Oh damn, in German, "Vati" is an affectionate form like "daddy", except it's the word stem of "father" ("Vater").

And wouldn't you know it, Christians also use "Vater" to refer to priests, the pope and their god.

Recently had to edit the hosts-file on a remote host, and I don't know if using two proxy jumps to SSH into it broke it, but it just wouldn't let me select text with the mouse.
I had to duplicate seven lines and edit the IP addresses, and without being able to copy-paste, I already saw myself manually typing it out.

Then I remembered that in Vim, you can do d5↓ to delete 5 lines. Surely that would also work with copying/yanking. And yep, a y7↓ and a paste later and I had duplicated the lines.

Then use the multi-line cursor like I routinely do for changing all 7 IP addresses...
...and now I feel like I've crossed the line where people will think I'm just a wizard.

The inherent problem with this kind of solution is that if you don't break backwards compatibility, you don't get rid off all the insecure code.

And if you do break backwards compatibility, there's not much reason to stick to C++ rather than going for Rust with its established ecosystem...

ʕ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°ʔ

What really annoys me about this is that we had good rail infrastructure here in Germany, then it got privatized in the 90s, which made it shit over the last few decades, which means everything is transported via trucks now, which just puts those costs onto the more expensive roads. Like, that was just a bad decision even before the public cared about climate change.

We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.

And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe...

Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?

Generally more than half of the rock is underground, so while it might be only one rock, you see many distinct sides of it...

Twitter dies as Musk wins war against own service

I thought about this recently with Instagram, when I got linked there as the 'official' information page for an event. I could see the post with the general information, but couldn't read the comments to see if any more information or clarifications had been posted.

That was an event, where the organizers obviously wanted as many people as possible to show up, and Instagram was doing them a disservice in that. I wasn't going to sign up to Instagram to view those comments. And my parents couldn't sign up to Instagram. It's too complex for them.

Twitter has been gone for the non-Nitter using general public for a while. So, at this point, if you're not a techy, where can you still publicly post information? TikTok, I think? YouTube, I guess. Mastodon would be an option, but it's verging on being too unknown for non-techies, as does BlueSky.

We've gone from a time where everyone and their mother could publicly announce things on the internet, to a pretty big vacuum.
It's going to be interesting what fills this space. Theoretically, even personal webpages might have a bit of a comeback.

This is kind of not really related, but last week, we've been onboarding two new devs into our programming project at work. Our team so far had exclusively used native Linux, while the two new folks were on Windows.

We recommended using a VM, because we had a recollection of how much pain programming on Windows was. Unfortunately, VirtualBox had performance problems on their machines and ordering a VMWare installation took a few days.

So, we spent those few days to see, if Windows was really still that much of a pain. They'd still need a VM for testing, but otherwise, our entire tooling should have been fine on Windows.

Fuck me, those days were wasted. One of our dependencies dynamically pulled in C code and compiled it, which you barely even noticed on Linux, but is apparently not a thing it can do on native Windows.
So, instead they were on WSL pretty early on, but that had all kinds of differences to a native Linux installation and they constantly had to fix the DNS config, because it kept being reset by Windows. In particular, while compiling Rust & C worked, it was extremely slow.

Eventually, they got VMWare and we started setting up the OS. We literally completed installing Linux before a compilation run had finished. And what had cost us multiple days to try to get going under Windows, was just working within an hour on Linux. And for some reason, compilation within the VM was about 20 times faster than under WSL.

I still assume, these are generally solvable problems and if our team had worked under WSL from the start, we would have had some of those solved.
But even taking that into account, there were just so many nonsense problems, which we never had to fix on Linux, that I'm still left absolutely baffled that some people genuinely use WSL for development.

One example that stuck with me is that he said some shit along the lines of 80% of Twitter's microservices being superfluous and he'll be shutting them off.

Yes, the dev teams just spent 4/5 of their time building shit no one asked for. It just annoys me so much, because anyone with basic reasoning should be able to work out that this cannot possibly be the case, but it's easy to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Well, except that many, many Twitter outages followed.