Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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  • 140 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I apologize, I was rushed and didn’t adequately explain myself. I want to restate the premise on which I made my comment. Israel has a large military and is using it to kill Palestinians right now. I absolutely agree with that. Israel is using weapons provided by the United States, and the transfer of those weapons was authorized by the current Democratic administration. No disagreements there.

    My fear is that the military of the United States will become directly involved in the Palestinian genocide. I am afraid of the much larger and better armed US military actively leveling grid squares filled with Palestinian civilians with missiles. What is happening right now is already monstrous. I want the United States to divest and cease its involvement in this genocide at the bare minimum. I want the United States to directly oppose Israel and stop the genocide, using force if necessary. I very much do not want the United States’ involvement to increase. If Donald Trump is elected, an increase in the use of force against Palestine may happen. That is my argument. I absolutely do not believe that the current administration is doing the right thing here. I hate it, and I want it to stop. I just also don’t want it to get worse.



  • So I’m going to preface this by saying how I feel about the situation. I’m furious that Biden and the Democrats aren’t just… y’know, fucking stopping this shit. I’m furious that the administration isn’t doing more to end the goddamned genocide. It makes me feel sick to think that the executive branch of my country isn’t denouncing what’s happening. The Democrats are supposed to be the party for compassionate people. I consider myself to be a compassionate person, and the Democrats are absolutely failing to represent me.

    I’m sure there’s some realpolitik going on there, but like, realpolitik can suck my asshole when my taxes are paying for bombs and missiles that are being used by a different country in an unjust war to kill innocent people in a genocide.

    Make no mistake, I want this shit to end right the fuck now. I want Israel to fuck off back to their borders. I want the hostages to be traded, I want Palestine to be a full state in the UN with defensive treaties. I want Bibi and the people who enabled him to be tried for crimes against humanity. I want Israel and the United States to pay reparations and to foot the bill for the rebuilding of Palestinian infrastructure.

    I want change. I am tired of the Democrats. Shit, I think there are a lot of people tired of the Republicans. Nobody is happy with the way out system works. I look at other countries with coalition governments and a large number of specific parties and I wish that I could have that. I would absolute love to have a party that represents my values and desires.

    With all that said, I just don’t think that we will be able to enact meaningful change in 30ish days. To enact change within the confines our current system, we would need to convince tens of millions of people to vote for a candidate that truly represents them in that timeframe. Given the constricting nature of our two-party system, I think many people wouldn’t know who that is. I certainly don’t know who would represent me. It certainly wouldn’t be Jill Stein, to provide an example of a third party candidate. I’d vote for Bernie Sanders, but he’s not running for president. His election would require tens of millions to write his name on their ballots.

    Many of the people who don’t feel represented by our government with regards to Palestine currently vote for the Democrats. If we were to all switch in unison and vote for someone who would truly stop this shit, then we could enact our change. I believe that there’s just no way to do that in a month.

    If we try to enact change right now and fail, then we will likely end up with a violent, narcissistic rapist as the head of our government who will continue to implement blatantly christo-fascist policies. Christo-fascists do not like people of the Islamic faith, and Donald Trump has promised to wipe out Palestine if he is elected. He cannot be trusted to act according to what he has previously said (which, speaking from experience, is the fashion of all malignant narcissists who are not being treated for their PD), but there is a chance that he will follow through on his word and will speed up the genocide of the people of Palestine.

    There are two primary candidates. One candidate will likely maintain the monstrous, awful, status quo. The other candidate may or may not direct the most powerful military force in the world to level Palestine and order the destruction of every man, woman, and child within its borders. The former gives the people of Palestine more time while to survive while we try to unfuck our system. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a chance.

    Earlier, I said that realpolitik can suck my asshole, and that’s what this feels like. It’s shit and I hate it and it makes me feel gross. None of this brings back the lives of those who have already died, and my choice probably wouldn’t really be appreciated by a Palestinian who is trying to survive the bombs I’m paying for. I won’t shame anyone who cannot live with themselves if they vote for Kamala Harris. People are entitled to their beliefs, and living out of compliance with them can be very harmful. However, I feel compelled to at least present an emotional argument against a vote for a 3rd party candidate (or no vote at all) in this specific situation.


  • 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.



  • Ditto for tar and unrar, although I deal with .7z so infrequently that I have to look at the manual every time I use it.

    find’s fucked up argument handling really becomes a problem for me when I want to use it in a complex pipeline or when using the -exec flag. I’ve spent far less time debugging in those situations since switching to fd. I won’t yuck the yum of folks who are comfortable and like find, but I feel that we probably have more approachable alternatives for new users.





  • find is also just a fucking mess in terms of UX. The fact that the ordering of positional and optional arguments are so strongly tied to each other has always driven me fucking bonkers. Nowadays, I install fd everywhere I can and tell people to switch to it and never look back. locate is nice and all, but I always forget to update the db and I don’t want it populating in the background.

    tar doesn’t bug me as much, provided you use unix or GNU style options. tar xvf foo.tar is just icky and less readable than tar -xvf foo.tar. I will happily concede that it’s not very ergonomic though. I used to rely on things like dtrx (short for Do The Right eXtraction) because it was such a pain to remember the options for tar/unrar/unzip/7z.


  • 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.