The DMZ - 2020-10-22

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12:24 AM

76

Q: Why do you have to be an admin to create a symlink in Windows?

In linux every user can create symlinks, but in Windows I need an admin command line, or mklink fails. Why is that?

windows permissions

this is an ancient question that still does not have any satisfactory answer... and the accepted one is "it's not allowed because it's not allowed"

9 hours later…

9:27 AM

It's hard to express just how much I love this comment. The question is "why does a college degree influence voting choices in America?" and the second answer is vomit worthy:

12

A: Why does having a college degree or not make a difference among how white Americans vote?

The experience of getting a degree exposes you to a wider circle of people. I'm white, male, and went to a school near where I grew up. The school and church had an intertwined population, and my social circle from the neighbourhood, school and church, all overlapped. There were a lot of people j...

Basically, the typical, "People without college degrees don't know anything about the world and are only concerned about their own narrow, personal concerns"

This comment though:

@divibisan - it is also the only answer that tries to explain a large scale phenomena with literally one person's anecdotal experience without any attempt at proving any of this is applicable in general case to American audience. Luckily for the poster, it is a politically "correct" answer in both meanings of the term, so people upvote because they like it rather than its objective quality. As a reminder, a non-college-kid is far more likely to meet people struggling to live on $40 a week than a college one, statistically speaking. — user4012 4 hours ago

The connection between higher education and voting Democract is definitely a real thing and I've seen sooo many people explain it as happening because, in essence, "college people are smart and voting democrat is smart" (except it is usually more about rural/poor/republican voters as being dumb, like this answer).

Needless to say it bugs the crap out of me, and its nice to see someone else jumping in to say something...

@ConorMancone I saw a chart once which said that people with a college degree are more likely to vote Democrats and people without are more likely to vote Republicans.

And a guy responded basically the same thing: "Yeah because smart people vote Democrats".

The difference is definitely real. Personally I expect it is a side-effect of the divide between rural/urban which also splits republican/democrat

Maybe if college did a better job of educating people they would realize that often things are not as simple as they seem on the surface :)

It's funny, because university students here were actually more right-wing than left-wing.

@MechMK1 Certainly, we'd be electing the right people to political office if you had to have a college degree to vote. Maybe we should pass a law about that?

@ConorMancone No no no, even better: Why not just outlaw the other party?

I expected most of my classmates to be "stereotypically liberal", yet when I got into political discussions with people, most were quite right-wing.

9:37 AM

@MechMK1 That can't be the case because smart people vote left-wing. Maybe Universities in Austria do a bad job?

@ConorMancone Yeah, there's a reason we're not world-class.

But I think it's just that being conservative is the new counter-culture.

It used to be that the media told you to be right-wing, so college kids gathered to be left-wing. Now the media tells you to be left-wing, so the college kids gather to be right-wing.

I suggest you guys overhaul your university system until colleges have a clear and strong left-wing bias

I mean, you have to be pretty fucking dense to have opinions backed by every single big corporation and the vast majority of media outlets and consider yourself "rebelling" against something.

The CEO of the company I work for recently wrote an internal article about how we need "recovery stimulus" (or whatever people are calling it today) for small businesses in the US and urging people to sign a petition demanding action from congress

And I pity those who think that those corporations are actually "on their side", that they "care about their cause". Because oh boy, do they ever not give a fuck.

@ConorMancone So basically just begging for money?

9:42 AM

In the US these days most people take it as a given that the government needs to sign another bunch of checks and give people and business money directly, like they did earlier this year

actual negotiations to do that though have hit a major stand still

As for our CEO, I'm sure that his concern is for struggling people and businesses

The reason corporations pander to left-wing ideals is because it's great PR. Coca-Cola would in a heartbeat make ethno-nationalist PR campaigns the moment this becomes the more "profitable" option.

The fact that our main customers are people and small businesses is likely unrelated...

@MechMK1 If you consider the fact that Coca-Cola invented the modern Santa Claus, history literally proves this true

@ConorMancone You know what I think proves it really well? Bethesda.

Which areas in the world would you consider LGBT people to be most oppressed?

I'm not familiar

Russia, Middle East, China, etc...

9:44 AM

The middle east.

I'd say those are pretty safe bets to say.

Indeed

One could argue that you're still disadvantaged here as LGBT person, but you're not outlawed basically.

So what happened during June this year? Bethesda changed their logo on all Twitter accounts to be rainbow colored "to support the LGBT community"

Everywhere...except on their accounts "Bethesda Middle East", "Bethesda Russia", "Bethesda China"

Oh, and Bethesda Turkey

user image

Just so you could see where their priorities were.

