So it turns out most of my youtube subscriptions are history related, but…

• Kings and Generals for historical battles because I’m a giant nerd.
• Miniminuteman for fun debunking of archaeology myths
• Mark Felton for WWII history
• toldinstone for Roman history
• History Matters for short introductions to historical topics with amusingly drawn characters
• The Tim Traveller for slightly odd and very nerdy travel destinations
• History With Hilbert because… uh… look, I like history okay?
• Atun-Shei Films for US civil & revolutionary war history
• WorldWarTwo for a documentary of WWII that advances one week per episode (originally recorded in real time)
• TimeGhost for general history done by the same people that make WorldWarTwo
• antichef is some guy that started as a pretty bad amateur chef trying to make Julia Child recipes. Now he’s a decent amateur chef doing the same.
• Dr. Glaucomfleken for medical jokes
• Townsends for early American history and recipes
• Primitive Technology to just chill and watch a shirtless guy in the Australian outback build housing and tools from absolute scratch
• UshankaShow for Soviet history and discussion of life in Soviet Ukraine

I was the sysadmin for a local company that mainly did custom ecommerce & CMS site building for local companies. Way before I started they also provided email addresses to local residents, and the first like ~100 people to sign up got a free account for life. We offered like 250MB storage, which was pretty awesome in the pre-gmail days.

Anyway, one of the lucky residents to sign up was a very interesting guy. In and out of homeless shelters, he ran for mayor every election, and at one point built his own three-wheeled Segway-like thing that he decorated to look like a Roman chariot that he would ride around during the weekly farmer’s market.

So yea. One day we get a call and the usual tech support bump it up to me because they don’t understand it. I answer the phone and am met with a barrage of rants about how my company is in league with the satanic monsters at AOL trying to stop him from becoming mayor and how once he’s elected he’ll blow our cover and expose us all.

Dear reader, he was trying to send an email to an @aol.com account that didn’t exist, and was getting a “no such address” reply from their “mailer daemon” - their mail server software.

I didn’t know who he was before then, but that’s how I learned.

Eh, learn something new every day I guess.

From now on I will only use Newtons when discussing temperature.

It sure is. But it’s also really, really easy to convert between the various units of measurement.

Yes, a US audience:

1. CNN is an American company
2. My comment was specifically for Americans that may not understand or appreciate the situation, as houses there are built very differently and are less prone to baking their occupants during summer.

Why does my labeling the unit of measurement bother you so much you have to comment on it specifically? I’m genuinely confused here.

Why? I’m clearly addressing an American audience from a non-American location; specifying if I’m using Fahrenheit or Celsius just helps avoid confusion. Does the label of the unit bother you?

Hell yea; I love the rain here. You’ll get so many weird looks from Dutch people saying that, but whatever. Fuck summer, I’d rather live with year round winter personally.

After living in the Netherlands for about three years (moved here from the US) I finally gave in and ordered an air conditioner. I was slightly worried about my neighbors judging us for it (it’ll hang out the window, it’s hard to not notice) only to learn that they also bought one that same day.

All the homes are brick, and are well suited to retaining heat through winter. I only set my thermostat to ~65F for a single room and leave the rest of the apartment unheated and the other rooms average about 50F. In summer though it may peak at 85F outside, but inside it will hit 100F and just stay there for hours even when it’s back down to 65F outside at night.

Awesome in winter, and an oven in summer.

It’s not all that remarkable for being in Europe, but… five weeks vacation per year.

These are all Dutch:

Secrid makes wallets and slim card holders; I quite like mine.

Moccamaster makes great coffee makers that are easy to clean with spare parts easily ordered online.

Royal Dutch Gazelle makes great bikes to be stolen at inconvenient times.

Tony’s Chocolonely makes tasty chocolate that uses as little exploited labor as possible and is (supposedly) trying to end slavery in the cocoa production industry.

Gulpener is a good beer brewed in the village of Gulpen between Maastricht and Aachen.

Wow, 140MPH! That’s … still 84MPH slower than the fastest trains in Europe, and 127MPH slower than the fastest train in Asia (Shanghai maglev).

These stupid fantasies are still a pale shadow of what the rest of the world has already managed to achieve. Just finish building the fucking train already!

I’ve had this experience myself; I’m an American living in the Netherlands and sometimes just don’t know the name for the thing I need nor where to buy one. LLM bots are fine for the translation part, but they will make wild assumptions like telling me I can buy a kitchen strainer at the hardware store or food spices at a place called Kruidvat which translates to spice-bucket basically but is actually most like CVS without the pharmacy and does not sell any food besides some candy and chips.

It’s hilarious how quickly these bots can swing from super useful to actually harmful to trust.

“But how about I just summarize it for you instead… poorly and with a few lies added in?”

• vlc
• vim
• tmux
• neomutt
• FreeBSD / Linux
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Firefox
• KDE’s Dolphin
• SwayWM
• pass

Am I mistaken, but isn’t Nix a package manager, where Docker is a container system? They’re related, but really not comparable.

That entry names are stored in plain text doesn’t bother me; if somebody has broken into my system so well that they’ve copied my password store then the last of my concerns will be if they can easily find out if I have a password stored for example.org or example.net. At that point it doesn’t matter if they can tell that I have a Jellyfin password stored, because that service is running on my server with clients installed on my phone & tablet.

