When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

Entirely context dependent.

Who’s cooking tonight? Me, and if it’s sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.

No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn’t count.

Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.

Paging Dr. Streetmentioner

Two things I need to ask:

• What inspired this question, exactly, and
• Can I have some, please?

Congratulations you just invented magenta

Lack of spez

bash

If you actually fill the drive with zeroes, the chances of anyone getting anything back are somewhere between fuck and all.

Old MFM drives (tech likely as old as your parents) had a theoretical exploit for recovering erased data.

With modern tech, that loophole was firmly closed; even state-level actors would be shit outta luck.

A file comes in two parts: the actual blocks of data that hold the file itself, and a directory entry with the name of the file, and the location of the first block.

When you delete a file, it only scrubs out the directory entry, and re-lists the data blocks as available for use.

Because this isn’t a Spot The Dog book, and we don’t need little picture of all the nouns.

On their own they’re ambiguous and vague; with the matching word they’re completely redundant.

What good does it do to say “I had pizza [little picture of pizza] for lunch”?

I’ll use the occasional :) or such as befits the tone, but pointless hieroglyphics are pointless and annoying.

My brother in christ, you need some Hatchie.

Hatchie - Rooftops

Hatchie - Giving the World Away

It’s true. Badminton players will never ever get laid.

Mirrors can totally reverse top-to-bottom, you just have to bend over to see it. The left-right bias is based on the way we look behind us, not any property of the mirror.

This takes a little explaining.

A rotation is a reversal through two dimensions at once.

If you turn around to look behind you, you’re swapping front-and-back, AND left-and-right.

If you stand on your head, you’re swapping front-and-back AND top-and-bottom.

Stand facing the way the mirror does, then turn to look into it. You have to do some kind of rotation - a two-dimension reversal - to get there. If you’re a normal human, you’ll twist around, swapping left-and-right as you swap back-and-front. Your left and right ear swap places, your nose and the back of your head swap places too.

But your reflection doesn’t do that.

A mirror only reverses ONE dimension: front-and-back. It’s the equivalent of punching your face out the back of your head: its ears are still on their original sides. You have swapped left and right in order to face in the opposite direction, but your reflection hasn’t - so it’s ears are on opposite sides to yours.

But you can do it the other way.

Stand with your back to the mirror, and bend over and look under your arm (or between your legs) to see your reflection, instead of twisting around.

Hold something with writing on it, and you’ll see: the letters in the reflection are upside-down, but they face in the right direction.

The only reason you don’t see this very often is that it’s a fucking weird thing to do and nobody ever does it.

Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.

Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.

Let it die, both financially and culturally.

yay more plastic we didn’t have enough

As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.

As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.

Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?

Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.

Hell yeah, though I prefer untoasted multigrain - also some cracked black pepper, maybe a little parsley or chives.