Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.

The scheduling demand thing is referring specifically to the project manager going “we need this for an upcoming major product launch, so you need to fix this before the launch.” It feels like Microsoft cracking the whip to try getting free labor, because it is.

If they truly can’t do without it for their product launch, they can fork it and fix the bug themselves. Surely Microsoft has the resources and brainpower to do so. But the PM didn’t want to do that, because it means they’d be spending their own time and resources on it.

Yeah, the combined modem/routers are almost all garbage. You really are better off bridging it and letting your own router do the work. Because the ISP has a vested interest in giving you the cheapest router possible.

It’s easier than ever these days. The hardest part is figuring out how to configure your router to point devices to it. Because router manufacturers love to bury that setting somewhere deep. For actually setting up the pihole, it’s usually just a matter of flashing the memory card with the right image, then finding some decent block lists. But even the block lists are easy to find nowadays.

I blocked the servers with my pihole. Coincidentally, my two smart TVs are the two most blocked devices on my network. It’s not even close.

This was with only ~1 hour of TV watching, while the device in the third spot is my phone (which I had been using all day). And yet the second TV still had almost 3x as many blocked requests.

Smart TVs are fucking invasive.

This is actually why they include the personal anecdote. Supposedly it’s easier to copyright a recipe when some sort of creative writing is attached. Because the bare recipe isn’t creative or unique enough to be considered copyrightable.

Being Hindu is relevant because Hindus believe cows are sacred. They believe that in the cycle of reincarnation, cows are the lowest form of creature that you can be reincarnated into. So taking care of cows is seen as a holy act, the same way taking care of the homeless or stray animals could be considered noble and selfless. Lots of their religious imagery and stories also involves butter and cream. Eating beef is taboo, and many Hindus take it a step farther and are fully vegetarian.

So with context, it’s sort of like forcing a Hasidic Jew to eat pork; It serves no purpose other than to humiliate them and denigrate their religion.

Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.

There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.

You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.

If you drink it straight out of the bottle, the whole thing only counts as one drink.

Make declaration of war a mandatory vote for every citizen. Anyone who votes “yes” (or illegally abstains) gets registered for the draft. Anyone who votes “no” is unregistered.

I know it’s not really feasible because governments need to be able to react swiftly in times of war. But these days with computers and cell phones, there’s very little reason that the government couldn’t push a “go download our secure voting app/visit this link to cast your vote” notification via the emergency alert broadcasting system.

Yeah, my last apartment had toilets that weren’t compatible. The supply hose going to the tank actually had a compression washer and went all the way through the tank before attaching to the valve. Like I couldn’t just unscrew the water hose from the bottom of the tank to tie in, because there wasn’t anything to unscrew. The hose just went straight through to the inside of the tank.

I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. It honestly had me baffled, and I was left settling for baby wipes until I could move into my current place. And you’d best bet that during my walkthrough for my current place, I checked the toilet to see if it would work with my bidet. The leasing agent looked at me like I was crazy when I dove behind the toilet, but it’s a new checkbox on my list.

Are you-… Uhh… Are you using Pringles to wipe, in some sort of Three Shells system?

but some other secure facility that maximizes the ability of these people to make whatever contribution to society they may be able to make to society.

Yeah, I touched on that with my last sentence:

It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

There are two problems with that. The first is that “maximizing contribution to society” can easily be interpreted as “being forced to stamp license plates for 16 hours a day.” We already know this is a possible interpretation, because that’s how our system already interprets it. Either way they’re locked up against their will, and are being forced to perform labor to someone else’s benefit. The very nature of their confinement means that any contribution they make will be for someone else and not themselves. And the simple word for that is “slavery”. The second problem is that it’s still prison. We haven’t actually solved the prison problem at all in this scenario; We’ve simply given it a mask so we can say prisons have been abolished. Like if we don’t call them prisons, we can say we don’t have any prisoners.

Prisons will still be necessary for the most egregious and irredeemable criminals. The sad reality is that there are certain people who simply need to be sequestered from the rest of society for the general public’s safety, and no amount of rehabilitation or intervention will solve that. But that should be the exception, not the norm. The massive prison population is absolutely a problem, but it isn’t something that can be completely abolished. It may be called something else in the future (like a long-term involuntary mental health facility,) but it’s still serving the same basic function while wearing a more friendly mask.

Yup, there’s a reason that engineering degrees require ethics classes. On the surface, you don’t realize civil engineering can be racist, until you learn about engineers designing bridges too short for busses to drive under, so white neighborhoods can keep bus-riding minorities out.

Wrong thread.

Also, by the time you’ve gotten it to compile, another two versions have come out.

You got to it before I did. Programming languages are like vehicles. You wouldn’t take a sports car off-roading, and you wouldn’t expect a tractor to win a drag race. There is a lot you can do with an all-purpose vehicle, but it’s not going to be as good as something that is purpose-built for a single task.

Honestly, browsing by new is one of the fastest ways to become a recognizable power user. I actually did it for a while back on the bad place. After a while, you’re able to pretty quickly determine if a post is going to take off. Then you just drop a quick witty comment, and it’ll have thousands of upvotes and dozens of replies in a few hours.

The big problem I’ve seen with “Active” as the default post sort is that you occasionally get year old posts suddenly get comment-bombed when someone scrolls too far and upvotes it. Suddenly that year old post is marked as active again, so it’s in everyone’s feed. And most people don’t even bother checking time stamps before commenting, so you suddenly get a flood of comments on your year old post.