The most I’ve paid was 250, for a used one. There’s no point in buying new, it will get stolen.

These are all Dutch:

Secrid makes wallets and slim card holders; I quite like mine.

Moccamaster makes great coffee makers that are easy to clean with spare parts easily ordered online.

Royal Dutch Gazelle makes great bikes to be stolen at inconvenient times.

Tony’s Chocolonely makes tasty chocolate that uses as little exploited labor as possible and is (supposedly) trying to end slavery in the cocoa production industry.

Gulpener is a good beer brewed in the village of Gulpen between Maastricht and Aachen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpR1ETf93Q0

Just a silly music video, but something that has managed to bury itself deep inside my head, to be brought up again and again as intrusive thoughts on a daily basis.

I was actually just thinking about those the other day and how I kindof miss them in a certain way. Just a silly little break from daily monotony of writing code; wiggle the cursor a bit and watch a tiny cat try to catch it.

Well let me count how many landlords I have rented from; I’m 100% certain they all lied about spending the entirety of the deposit on cleaning.

And every guy I’ve ever dated. And a few sellers of second hand vehicles.

Best of luck! If you’ve got questions or problems feel free to DM me (or reply here) and I’ll try to help as best I can. I’ve been using linux since the mid 90s, so I have a decent idea of how it all works :)

I think it has some valid use as a tool in programming, though relying entirely on it (“vibe coding”) just produces a mountain of difficult to maintain crap.

What works for me is using it as tool like one could delegate to a junior programmer. I can write the signature of a method that it will complete the contents of; for example I’ll write “function reverseTextInSentence(string: text) {}” and tell an AI to implement that method. It saves me a little time and I can keep thinking about the larger picture rather than the details of reversing a string of text.

That said: do not let it organize the structure of your project, don’t let it name things for you, don’t use in place of critical thinking, don’t ever think it can actually use logic and reason besides repeating things it found on online forums, and don’t let it write projects wholesale. It’s a tool that can be useful, and you need to know when to use it and when its use will just make things worse.

Also fuck the AI corporations, run a free model on your own hardware.

• vlc
• vim
• tmux
• neomutt
• FreeBSD / Linux
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Firefox
• KDE’s Dolphin
• SwayWM
• pass

At some point you have to assume that even if they can walk on the seabed that the physical pressure would just disintegrate their bodies. If the powers of necromantic reanimation can be overcome with a sword or a shotgun then surely several atmospheres of pressure applied across the entire body would do it.

That’s fine, I don’t require players take advantage of it. Spend your time crafting, resting, whatever. It’s all just a game in the end.

One of my long standing house rules when I’m DM is to let people just be as creative as they want during downtime, as long as it doesn’t affect the story. Druid wants to spend all day wild shaped as a turtle, hanging out in the pond? Sure, go for it - I’ll ignore the X/hours per day limits or whatever. The wizard wants to cast Wish just to create a sick looking pipe to smoke from? Amazing, no XP or gold cost for that. Fighter wants to use Action Surge repeatedly to chop an entire tree into firewood for their winter log cabin? Don’t forget to mount a deer’s head above the fireplace.

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.