Oh, and did you hear the thing about Uncle Ben's rice?

You can't blame a business for taking advantage of modern events to improve their image, can you?

lol, no, but this sounds good

@ConorMancone No, of course not. They're just doing it for the money obviously.

But I found it funny when I was buying groceries yesterday, saw some Ben and Jerry's ice cream, was about to take one and saw "Refugees Welcome" plastered all over it. Immediately put it back.

So the thing about Uncle Ben's rice is that there is a black man as their mascot. I assume he is uncle ben.

user image

You know, this guy, right?

9:54 AM

Oh yeah, rings a bell. Been a loooong time since I bought that

Yeah, just normal rice. Always has been.

But now, they removed Ben as their mascot, and just call it "Ben's Original"

Do you want to know what the comments below their announcement were?

lol, that can go in a lot of directions....

The most prevalent was a variation of "Thank God, now I don't have to look at a ----er anymore when buying rice"

I'd say that worked out pretty well for them, right?

Yikes...

I mean, I honestly ask: How many black people actually felt offended by Uncle Ben?

It wasn't like he was a caricature or a stereotype of a black man. Just a regular old black man called Ben.

It's like saying Wendy's is offensive to white people.

Or just in general, the depiction of people is offensive to people.

10:05 AM

Those pigtails? Maybe :)

Honestly, why not? I think they look fine

I'm just being ridiculous

And Colonel Sanders........

Just read this one yesterday

nationalreview.com/news/…

Poor KFC really

Ah yes, the "you're only black if you vote left-wing"

I think the best thing was a white guy calling a black guy wearing a MAGA cap a "racist-ass n----r"

Imagine being so liberal and tolerant that you turn full-circle

10:08 AM

People are weird...

10:27 AM

Politics is weird

I have ascended to becoming a doomer

1 hour later…

11:41 AM

So yeah, my employer has just been sold. Great

Can't wait for the "restructuring"

11:53 AM

I know the feeling...

The pessimist in me is saying we'll get less pay and some of us will be cut off after a year.

The optimist in me is chugging a 473ml can of red bull and saying whatever

No wait, that's the nihilist

Where the fuck did the optimist wander off to?

29

Q: Is it legal for Microsoft to install software without user approval?

On several occasions, Microsoft had misled their users to forcefully install updates or unwanted programs (like Windows 10 on Windows 7 here, here, here, and here), it also has forcefully installed the new Edge chromium web browser on W10 computers, and now is forcefully installing office webapps...

software privacy terms-of-service security

> As a law site - we don't consider whether things that are legal are ethical.

Ethical does not mean legal. Legal does not mean ethical.

this is something I hate about windows, it does things that "are the best for you" even when you don't want it...

I had a disaster recovery training one of those weeks, and I would be the leader engineer.... one hour before it starts, I got the VM up (because I wouldn't use Windows as my primary computer), log into the vpn, the citrix workspace, and everything was set. 15 minutes before the start, the VM restarts because Windows needs to upgrade, with no warning.

Meanwhile on Linux you get a weird error, google it, someone say it's an incompatibility between version 3.0.1 of something and 2.9.21 of another thing, so you google how to revert back to 2.9.20 of that version, only to end up having to compile it from source, but the library isn't available through your package manager, so you have to look for the library online, but when you try to compile it, make gives a weird error and you google for that error and it seems like it's because of some undefi

So finally, you just give up and hope the error fixes itself after a few days

That is the authentic linux experience

it gets stuck on that "don't shutdown you computer, updates are being installed" for 10 minutes. restarts, and gets stuck on the "preparing your computer" for another 10... and when it gets back online, VPN does not work anymore... I had to uninstall it, reboot, install again, reboot again, and then I get to the test

Yeah, that's a lovely feeling!

MacOS is just as shit. You want to do a thing that you are pretty sure should work normally, but it doesn't, so you google for it, and you find 30 different threads telling you that you shouldn't do the thing, because had Apple intended you to do the thing, they had make it work.

12:01 PM

my colleagues wanted to kill me... imagine being asked to step up as the primary engineer 5 minutes before the first DR testing...

@ThoriumBR Oh fuck no

I have no issues being thrown at a problem without warning, I can navigate that easily, but the poor girl that had to step up isn't that cool headed, and she have some anxiety issues

now I shutdown every Windows VM every day...

