We're fucked.

I was having a debate on Reddit. A topic I brought up here already. Genetics and the mommies in my local baby group.

I was downvoted to hell for my conclusion those mommies cheated. Don't get me wrong, my conclusion was, they most likely cheated. I use high school genetics as heuristics, saying that its outcomes aligns with the question often enough to be a good decision maker.

A strategy manifested. Some people wrote long scientific correct arguments, just to block me the moment they sent it. For me it looks just like they deleted themselves and their account. I can still read it when logged out.

I just created a new account to reply to them. Went without a hitch, except that when I checked back in incognito, my replies weren't there. I assume they don't allow accounts that are too new. Reading from incognito, it was like they had the last word and I couldn't answer. The problem, they actually admitted to my points and built a straw men to the other points and I cannot point that out anymore.

I also thought, I should find a few people to hang out online with. So I started to play an MMO. After all, I am a daddy now, not so much time to find people. Only have nights. Besides the discords always being empty, all guilds I joined had the same thing in their rule set: "Do not discuss religion or politics."

Let me explain you something about democracy. It lives on debates. If you think you do not want to speak about your political opinions, then you're anti-democratic. Why are we allowed to vote? So, that everyone with a political opinion will find a decider. If we do not discuss, we are just at the mercy of advertisement. Most of us do not look deeply into topics, but some do. We trust them, because we know them. We have those smart people around it. Democracy is based upon "My neighbor has said and I trust him." That's how it works.

Forbidding political discourse, hiding downvoted opinions and using tricks, so the other party cannot reply in time or only with troubles is the death of democracy. That's how it ended. Because we're too butt hurt to even talk to each other, have the conversations. And I am sick of it.

And no, you cannot say, this is just a friendly group about knitting. The price of democracy is that all groups are political forums. And jobs. Everything. We do expect you to be adult enough to work with someone who has a different opinion from you. Who might even dislike you. Otherwise, the outcome is that all spaces where you would meet people that have different opinions are non-political and all political spaces are echo chambers in which you meet those people who are at best the staunchest warriors of a side instead of the normal person.

I bet two people of two different ideologies, who aren't deeply ingrained in it, have more in common than a person deeply ingrained and one that is not from the same ideology. But you wouldn't know that in today's echo chambers.

Just finished setting up immich on my server. Using the prepared docker compose file. But I renamed the docker image of the database. It was called postgres. I renamed it to immich_postgres. After all, I want to know that this container belongs to immich.

Half an hour troubleshooting later, I figured out why I get a login failed error message. Login did not fail, connection did. Why? Because, they rely on the postgres name as an alias. They could have put an explicit alias for dns, they could have used the configuration name, after all they used it in the depends_on section. But they decided to refer to it via the automatically assigned name. Really? Container name? That one thing in the configuration that is supposed to be unique?

Did you really think that was the only postgres database on the server? Maybe I should centralize it into a single database, but I like when my applications can run without outside dependencies. Proper documentation would have been nice. I am sure they mention it somewhere.

Got a child. Little under a year old.
We go to a little baby group nearby. We visit it from time to time. Just like 6 different babies there.

One baby has brown eyes. Mommy and daddy have blue eyes. Oh...

Next baby is blonde. Mommy is blonde. Daddy is blonde. Someone commented, that blonde was very likely with mommy and daddy. She said, no, her mother-in-law is black haired. She proves it by saying, her oldest son has black hair.... Oh....

Out of 6 parents pairs, we had 2 cheating. 1/3. And for the other 4, well, we only ever met the mother and they have not told us anything about their husbands.

This leads me to only one conclusion: People are terrible in high school level genetics. I know, it is not 100% correct, there are special cases and exceptions. But it it 99% correct.

To quote Rex Harrison: "This is what the British population calls an elementary education."

I am still salty that git master was renamed to main... I mean, the rename is stupid, but when you remain it, why not bough? Bough was the obvious and perfect choice...

Procastinator's tricks to be productive: Schedule messages

I hate to write people. They could answer. My whole plan might be thrown off. But when is the best time to answer them? The day after tomorrow? Too late. Tomorrow. Around 10? Thank you to all messengers that allow me to schedule a message. Instead of procrastinating, I answer, I schedule, and if I am in a bad mood, I later come back and abort and rewrite the message nicer.

Went perfectly swimmingly with my happy new year messages. Everyone got them at 00:00. Yes my friend, you're obviously the most important thing in my life, first thing I did was writing you!

All the crypto bots and hire a hacker adverts make no sense. After all, they still need to either go through the API or make a selenium script. Will still take them 1 to 2 hours at least to build it. For what?

