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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.


  • Ideally you notice it from the shore and avoid it as others have mentioned. If you’re swimming in one you’ll realize soon enough you’re getting taken out from the shore.

    I got caught in one when I was a teenager off Mission Beach in San Diego. I’d already been out swimming in water deeper than I could stand in for a while and, getting tired, started heading to shore. After some time I realized I wasn’t making any progress at all. It took me a little while more to realize what was up: I was in a rip current. Thankfully I’d had an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, AZ of all places that taught us kids how to escape one and I remembered - swim parallel to the shore a good distance and then try swimming back in again and check your progress. Repeat as needed if you’re unable to make progress. I followed those instructions and eventually was able to get back to shore, utterly exhausted. I can’t help but think how lucky I was not to have missed that day of school.





  • As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

    It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

    Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.




  • I suspect i might be the winner here. My friend had an alley behind his house along with a nice strip of open land near a busy road. Eventually a strip mall was built and then another large commercial building started to go up. Being basically behind my friends house we walked over to this new building on weekend to check out the construction site.

    The building was being built with cement block and had lots of scaffolding and yet-unused block scattered around. I found a pipe-bender - a very heavy tool made out of high quality steel - and found you could just tap on of these cement blocks and it would shatter to pieces. I was fascinated, as were my friends. I have no idea how many cement blocks we destroyed over the next couple of days, but it was a huge number. Then we decided to see if we could go through a wall with the pipe bender… we could indeed, making a hole in the side of the building we could walk through. Looking around we eventually realized what we’d done was awful… we had decimated this construction site. We finally slinked away and come Monday when the crew returned, police were called and neighbors interrogated but thankfully with privacy fences all around, none of the neighbors saw anything. 11 and 12 yr olds are stupid.


  • That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.

    First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.

    Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.



  • I was once very poor and now pretty well-off. I’m generally happy to try and pick up the bill when I go out with friends and family because I’m thankfully in a place in my life I can do that and I remember how thankful I was for the generosity of others early in my life. Unfortunately I’ve found some people get offended… that my picking up the bill is some power move to show I’m rich so I’ve become reluctant to do that unless I’ve explicitly invited them to dinner or whatever. I don’t want people to think I’m showing off and trying to make them feel inferior so if they’ve invited me or it’s an otherwise group event, I assume they’re paying their own way and didn’t come with the idea that someone else was paying for them. If somehow I’m the one whose credit card it ends up on because the place won’t split the bill, I’ll let people know how to Venmo me or whatever. It’s not because I’m worried about the money though.



  • My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.