I don’t have advice, just a worthless anecdote.

I work at a large tech company. We had a Windows XP system on our network get hacked. They used that to jump to our servers. IT had to quarantine off the whole lab, because they didn’t know where the hacker had hopped next. So then IT had to do a post-mortem and figure out how they got in and what was affected. That process took 3 months. In the meantime, any team with servers in that lab couldn’t use them. The team directly responsible for this couldn’t work at all for the full 3 months.

I guess I’m a dummy, because I never even thought about this. Maybe I got lucky, but when I did restore from a backup, I didn’t have any issues. My containerized services came right back up like nothing was wrong. Though that may have been right before I successfully hosted my own (now defunct) Lemmy instance. I can’t remember, but I think I only had sqlite databases in my services at the time.

Also, The Presidents of the United States of America.

The song “More Bad Times” came on my Spotify radio playlist a few years back. I had never heard the song before. I was dying of laughter. I was not at all prepared for a song that silly.

The 20% is relatively new. It was always around 10%, and then restaurants started “suggesting” higher tips on the receipts, and basically guilting people into tipping more. It was pushed up to 15% in the mid '00s, and then only pushed up to 20% during Covid. I have been called a piece of shit human on multiple occasions because I didn’t buy into the restaurants randomly changing it on me. There is immense social pressure here around tipping.

The restaurants have a financial motivation to want the tips to be higher, so I feel like it’s a conflict of interest for them to be suggesting the tip amount. I think the government needs to get involved and regulate tipping or even outright ban it at this point, because restaurants aren’t going to stop pushing the envelope at 20%.

I live in the US and I have never tipped housekeeping, nor have I ever heard of someone doing it.

I conducted coding interviews for a few years at a startup before moving to a bigger company where I had a smaller role.

For me, I never cared about if someone got the right answer. I have actually said no to people who got the right answer and yes to people who got the wrong answer (or didn’t finish). The purpose of the interview is to see if I want to work with that person. If someone can write a perfect program, but can’t tell me why it works, that gives me no insight into how they solve problems or if they even know how to solve problems. What I want to hear is their thought process.

First repeat the question, and emphasize the key details. Speak an example input and output of the function so the interviewer (and you!) knows you understand the problem. Then start talking about what kind of algorithms or data structures you might use to solve this problem. Reference other common problems that might be similar, and how they differ. Specify patterns that could be used for this problem or even your comparison problem, and whether or not that will work for this one.

Doing all of these steps with spoken words helps your interviewer understand how you think, and they may give away hints to mistakes in your thought process, or even point out that you are misunderstanding the question entirely. And that’s okay! It’s better to work out the details when speaking about it before writing any code.

Treat the interview like you are solving a problem with a colleage in pair programming. Bounce ideas off them and see what they think. They are very likely to give hints if you talk to them in this way. If you are stuck, tell them! They might be able to reword a part of the question to help you think about the problem in a different way, leading you towards the solution.

AFTER you and the interviewer are both confident that you understand the problem, and you have discussed all the algorithms, data structures, patterns, etc. that you need, maybe spoken through a some pseudocode, or maybe written down a table of example inputs and outputs, only then start coding.

I think soap deserves an honorable mention.

Mine are named after fictional robots, computer programs, or AI. It started with my wifi being GLaDOS for 5 GHz and Wheatley for 2.4 GHz. I thought it was funny that everyone could immediately tell that Wheatley was the slower one. Over time, I continued the trend. My gaming PCs are named after characters from the Mega Man X series (desktop is Zero, laptop is X, steam deck is Sigma). My macs are named EVE and WALL-E. My server is named Sibyl System (from Psycho Pass).

I think “you’re welcome” is just too formal. I would say it to a customer, not my friend.

Korben my man. I-I-I-I have no fire.

I think it’s fine for kids younger than teenagers. Maybe around 8 and up. By the time they are teenagers, most kids are watching anything and everything, included R-rated movies.

From what distance away? Because I had them, and I promise they weren’t as loud from normal use distance than a jet engine. Maybe if your ear/microphone is basically touching the bag, but your ear isn’t normally that close. Plus, exposure time is pretty significant factor for hearing loss. Rolling up a chip bag once every couple of days when you have chips isn’t going to cause hearing loss.

It wasn’t that loud.

At the time, I thought the Sun chips bag situation was hilarious. If I think back on it now, it’s really sad. Yes, the bag was significantly louder than the original bag. But I feel like we’re going to need to make some sacrifices as a society for the environment. And that seems like a really, really tiny sacrifice.

The song 1985 was not originally recorded by Bowling for Soup, but SR-71

I don’t think owning your home is realistic in all scenarios. For example, let’s say because you needed to leave your abusive partner, so you don’t have the luxury of going through the whole process of saving money, then researching, and eventually purchasing a home. You need to get out, maybe live somewhere for a year or two to get your feet under you and save some money so you can purchase a home. If you couldn’t rent a home, how could you possibly get out of this situation if you had no money on hand?

If you move to a new city that you’ve never visited before, sometimes you want to rent in a few areas to find the areas you like before commit long term to a place.

I really don’t think buying a home should be your only option for living in a home. It’s just not what’s best for some people in some scenarios.

I fixed my refrigerator. 2 months ago I was changing the filter, and I was too lazy to turn off the water first, so the pressure was too high and it didn’t seat properly. When I turned it, I broke the filter receptacle. I called Samsung, and they said they’ll fix it, but they can’t tell me how much it will cost until they make the work order, and at that point I can’t cancel it if it’s too expensive. I asked if they could ballpark, like $100 or $1000. They said they couldn’t. So I told them to go fuck themselves. I ordered the part on Amazon for $60. I had to disassemble a decent amount of the refrigerator to get to the part. But I did it! I swapped out the part and everything works perfectly. All in all, it took about 2 hours. There were multiple videos on the internet on how to do it.

Fuck Samsung.

This is an excellent use case for a self hosted service, since location data is frequently used for nefarious purposes.

I have a mesh system made up of Asus Zenwifi ET8s, and I have been very happy with them. They have a lot of cool features, such as having a VPN server and VPN client, with the VPN client allowing me to apply the VPN to only selected devices. It has tons of customization options for those that are knowledgeable about that sort of thing. For example, I can tweak at what signal strength AP steering happens. It has WiFi 6E and 2.5 Gbps wired backhaul.

When I first got it, it was very buggy, and some features straight up didn’t work. But they eventually got all the bugs that I found fixed. It’s in a really good state right now.

To address your desired features, it does have wireguard. I don’t know about DDNS, but it does not have pihole built in. It has adguard built in, but it doesn’t really seem to do much, tbh. Then again, pihole didn’t really do anything for me either. I ended up shutting off my pihole because I didn’t even notice a difference.

I created my first account in June of 2023, like many of us, I’m sure.

Now that I have RIF back via Vanced, I spend a lot of time in both places. The communities that I want to engage with just aren’t here. But when I want Linux news, this is my place to go.

I had my own instance for about 10 months. I started it when I was frustrated at the downtime all the big instances had. But now they seem a lot more stable, so I shut down my instance.