To advertise to a dying platform that has a dwindling community, which is on top of it well-versed in programming and technically affine, so that the probability of profiting of it is tiny...

My conjecture: A devrant member is pulling a long running prank.

I bet it's someone like theRealJase. Or someone like that.

Anyone already had a more unrealistic deadline than the writer for the question of week wk386?

Just a quick follow up. I told you guys after rebooting my server by accident, I'll color in the terminals for my ssh connections.

Normal terminal in white. With the code to do it. Just a shell script with the name ssh earlier in the path than the actual ssh. That was the only solution that didn't fuck my auto-completion. compdef was somehow useless. But it is simple.

For some reason I had to hardcode the return color to white. Alacritty was not happy with just a no-color code. But whatever. Super useful. I won't accidentally restart non-host computers now.

Planning on extending this to have different colors according to the host. Like my homelab could be green. Live servers would be red. Dev servers blue. But that's for the future.

Just wanted to share my little improvement that will make my computing saver.

I just rebooted my server by accident because I wanted to play Space Engineers.

Long story short, dual booting. Needed to boot into windows. Typed reboot into my terminal. My terminal was not local. When am I finally getting around to set up my terminal color as red when it is connected to another host?

But two things are good here. This was my own server.. Well, bunch of stuff is running on it, including for my bachelor's thesis. But if that was a server of my company, that would have been worse.

Second thing, my systems are fault tolerant. I reboot once per week at the latest and for systems with fail overs once per day. I know they are coming back up. I don't worry. My Gitlab will be back in 5 minutes at the latest. I am going to reboot and play Space Engineers now.

Reboot your servers guys. Only way to make sure they'll survive reboots!

I did it, I found the fountain of youth. It is the cat fountain in my living room. Tragically, it was discovered by my daughter.

When she grabbed onto it, I tried to pry her off. But I was too late, she was nothing but a baby when I succeeded.

My wife likes to claim she was a baby before grabbing onto it, but what the fuck does she know.

If finally happened. My cats broke me down.

After years of spotty internet, in which I couldn't resolve websites, to which the solution always was to reach down and push the RJ45 jack with the broken off clip that connects my router to my pihole back in, because my cats pulled it out once again.

They made me do. They finally made me do it. After all those years. Today, my cat pulled it out like ten times in a row... So I finally did it. I walked over in the other room, grabbed a new cable and plugged that one it.

Try that again, cat. I dare you. Try it again!

I just realized that I subconsciously believe more lines of code means slower code.

It's not intellectual. I understand that little lines of code often are just calling other code. That this is not how Big O works or does not replace benchmarking and that some data structure requires a lot of code for immense speed up. E.g: B-Trees with sizes at page size for big amounts of data read from a secondary storage location.

But still, when I see a function with just 3 to 5 lines, my inner monkey believes it must be fast.

Know your biases, I guess.

Fucking hell, writing browser addons is annoying.

I just wanted some small addon for myself. But first did it in tampermonkey. It was supposed to take a screenshot of the website and upload it together with the link of the website to my server. First used html2canvas. Terrible performance. But addons can take direct screenshots.

Reason, when I listen to something or watch something while holding my little daughter, I cannot copy links over. But I can quickly slap a key combination and save for later what I just saw.

Anyway. Addons are terrible. The error messages makes no sense. Missing permission active_tab... Fucking hell, it was missing host permissions. Permissions has to be one of. Documentation sucks on MDN.

And then, you can not even install unsigned addons. I do not want to share my addon with mozilla. You have to install Firefox Dev or ESR for it. Switched to Firefox Dev.

But I feel sorry for everyone having to write browser addons professionally.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...

And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.

But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.

So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...

Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.

But what the fuck... What the fuck?

Shower thought of the week...

Cell phones raised strongly the relative probability of being bitten by a toilet snake...

I just got the dna test.
I am the father. My daughter is now 3 weeks old.

No surprise there. I expected to be the father. I had no reason to distrust my wife. But, after all, I know my IT security.

The relationship I had with my daughter was transitive. I trusted my wife and my wife had my daughter, ergo I had a connection with my daughter. Or in clearer terms: from a => b and b => c follows a => c.

The problem I was thinking about: What if I will stop trusting my wife in the future. At some point in the future... Something might happen. And I would stand there and wonder how long it went on. Maybe a month? Or before my daughter's birth? Maybe more than 9 month before my daughter. Would I be able to hide it from my daughter or would she notice...

If anything ever happens now, I know it has nothing to do with my daughter...

That's the same reason why we use end2end encryption. Sure, we have to trust that the application provided is not manipulated. But we only have to trust today. If it lands on their severs, we have to trust until the end of eternity.

I don't need any trust right now. And I am fucking happy about it.