Badabinski

I was looking for this comment so I can vent my extreme irritation to the world.

God, can this concept please die already‽ If you want to put solar panels where the cars/trains are, just 👏 fucking 👏 put 👏 them 👏 on 👏 top👏

Do not put them on the ground where they will get smushed and covered in dust and snow and dirt. do not. Just make a little roof for the train tracks/road/bike path/sidewalk/game trail/snail raceway and then put the panels on top of the roof and then if you’re feeling fancy angle the panels to point towards the sun and if you’re feeling really quite fancy then you can use bifacial panels to capture the backscatter from the ground and shit and then we can all be happy. solar ground no, solar roof yes, ground no roof yes. do not play the trolley problem with solar panels on the railroad tracks. we have been doing solar energy for decades and have fucking minmaxed this shit so why are they still trying to do this just STOP.

Fuck.

Person I’m responding to, please know that none of this is directed at you. I’m just sour right now and should get off the internet.

LAX is also just the worst fucking airport. I remember feeling shocked the first time I flew to LAX. I thought that a city like LA would have a nice, efficient airport, given how much traffic that airport gets and how much money LA has. It’s been 10 years since I was last there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if LAX was just as dingy and disorganized now.

I’m sure the whole security theater bullshit would occur no matter what airport you flew through, and I don’t know if the experience would have been any nicer anywhere else. I just don’t like that airport, I’m in a bad mood, and I want to complain about things on the internet.

I definitely haven’t been shouted at in any of the European airports I’ve been in (from memory, KEF, HEL, AMS, MAD, BCN, NCE, and BER, so not super representative of the continent), so to me, it seems like an American phenomenon. I haven’t been to Canada enough to know what it’s like there. It’s also somewhat recent. I’ve been flying for 25ish years now, and I feel like the yelling has only been happening for the past, I dunno, 5-7 years?

As others have said, I don’t think it’s that we like being shouted at. We just have a large number of people who are, uh, “ruggedly individual,” to put it in nice terms. Those people don’t really think about others enough, so you have to yell at them to get them to pay attention to the world around them. I’m the type of person that looks up the rules before I leave and makes sure I have all of my shit out of my pockets before I even enter the security line to ensure I don’t reduce the efficiency of the security checkpoint. I often feel a bit exasperated with the people who don’t think about others in those situations.

As a means of dealing with it, I’ve found that smiling, making eye contact, and nodding at the TSA agent doing the yelling makes them less likely to yell at me while simultaneously making me feel a bit less frustrated—expressing nice feelings and trying to show some common humanity with the people I’m interacting with makes it harder for me to feel angry. Not saying that’d work for everyone, but it’s helpful for me.

W.r.t. water bottles, I think it’s because people don’t look at or think about the signs that are often posted. A loud person yelling specifically at you is much more likely to make someone stop and ask themselves if they have a water bottle.

I’m definitely not defending it, but that’s my take on the matter. The whole water bottle thing is just security theater anyways.

The arch wiki has a udev rule that can automatically do something if the battery crosses a certain threshold: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop#Hibernate_on_low_battery_level

No polling which is great. I always try to do stuff on an event driven basis where possible for efficiency reasons. Gotta test this out though, since your battery might not send events for every percent change.

It very definitely was 😅 The way that company used the satellite network was cool, don’t get me wrong. They would use it to push content out to all their stores with multicast which was really efficient with bandwidth. I loved it for that, but I hated interacting with it over unicast in any way, shape, or form. Horses for courses, as they say.

The screenshots look really nice. I’ve personally always struggled with designing nice TUIs, so I really appreciate the way this looks.

I’d recommend trying out shellcheck and potentially building it into your repo as a CI check. I’ve written a ton of Bash over the years, and I’ve found shellcheck to be absolutely essential for any script over ~100 lines. It’s not perfect, but it does do a great job of helping you avoid many of the foot guns present in Bash. I also dearly love this site. It’s a fantastic reference, and I look at it almost every day.

I may take some time later today and provide a bit of specific feedback.

My pain tolerance for shitty input methods has been permanently warped after experiencing psychic damage from using Teamviewer to connect to a system over a very flaky HughesNet satellite link. I was working for a vendor that supplied a hardware networking box to a stupid retail company that sells food and shit. I just wanted to ssh to our boxen on a specific network so I could troubleshoot something, but the only way I could get to it was via putty installed on an ancient Windows XP desktop on the same network as our box that could only be accessed with Teamviewer. My favorite part of that was that the locale or something was fucked up, so my qwerty keyboard inputs were, like, fucking transformed into azerty somehow?? The Windows desktop was locked down and monitored to a tremendous degree, so I couldn’t change anything. The resolution was terrible, the latency was over a second, and half of my keyboard inputs turned into gibberish on the other side.

Oh, and I was onsite at that same company’s HQ doing a sales engineering call while I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I spent 5 days sitting in spare offices with shitty chairs, away from my family, living that fucking nightmare before I finally figured out what was wrong. God damn, what a fucking mess that was. For anyone reading this, NEVER WORK FOR GROCERY/DRUG STORE IT. They are worse than fucking banks in some ways. Fuck.

