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A better place

The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.

The 99 bottles of beer song is (was?) a popular programming exercise to teach beginners about loops. Singing it in real life would be pretty annoying because you would essentially repeat the same two sentences for a couple of minutes. Apparently, the PHP developers were planning to order one beer each, sing the song and get on everyone’s nerves. The C++ dev stopped this by buying all the remaining beer at once.

The choice of languages is probably OP’s own prejudice. These days I’d say PHP devs are on average older and more experienced than JS and Python devs, just because almost nobody learns PHP as their first language anymore.

The bakery down the road from where I grew up used to hold the Guinness world record for the largest version of a local specialty.

I’d finally finish some of my personal projects.

Over the last few years, I’ve had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I’m experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I’d love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures… one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t get bored any time soon.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

Learned that the hard way. Within less than a week went from happily living in the house that I had grown up in, that I was renting from my father and that I was planning to eventually buy or inherit to having to look for an apartment because he sold it. The worst thing? That he never gave me a reason or even acknowledged how much he had hurt me. Quite the opposite, he later asked me to help the new owners set up their tv as if it was nothing.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

And I’m pretty sure that the name “hot potato license” and the comment above the license are very strong indicators for this not being the case. The license is meant to mimic a game of hot potato where you get the code for a short moment (one commit) and have to throw it to someone else. Sure, the analogy doesn’t quite work because you can’t decide who has to make the next commit but it would make even less sense if you were able to keep control over the code and add more and more commits. That would defeat the whole point of naming it “hot potato license”.

Yeah, that should read “all other citizens of earth”.

That‘s correct and indeed unfortunate but not what we were talking about.

There’s a chance that framework might build something. Lately they’ve been asking what to build next and modular phones were one of the most frequent answers. While their parts are not fully open source, their interfaces between the modules and the firmware are. For the laptops, you can already replace basically anything with a custom version.

Not sure why you get Apple into this. Apps on iOS have been natively compiled from the beginning and they are amazing at running stuff on older hardware. My current iPhone 12 Mini is over three years old and smoothly runs everything I throw at it. Before that I had a 2016 iPhone SE for about four years and only replaced it because I wanted something with a better camera (I’m a semi-professional photographer so I want something decent for when I see something cool and don’t have my big camera with me). I gave the SE to my mom and she used it for another two years until she decided she needed a bigger screen. It probably still works and it got its last OS update just two months ago.

As long as you don’t run something super hardware hungry, you can easily use an iPhone for at least five years without any problems. Even if the battery dies halfway through, there are lots of repair shops around that will replace it for a reasonable price in case you’re not comfortable with opening up the phone on your own.

English:

• Lateral
• Darknet Diaries
• Artifexian
• Exolore
• The White Vault (caught up on old episodes)
• World’s Greatest Con

German:

• Geschichten aus der Geschichte
• Geschichten aus dem Altbau
• Darwin gefällt das
• Mord auf Ex
• Bayern 3 True Crime
• Weird Crimes

All in no particular order.

It’s the IT department’s job to make sure you have all the hardware you need to do your job. While not being able to track your time is something that affects you more than it affects the company, it’s still part of the job.

It is certainly not your job to buy new devices with your own money. Also, I would highly advise your IT department against letting you use a private device that you carry around in your free time and even on vacation as your second factor. Anything that can be used to access your work data should never be with you when you’re getting drunk in a bar.

If you’re financially stable enough that getting paid a few days late doesn’t hurt you too much, I would recommend you ask IT for a new phone (that you will only use for work!) and hand in your time sheets in whatever form is the least convenient for HR until the problem is resolved.

Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.

They can. They just have to compile it themselves (the code is available on GitHub) or find someone else to give them a compiled version (for example F-Droid which is linked from the readme on github).

Free software means that you are allowed to do a lot of stuff. It doesn’t mean you can expect to be handed everything on a silver platter. Correctly building and uploading mobile apps to an official app store is a lot of work (even more on iOS than on Android) and while I personally wouldn’t take money for it, I can completely understand when other developers do so to finance their work. Remember, open source developers also need to pay for food and housing.

You’re paying for the convenience of having it compiled and uploaded to the store. Nobody keeps you from compiling it for yourself. Or from getting it for free through F-Droid which is even linked from their github repository.

You don’t have to go back to the 70s for changes. Kazakhstan has changed from two time zones to one just about a month ago.