductor, 27 ohm resistor, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, LED (D13), green LED, red LED, yellow LED, 6-pin header, 8-pin header, 28-pin DIP socket, 6-pin FTDI header, ceramic resonator, USB mini-B socket, 16MHz oscillator, M7 diode, LDO voltage regulator, 3.3V regulator, 5V voltage regulator, polyfuse, 22pF capacitors, 100nF capacitors, 10uF capacitors, 47uF capacitors, 100uF capacitors, 1N4007 diode, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 16MHz resonator, 0.1uF capacitor, 330 ohm resistors, 27 ohm resistors, 4.7K resistor, 10K resistor, 10uH inductor, 22pF capacitor, mini-USB connector, 8-pin header, 6-pin header, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, ceramic resonator.

As a team lead, what would you do if one of your direct reports sent obscenely bad code for review? Like absolutely nonsensical, non-working, touching wrong parts of the project, doing wrong things… Terrible even by your company's standards.

Would you consider it an instance of stupidity? Tiredness? A resignation letter? An insult? A cry for help? A combination of those things?

On the Overwatch 2 official poster, Tracer's pussy is bigger than Ana's face. Ah, yes, targeting lonely male gamers with sex, how original.

Pathetic.

Why tf ServerAliveInterval 300 is not the default for SSH?

Soviet “Altair”: a Nintendo Game&Watch with a built-in Geiger counter.

Right side, top to bottom: game 1, alarm, game 2, reset, time, µSv/hr x 100 µR/h
Top side: Altair
Bottom side: Dosimeter ✻ Watch ✻ Game

Today is the Put Your Open-Source Projects Into Public Domain Day. Face it: your open source ventures earned you no fame and no lucrative job offers.

Really successful open source projects earn their creators those things no matter the license — just look at porsager/postgres.

So, why limit the usage rights?

We’ve reached the point where every single hyped tech thing is a scam.

ChatGPT is just DSL for Bash
Change my mind

Just leave the scroll alone!

Cat of the day

Cat of the day — mine!

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
— G.B. Shaw

Heroin is the excellent way to reduce the number of your problems in life to just one.

That's aII y0u have t0 kn0w

I d0 be Iike M0rpheus, but my bIue piII is datura insanity and my red piII is manganese encephalopathy. Ch00se y0ur destiny!
0r d0 y0u think it's a c0incidence that y0u see me just bareIy 0ut 0f frame every time y0u g0 t0 the bathr00m at night?

My cat's brain is powerful enough to calculate and apply the exact physics of a long jump, with ballistics, flight aerodynamics, dynamic weight distribution using tail as stabilizer, all of that, and land a jump every time without failure.

Yet, it's not powerful enough to realize that can just walk straight through a slightly opened door using her body as a wedge. Or, she can just, you know, push the door open with her paw. When presented with an everyday task that involves physics, she acts like she's nothing but an ethereal ghost and fails miserably.

This makes me think that her jump computer is a very old hardwired part inherited from frogs, honed by evolution and compiled into wetware millions of years ago. Like an ancient analog computer that works flawlessly every time. She has no conscious access to its inner workings. She can use it, sure, but she doesn't understand it.

I wonder how many such parts do us humans posses.

Cat of the day — mine!

Windows XP was just right. A perfect balance of performance and functionality.

Everything less complex feels too impractical, everything more complex feels too uncontrollable.

When using XP, I was confident I could get the job done, yet I knew what every process in the task manager did. It’s not the case with 7, let alone 10/11. I don’t know what happens under the hood there at all. Maybe custom Linux distros qualify too, but they’re unapproachable by laypeople. You have to be a geek to use them effectively.

Windows XP struck just the right balance between functionality, simplicity and compatibility. Too bad the era is gone in favor of opaque surveillance.

What do you think about Dart? They pitch it as an elegant language for everything: browser, WASM, servers, plus every native platform with Flutter.

“Those stitches under my belly hurt, for sure, but what if I… hypothetically, just took manicure scissors, and… was urgently rushed back to hospital for no reason in particular, so to speak?”, — echoed in my head. I was 15. Just out of hospital after hernia surgery, knowing full well they will give me morphine again if I did that.

Yes, they used morphine on a 15-year-old kid. It was a town of 50k people in rural Russia.

Withdrawal syndrome lasted about two weeks that felt like two years. You can't tell if you're asleep or not, you shiver while you constantly think about nothing but morphine, and you're anxious because your grandparents shouldn't know! As if it was ever a 15-year-old kid's fault.

Yes, I, in a way, quit morphine at the age of 15.

The hernia was caused by what my mother did to me, but that's the story for another day.

Sufficiently advanced XML is indistinguishable from satire

I'm stuck.

Quitting smoking/scrolling/youtube/other unhealthy coping mechanisms, taking my prescriptions and exercising every day made my mind free — now it's unobstructed, clear and not hindered in any way.

The problem is, without constant coping, my memory turned into a minefield. I can't think freely, as I constantly stumble upon trauma after trauma that make my heart physically hurt.

With clear mind, I now clearly see what used to lurk in shadows, and I'm terrified of it. I won't go back to smoking and watching youtube ten hours a day.

What should I do?

When depression set in, I thought pain relief lied in getting duller. People I called “stupid” — who lived simple lives filled with alcohol and lack of any talent or purpose — weren't suffering. Better even, they denied the existence of depression.

My “wish” was granted when they prescribed cariprazine. In two months, I lost my ability to read, let alone code.

Before that, even depressed, writing a simple email/password auth was a matter of ten minutes in any of the languages I knew how to do web in (JS, Python, Clojure, PHP). But on cariprazine, I remember myself not quite getting what an HTML form was.

Tell you what… you should never wish to become dumber. When I was smart and depressed, the pain was real, but it felt like… let's say a breakup. When I was dumb and depressed, it felt like being raped with a red-hot soldering iron. Or like being skinned alive. Or like when 100% of your skin is a third-degree burn. The pain weren't listening to me, as my mouth was glued shut as if I was Keanu in the first Matrix movie. You can't say, do or think anything, at all, to ease your pain somehow. You can't even realize that just DMing or calling someone is probably a good idea.

Instead of you vs. despair situation from when you were smart, now it's just despair that is actively melting you, so you two become one. Even time loses its meaning. There is nothing out there but suffering.

If you're smart(er than I was at my lowest), DO cherish it. Losing that will spell disaster. So stay away from substances that can facilitate that loss.

because the house I lived in was quite a hostile environment, and every place after that I rented, I grew up without the feeling of home. I was puzzled by how to acquire it. Should homeownership do the trick?
the answer came swift and unexpected — I got a cat. Now, my home is where my cat is. Simple as that.

When I'm stuck but I need my brain to think, I put on Allan Holdsworth. Immediately decongests my flow and makes my neurons tick faster.

https://youtu.be/IcPbmPM7epY?t=112

humpty dumpty goes for a walk
humpty dumpty walks into the forest where he meets The Lobe
humpty dumpty feels an emotion that isn't invented yet.
“Ƶ͠Ͼ҉ΔǁƼϢΞ҉͘Ͼ́҉Ƽ̶Ξ͠ǁ͘͠Ƶ̵́Δ҉̵̀Ξ͠҉́Δ́͠ϴ̀҉,” — says humpty dumpty.

Say “bug fixes and performance improvements” one more time! I dare you! I double dare you, motherfucker! Say “bug fixes and performance improvements” one more time!