Badabinski

I feel this is a reductive argument. Parents should help their kids avoid harm while also encouraging growth. Phones and the Internet can absolutely encourage growth. The parent’s job is to ensure that the phone isn’t harming them. If the kid isn’t on the phone too much, isn’t picking up bad shit from the phone, and isn’t harming anyone else, I don’t think it makes sense to deny them.

If the kid is being harmed by being on the phone, then the parent should try to figure out what the problem truly is so they can find good solutions. I was on the computer too much as a kid and missed out on important shit. Rather than ripping out desktop out of the desk in a rage (which is what happened), my dad should have thought about why I felt the need to escape from my life so much (e.g. being afraid of a father who would do shit like rip out a computer and threaten to throw it off of a second floor balcony, self hatred, intense bullying at school, or alllll the crazy shit my mom did). He didn’t try to help me fix the things that were harming me, so all I had was my computer and the few people who didn’t seem to hate me.

I spent so many hours browsing Wikipedia, learning about scientific concepts. I talked to people who had lives like mine and were able to commiserate. I found a place and community that I was lacking in my everyday life. I learned skills that eventually translates to a successful career in software development. I don’t think that it’s good when kids feel like they need to escape to the Internet, but I think that having access to all the great stuff out there is worth it. For the kids who have awful lives because of shitty fucked up parents, the internet (or any escapist coping mechanism) can literally save them, albeit at a substantial cost.

The internet can be harmful, but we only seek out harmful things when the alternative is going without things we need. I think this is also true of children, so the question I feel parents should ask is “what does my phone-addicted kid need?”

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.

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.

Eh, I have a low tolerance for this kind of bullshit. I know what I like and what I don’t like. I went through their posting history before blocking them, and I found that the subjective quality of their contributions failed to outweigh my irritation towards them. To me, it’s better to just block them and never risk seeing comments like this from them again. There are a bunch of people on this site who I’d rather interact with.

As a bonus, they’ll only ever have one shitty passive aggressive comment from me to deal with.

Ah, excellent, thank you! I love it when shitheads make themselves obvious so I can block them. Toodles~

Someone beat me to the punch about the true meaning of Oracle, so I’ll instead link this wonderful video about why you shouldn’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s