Given how obviously impressionable and just not “on top of things” the politicians are in the US these days, I’m not sure someone could come up with a argument that convinced me that alien life with the ability to do interplanetary travel would waste their time trying to communicate with our leaders.

Within a day they would just decide to kill all of us for the safety of the galaxy.

I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”. Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first “computer guy” to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.

Having said that, I also don’t have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn’t make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.

The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.

Trump has historically been for or against whatever he thinks will be the best for him.

This combination of arrogance and complacency sort of thinking is how it does happen on Linux one day.

If all of the parts of the internet that the average person finds useful goes down, then it matters little that technically “the internet” is not down. If it can’t be useful then it is as good as “down”.

Couldn’t we just skip the middle man so to speak and feed some billionaires to a few polar bears out right?

I’m with you on that. VIM is a good example of a tool that the deepness of the tool makes it aggravating to use for the 90% of simple use cases.

Unless you use VIM enough for the shortcuts to be second nature it is faster to install Nano, make the changes, and remove Nano than it is to use VIM.

A lot of my personal dislike for VIM would be done away with if it just had a helpful common keys cheat sheet (basic cursor navigation, edit mode, exit with and without saving, etc) at the bottom of the editor window like Nano does.

Those were actually on different lines when I wrote that. Weird.

• A tape measurer
• A heating pad
• A water resistant fire safe
• Decent surge protectors for your expensive electronics (splurge on UPS’s if you can)

I wonder if I could rig up a bidet that would play Africa by Toto while it washed my backside.

Putting new tasks down to get to them later at work when I see something I had not planned on doing. Just make a ticket and throw it in the backlog. It is amazing how those little 5 minute things can eat into the work you said you were going to be doing now.

Also, "the Scotty principle ". Basically always say something will take longer than it will.

https://tinyhydra.com/the-scotty-principle/

I just enjoy new tech and trying new things in that arena. So new phones before I technically need to is one of the things I spend disposable income on when something in that arena catches my interest.

Does have a nice side effect of constantly reenforcing the use of platform agnostic services and retaining ultimate control of my data if it is something I care about, since it really allows me to just move the sim to a new phone and be up and running in a hour or less with more or less any Apple or Android phone.

And it is more discouraged to kill and eat the users when they get out of line.

The Stephen King movie Silver Bullet. I have always really liked but been freaked out by werewolf movies and something about Everett McGills performance as the priest mixed with the usual stalking of the wolf really spooked me.