EDIT: also, I asked ‘why Teamviewer’ and the answer was always shrugs. This was before the big TeamViewer security incidents, so maybe they thought it was more secure? Like, at least they didn’t expose RDP on the internet…

Having been in this situation (the only binary I could use was bash, although cd was a bash builtin for me), echo * is your friend. Even better is something like this:

get_path_type() {
    local item
    item="$1"
    [[ -z "$item" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to get_path_type'; return 1; }
    if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'dir'
    elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'file'
    elif [[ -h "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'link'  # not accurate, but symlink is too long
    else
        echo '????'
    fi
}

print_path_listing() {
    local path path_type
    path="$1"
    [[ -z "$path" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to print_path_listing'; return 1; }
    path_type="$(get_path_type "$path")"
    printf '%s\t%s\n' "$path_type" "$path"
}

ls() {
    local path paths item symlink_regex
    paths=("$@")
    if ((${#paths[@]} == 0)); then
        paths=("$(pwd)")
    fi
    shopt -s dotglob
    for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
        if [[ -d "$path" ]]; then
            printf '%s\n' "$path"
            for item in "$path"/*; do
                print_path_listing "$item"
            done
        elif [[ -e "$path" ]]; then
            print_path_listing "$path"
        printf '\n'
        fi
    done
}

This is recreated from memory and will likely have several nasty bugs. I also wrote it and quickly tested it entirely on my phone which was a bit painful. It should be pure bash, so it’ll work in this type of situation.

EDIT: I’m bored and sleep deprived and wanted to do something, hence this nonsense. I’ve taken the joke entirely too seriously.

oh my God it’s like you’re in my head get out of my head. I’m reading this because I’m trying to catch up on sleep and need to distract myself from the dread, so this hits way too close to home lol

Nolla. They make great games with interesting vibes!

oh fuck I did misread it. Man, now I sound like a big ol’ asshole. Sorry, OP :/ I had a bad week thanks to some ChatGPT code and just kinda jumped out when I saw the word “ChatGPT” next to Bash.

Ugh, I hate ChatGPT. If this is Bash (which it is, because it’s literally looking for files in a directory called ~/.bashrc.d), then it should god damned well be using syntax and language features that we’ve had for at least twenty fucking years. Specifically, if you’re writing for Bash (and not POSIX shell), you better be using [[ ]] rather than [ ]. This wiki is my holy book I use to keep the demons away when writing Bash, and it does a simply fantastic job of explaining why you should use God damned double square brackets.

ChatGPT writes shitty, horrible, buggy ass Bash. This is relatively decent for ChatGPT (it even makes sure the files are real files and not symlinks), but I’ve had to fix enough terrible fucking shitty AI Bash to have no tolerance for even the smallest misstep from it.

Sincerely, A senior developer who is known as the Bash wizard at work.

EDIT: Sorry, OP. ChatGPT did not, in fact, write this code, and I am going to leave my comment here as a testament to what a big smelly dick I was here.

I played so many games on my Palm Pilot back in middle school. My Palm Tungsten T3 was great, and there were a shitload of freeware or shareware games released over the years.

I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.

I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.

Yeah, I’ve been wondering how the fuck they pulled this off. If it turns out that the only pagers that exploded belonged to Hezbollah members, then that would signal to me that this was done entirely digitally.

I’ve heard that batteries (can’t remember if it was laptop or phone batteries) contain the energy of a small grenade, but getting it to release that energy all at once without physical access is absolutely fucking wild and has serious fucking implications for device security.

EDIT: To avoid spreading misinformation, I’m providing this edit to say that the batteries absolutely were not the cause of the explosion. This was a supply-chain attack. Explosives were inserted into the pagers. The batteries in these pagers cannot be made to explode like this. I was overly excited when I made this comment.

I’m guessing it was because my comment is off-topic and lengthy. I would have sent you a DM, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do that in my mbin client 😅

Sorry for the off-topic question, but is your username a reference to the Culture books? I think that would have been a great addition to Very Little Gravitas Indeed/Zero Gravitas/Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Like, I can just imagine a book where the Very Little Gravitas Indeed, Zero Gravitas, and A Gravitas Deficiency all happen to be in the same incident group chat and constantly fuck around while the other ships debate and fuss, and then one or all three of them pulls a rabbit out of the hat and fixes the problem while the other Minds aren’t looking.

God, I miss Iain M. Banks. Also, if your username isn’t a reference then I probably sound like an absolute lunatic.

Very true! I was just in a rush and didn’t want to explain who he was.

For others, Bryan Cantrill (the guy in the video) is an incredibly gifted engineer who worked for Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle. He was deeply involved in Solaris (Sun’s really cool operating system that included pioneering shit like ZFS), and was then involved with Illumos, which was a fork of Solaris. He worked for a company called Joyent that made a super fucking cool thing called SmartOS, and now he’s the CTO for a company called Oxide Computer.

This is a hideously bad summary of his accomplishments. People who want to know more should read his Wikipedia article or watch the talk I posted. He’s a great presenter, so his talks are always pretty entertaining.

EDIT: The shit they’re doing at Oxide is absolutely nuts. They’re making what is effectively a datacenter contained within one 48u rack, and they’re writing all their own firmware and BIOS and shit for it. It’s crazy cool.

Don’t forget fully automated!