I was an atheist, socialist learning, bisexual pacifist in a family of young earth creationists that even in the mid 90s would get frothy mouthed angry at the history of Vietnam veterans being spat at.

I enjoyed learning, my step father hadn’t read a book since he was 17. I wanted to live in a pedestrian friendly city, my parents encouraged me to yell “jap-junk” at people riding japanese motorcycles.

I started learning how to code when I was 10, and my homeschoolimg books were bought from a fundamentalist church in Florida that required memorizing bible verses for math and history class.

It was a choice of leave or suicide.

Yes! Let’s make the Local Dick Sucking Union a reality!

I absolutely prefer working from home.

I’m a programmer; my ability to work is heavily dependent on my ability to focus and think.

At home:

• I decide how quiet it is
• I decide when to look at or even think about interruptions from email or Slack
• I have a nice chair, a fancy ass keyboard and expensive mouse
• I also have a nice 27" monitor and a 34" ultrawide
• I decide when (or if) to eat lunch
• If I am eating lunch I have my own fridge, pantry, and numerous restaurants in a short walking distance.

My office, by comparison:

• I cannot control the volume of the radio or what it plays
• I cannot stop people from saying “Hey BozeKnoflook, what…” and just fucking ruining my last two hours of condensed thought and making me waste time getting back into my prior line of thought just to resume my previous state.
• The chair is acceptable, but I fucking loathe typing on a laptop keyboard
• The office only offers a 23" monitor to hook my laptop up to
• Everybody goes to eat in the building’s cafeteria at noon, because that is when lunch is served. There are no restaurants or food spots in a short walking distance that are a viable option. I can only eat what the cafeteria offers (and while okay, it’s not great food).

Throw in the time it takes to commute back and forth and… why the hell would I want to work in the office? Sure, throw an occasional event (quarterly meetings, occasional dinner parties of the various teams, whatever) to build personal relations but I am easily far, far less productive in the office than at home.

Police have had, since the late 90s I think, the “Hotplug” which is a special battery pack / generators that provide a special power plug where you can gently loosen the existing plug, slide the generator’s plug in place over it, then remove the computer from the main supply while keeping it powered on.

Power plug locks only buy you time or prevent casual mayhem; the police can work around those.

QNX could qualify, but it’s not as easily available as most other OS.

Solaris is nearly dead for new development, but it’s still receiving updates (last release was 16 days ago) and can run GNOME and a browser.

Apparently: show empathy to the poor.

To start… it was slow. Your modern gigabit internet can download a 700 megabyte file in 6 seconds; on a good dialup link that would take 30 hours. Videos for porn weren’t an option – just loading a single image could mean waiting for a full minute or two. Sometimes you’d get a JPEG that would load the entire (very fuzzy) image at first and then it would progressively become sharper, other times you’d watch the image load from top to bottom, one line of pixels at a time.

Browsers didn’t have tabs, and the more browser windows you had open the slower your computer would go. All it took was one page throwing in a bunch of silly effects (like animated snow falling on the screen while you try to read, or an animated cat that follows your mouse cursor to pounce on it, etc) and it would take down all of the other browser windows you had open.

Uncensored was definitely one way of putting it. There were several “file sharing” systems, all basically completely un-moderated. After two weeks of downloading The Matrix it may turn out to actually be a collection of snuff films of people being decapitated (no joke or exaggeration - the Tukhchar massacre during the war in Dagestan was brutal). You could wait all day on a download of some song only to find it’s the Barney theme music but saved with the filename “Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3”

BUT, that said, there were a lot of forums and those where moderated by the owners who where trying to cultivate their own community. You can still find some of these, SomethingAwful.com and Metafilter.com are still kicking. I haven’t looked at SA in ages, but Metafilter remains a lovely little community in the modern era. Metafilter also charges a single $5 fee to sign up (which is required to post), which I think really, really helps keep down the number of trolls and bots.

Search engines didn’t really exist for some time. Yahoo was one of the first, but even Yahoo started as a manually cultivated list of sites. So you wouldn’t search for “cheesecake recipe” but you’d look at Yahoo’s list of recipe sites and browse through them looking for cheesecake. When it first came out Google was a massive game changer.

