If the price I saw when I picked an item is different to what I pay at the counter, I’ll never be back at that place again, even if it means I’m paying less.

My experience with maintaining open source projects (though mine are very much smaller) is that it’s quite similar to a business: you just have to deal with stakeholders and people who think they are stakeholders.

I had all the same experience at work:

• Some unknown person from an unrelated team contacted me because something that my team does not manage broke. I tried to help a few times and I suddenly became their personal IT support team.

• Another time someone not even working at my company demanded that I drop everything and fix their problem, because my name appeared in 3rd parties libraries.

It’s sad that open source authors don’t always receive the recognition that they deserve.

Thank you for your compliment. I love it. The floppy disk is 1.44 non-freedom MB, not 0.015264 miles of CD drives.

I would suggest:

• 1KB = storage capacity of 1 kg of 1.44 floppy disks.
• 1MB = storage capacity of 0.0106 mile of CD drives.
• 1GB = storage capacity of 1 good computer in the 2000s.
• 1TB = storage capacity of 1 truck of GB (see above)

PS: just to be clear, I meant CD drives, not CD discs.

You make me want to buy a Steam Deck, even though I don’t play games much.

RoR is too much magic for me. Getting started with any new code base is such a pain that I never want to do again. As a manager, I’ll avoid any job post that mentions Ruby. I have maintained projects written in Delphi, Centura, Java, C#, PHP and none of them even come close to the pain of RoR. Java and C# are notorious for ceremonial interfaces but that’s nothing compared to trying to figure out RoR automagics.

Epic wanted exclusives by pulling games from other platforms. I will never spend a single cent on Epic Games. I’m happy to spend it on Steam, especially games that I have pirated before (Commandos series for example) or indie games (Banished anyone?).

For bigger games such as Civilians, I’ll purchase it on Steam and then pirate so I don’t need to run Steam. I am a big fan of patches to remove the intro screen.

I pirate because it’s more convenient. No launcher, no update, no DRM, no need to be always online. I still purchase games but still play the pirated version.

I’m at the level called “never bothered to try”.

The fact that it’s impossible to change game on an ongoing/completed game is exactly the reason why everyone is angry. This is distortion, simple, just like the example of car being charged for miles mentioned in the article. It’s no coincidence that games are advertised as “built on …” since game engine decides how the game is built.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) by Peter Jackson.

RoR is very… specific. Some love it because it comes with magic. Many hate it for the same reason.

You either knows the magic and love it, or you hate it with a passion. You never really know when (not if) your change will break the system because it’s supposed to name in a very specific way that work by, again, magic.

Any good encryption should make data looks random. Looking for patterns in encrypted data is one of the most basic steps to break an encryption. Therefore, good encryption should make data almost uncompressable, as in it’s so random that compression does not reduce the size.

Encrypt then sign. Verification is often much faster than (or at worst as fast as) decryption. Signature can also be verified without decryption key, making it possible to verify the data along the way.

After many failed attempts at TDD, I realized/settled on test driven design, which is as simple as making sure what you’re writing can be tested. I don’t see writing the test first as a must, only good to have, but testable code is definitely a must.

This approach is so much easier and useful in real situations, which is anything more complicated than foo/bar. Most of the time, just asking an engineer how they plan to test it will make all the difference. I don’t have to enforce my preference on anyone. I’m not restricting the team. I’m not creating a knowledge vacuum where only the seniors know how yo code and the juniors feel like they know nothing.

Just think how you plan to test it, anyone can do that.

Russia invasion of Ukraine. They used to be number 2 army with sophisticated weapons. Now they are number 1 world laughing stock with weapons that works exceptionally well for invading Mars but not on earth.

Not sure if they’re different now. I tried YouTube Music one year ago and it’s very hard to find new music. On Spotify, I can navigate from one song to a related song and another and so on. On YouTube Music, it keeps taking me back to artists and songs that I have liked before, making it very hard to find new music.

PSA: Since his finger and the reflection touches, he’s likely looking into a one way mirror. There’s someone behind the glass.

No FactoryFatoryFactory? I’m disappointed. (Typo is intentional)

Plex login system is such a nightmare. There’s a mix of something that is local, some that are online but displayed as local, and some that are completely online. I gave up on Plex when I can’t figure out how to remove an old Plex instance that somehow the clients still connecting to instead of the new server.