And I handle key storage with a pair of Yubikeys which hold a copy of my private key. It can’t be extracted (only overwritten). There is a physical copy kept on offline, disconnected storage, which could be an attack vector – but if we’re at the point of somebody breaking into my house to target my password management then all bets are off: you don’t need to break my kneecaps with a hammer for me to tell you everything, I prefer to keep my knees undamaged.

For attachments I just add another entry; /services/example.org-otherThing - there’s nothing stopping you from encrypting binary data like an image.

And when it comes to convenience: I have a set of bash scripts that use Wofi to popup a list of options and automatically fill in data. Open example.org click the login field, hit meta-l, type example.org, hit enter and wait a moment: it’ll copy and paste the username, hit tab for me, then copy/paste the password, then copy a bunch of random data into the clipboard buffer like 10 times before copying an empty string another hundred times to flush said buffer. meta-f for username only, meta-g for password only; it’s honestly way more convenient for me than the 1Password setup I use at work.

I understand the point the video is making, but I think it’s irrelevant if you keep the private key on something like a Yubikey.

I use passwordstore.org which is basically a bash script that wraps GPG; but there is an Android client as well.

Everything is stored in encrypted files tracked by git. Files are synchronized by git/SSH to a server I run.

I absolutely prefer working from home.

I’m a programmer; my ability to work is heavily dependent on my ability to focus and think.

At home:

• I decide how quiet it is
• I decide when to look at or even think about interruptions from email or Slack
• I have a nice chair, a fancy ass keyboard and expensive mouse
• I also have a nice 27" monitor and a 34" ultrawide
• I decide when (or if) to eat lunch
• If I am eating lunch I have my own fridge, pantry, and numerous restaurants in a short walking distance.

My office, by comparison:

• I cannot control the volume of the radio or what it plays
• I cannot stop people from saying “Hey BozeKnoflook, what…” and just fucking ruining my last two hours of condensed thought and making me waste time getting back into my prior line of thought just to resume my previous state.
• The chair is acceptable, but I fucking loathe typing on a laptop keyboard
• The office only offers a 23" monitor to hook my laptop up to
• Everybody goes to eat in the building’s cafeteria at noon, because that is when lunch is served. There are no restaurants or food spots in a short walking distance that are a viable option. I can only eat what the cafeteria offers (and while okay, it’s not great food).

Throw in the time it takes to commute back and forth and… why the hell would I want to work in the office? Sure, throw an occasional event (quarterly meetings, occasional dinner parties of the various teams, whatever) to build personal relations but I am easily far, far less productive in the office than at home.

To start… it was slow. Your modern gigabit internet can download a 700 megabyte file in 6 seconds; on a good dialup link that would take 30 hours. Videos for porn weren’t an option – just loading a single image could mean waiting for a full minute or two. Sometimes you’d get a JPEG that would load the entire (very fuzzy) image at first and then it would progressively become sharper, other times you’d watch the image load from top to bottom, one line of pixels at a time.

Browsers didn’t have tabs, and the more browser windows you had open the slower your computer would go. All it took was one page throwing in a bunch of silly effects (like animated snow falling on the screen while you try to read, or an animated cat that follows your mouse cursor to pounce on it, etc) and it would take down all of the other browser windows you had open.

Uncensored was definitely one way of putting it. There were several “file sharing” systems, all basically completely un-moderated. After two weeks of downloading The Matrix it may turn out to actually be a collection of snuff films of people being decapitated (no joke or exaggeration - the Tukhchar massacre during the war in Dagestan was brutal). You could wait all day on a download of some song only to find it’s the Barney theme music but saved with the filename “Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3”

BUT, that said, there were a lot of forums and those where moderated by the owners who where trying to cultivate their own community. You can still find some of these, SomethingAwful.com and Metafilter.com are still kicking. I haven’t looked at SA in ages, but Metafilter remains a lovely little community in the modern era. Metafilter also charges a single $5 fee to sign up (which is required to post), which I think really, really helps keep down the number of trolls and bots.

Search engines didn’t really exist for some time. Yahoo was one of the first, but even Yahoo started as a manually cultivated list of sites. So you wouldn’t search for “cheesecake recipe” but you’d look at Yahoo’s list of recipe sites and browse through them looking for cheesecake. When it first came out Google was a massive game changer.

And if you go to pre-“web” days there wasn’t even websites: Usenet / NNTP was basically just one big huge text-only forum. You would load up rec.food.baking or rec.food.cooking to read or discuss. There wasn’t any moderation – if somebody was being a shithead all you could do is block them on your side and ignore them. And the newsgroup naming scheme could be so inconsistent - there was comp.lang.python for Python programming discussion, but C/++ learners had alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++.

I think that, ultimately, the largest single change has been the consolidation. Nowadays people can spend nearly all of their time just on a handful of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You could install the “StumbleUpon” browser extension and just spend all day finding new websites that other people thought interesting enough to submit to the index. We had entire websites/forums dedicated to niche interests like specific models of a car or motorcycle.

It was better in some ways, worse in others. You can still get a feel for it though: I genuinely recommend looking at MetaFilter and trying to explore the parts of the internet that aren’t part of the consolidated corporate blob of Facebook / Threads / Twitter / etc.

She’s utterly wrong. Take Robin Williams as an example: he was famous, rich, loved by everybody, stupendously funny. Still had depression. Still suffered.

It has nothing to do with people’s “value” or their work ethic.