And if you go to pre-“web” days there wasn’t even websites: Usenet / NNTP was basically just one big huge text-only forum. You would load up rec.food.baking or rec.food.cooking to read or discuss. There wasn’t any moderation – if somebody was being a shithead all you could do is block them on your side and ignore them. And the newsgroup naming scheme could be so inconsistent - there was comp.lang.python for Python programming discussion, but C/++ learners had alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++.

I think that, ultimately, the largest single change has been the consolidation. Nowadays people can spend nearly all of their time just on a handful of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You could install the “StumbleUpon” browser extension and just spend all day finding new websites that other people thought interesting enough to submit to the index. We had entire websites/forums dedicated to niche interests like specific models of a car or motorcycle.

It was better in some ways, worse in others. You can still get a feel for it though: I genuinely recommend looking at MetaFilter and trying to explore the parts of the internet that aren’t part of the consolidated corporate blob of Facebook / Threads / Twitter / etc.

I used to share the struggle with names, until I started to learn Dutch and realized that I can just use common non-English names.

No more Bob the Blacksmith, Tom the Wizard Shop Dude, Jane the Horse-Mechanic; now there’s a bunch of Noor, Sem, Yara, Mees, Saar, Bram, Lotte, Luca, Felix, Mia, Lia, Gerrit, Hendrika, Inaya, Mael, Manon…

In perfect Dutch tradition of the law being quite wishy-washy even what you say is now not fully true anymore: some cities have signed onto a national experiment where the coffee shops are only allowed to purchase from a set of legally licensed growers.

So the current situation is that cannabis is illegal but there is officially an unofficial policy of tolerance, saying they only care about it selectively and most people can have and use it without worry. Most cannabis sellers have to grow it illegally or purchase it illegally, which is tolerated. And now some cannabis sellers, whose product still remains illegal, are only allowed to purchase from legally licensed growers. Who have a legal license to produce and sell a product that remains illegal.

It’s great to consider while high.

Source (in Dutch language): https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2024/12/10/experimenteerfase-van-het-experiment-gesloten-coffeeshopketen-wietexperiment-start-in-april

Other source: I live within 20 meters of a coffee shop and frequently partake. And bought a bunch right before the deadline to switch over to cannabis grown under license, because the coffee shops were dumping their old inventory while they could still sell it in its Schrodinger’s legal-state.

Yea I know. I went from >400lbs to 195; but then COVID. I swear to god I can do week long fasts and barely lose weight, I really need some kind of sustained cardio exercise on a regular basis. Just give me an elliptical and some time.

Get back to my pre-COVID weight. Thankfully I just moved to a new place with a gym literally across the street.

She’s utterly wrong. Take Robin Williams as an example: he was famous, rich, loved by everybody, stupendously funny. Still had depression. Still suffered.

It has nothing to do with people’s “value” or their work ethic.

I’m running a PF2 campaign where the party are outlaws running around Alkenstar, robbing banks and seeking vengeance.

Every day begins with some newspaper headlines. One will be about them if they did something substantial or noticeable, but I have a ton of fluff ready to insert. Some is story related foreshadowing, some is just stuff like “Prices of apples are up 2% after news of heavy rain in Geb’s south has washed away too many skeleton fruit pickers”

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM (AWS authentication system) is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide to fail because the internal authentication is broken.

I can’t login to the AWS console to check on my stuff in the European zone, because the login goes through IAM in us-east-1 where all the authentication does.

It really highlights just how centralized so much of the internet is on like three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google)

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I suspect the big problem is that IAM is affected and it is not decentralized, which is causing other systems worldwide (even outside of AWS’ us-east-1 location) which rely on IAM in us-east-1 to also fail. I’m having trouble even logging into the AWS console to check on my European servers.

Edit: IAM is the main authentication method. So AWS may still be up and running fine in other locations around the world; but if you can’t connect to them because AWS’ internal authentication is all fucked up…

Oof, you’re probably as out of luck in Drenthe as I am in Nijmegen. In Amsterdam I can recommend La Condesa and Tacoteca as pretty good. I’ve heard rumors of places in Den Hague but I haven’t gotten there yet.

The only places without a housing crisis at the moment are places where nobody wants to live.

There is, nationwide.

But also everywhere else in Europe, and everywhere in the US that I would be willing to live. What can you do eh?

Good food does exist, it just takes some time and effort to find out where to go and where should be blacklisted. And there’s like three good Mexican restaurants in the whole country.

Haha sorry, I managed to submit that comment waaay too early.