Oh yes, I can understand how that is an uncomfortable situation

with linux, if you disable the automatic updates, it will run for a decade without changes

I mean yeah, the Ubuntu 9 laptop I had set up for my grandma would still work

As long as you don't connect it to the interwebs

12:04 PM

want to have firefox 4 and java 1.2 and flash? why not? want the kernel 2.6.0? sure! it won't just become another thing in the morning

I miss the times where I told a computer what to do. Now it feels like the computer is, when I am lucky, informing me what it did.

like when I got my gaming laptop (yeah, the almighty lenovo t430), I installed windows 7, left it updating and went to bed. in the morning there was windows 10 installed... I removed it, installed 7 again, went to lunch, came back and windows 10 installed...

Yeah, that was the biggest clusterfuck. I miss windows 7, honestly

I still have it. I got every registry hack possible to stop windows 10 from installing.

it's just a gaming laptop, I don't navigate the web with it, so I don't care

Too much work for me, I just ceded and installed Windows 10

Then downloaded a script that takes care of telemetry for me

12:11 PM

windows 7 feels faster on that ancient machine

and I can find things on control panel better

Yeah, the control panel is so much better

I hate that microsoft still has to offer both

Windows 10 feels unfinished

remember windows me? windows nt kernel but windows 98 gui? windows 10 looks like two systems smashed together

like a desktop os mixed with a tablet os

Yeah, I have to be honest, I FUCKING HATE FLAT DESIGN

you are too young to remember that, but back on the windows 95 days there was a program called window blinds. it let you customize the look of windows on a way that would rival any Enlightenment skin

it made windows beautiful...

I miss those beautiful effects in windows 7

12:21 PM

googled around, and it still exists... take a look, it can change windows a lot

That made window borders look like glass

Honestly, returning to just a flat color was a mistake

It doesn't look "sleek", it looks lazy

www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

windows 7 look? like this? www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/images/wb10/wb_ss/2019-05-14/wb10_ss5.png

Like honestly, fuck Apple, but at least their OS used to look visually appealing

MacOS 10.5 looked GORGEOUS

user image

I mean, tell me you wouldn't want to take this OS out for a nice dinner and perhaps a coffee later?

sure... apple have a nice design team

With those gorgeous, intricate high resolution icons, the glass-like dock, doing real-time reflections

user image

Look at it now. Rectangles, flat colors, perhaps a gradient thrown in. I am surprised they kept the stamp icon for mail and not a stylized envelope like everyone else

12:28 PM

@MechMK1 Ouch. I hope it turns out okay

@ConorMancone Who knows, who knows

@MechMK1 lol, these are not optimistic times

I wouldn't even take out MacOS 10.5 to Burger King.

@ConorMancone The optimist has shut himself into his room trying to cope

You know what? Making a good-looking OS and a good looking reload animation are very similar. Both are something you need to do, both serve a very functional purpose, but some are just functional and some are gorgeous.

For example, in a good reload animation, you show the forces being applied. For example in an AR, tap that mag release, flip the empty mag off to the side while grabbing the next, and push it in with force, then slap that bolt release and grab it with force again.

In a bad reload animation, you just do the required motions in the required time, done.

And with a good window UI, it's the same. You can make some functional buttons, but it won't feel good to use

Make a concept about what you want your UI to be like, for example "rounded glass" as the windows.

1:37 PM

I don't care much about the graphics, that's why I used fluxbox as my window manager for a decade

currently I am using xfce with the most bland skin available... and I use the console for most of the things

But I do. Windows 3.1 came out in the early 90s. It's been 30 years. I want my UI too look more beautiful than "box"

yeah, windows 3.11 reloaded isn't that good...

speaking of that, does xfce have a win 3.11 skin?

I don't know, I don't use xfce

I have no idea, but I do use XFCE. I hate fancy interfaces, and always turn off all "effects" on my UI, so it's nice that it doesn't come with any

1:58 PM

xfce is "cholesterol free common environment" and it's the opposite of fancy

I used xfce and fluxbox most of my life

Am I the only one who enjoys gorgeous UIs?

I enjoy command lines...

and fast response times

that's why I used a notebook without external mouse for a long time, as I use the keyboard for almost everything

I have a high-end gaming GPU in my system, capable of doing raytracing in real-time. One would assume that a simple reflection or transparency with fresnel would not be too difficult for it

people find amusing that back when I worked on a newspaper, I would use Pagemaker almost entirely using the keyboard

I just hate flat colors in "material design" sooo fucking much. It's so ugly and soulless, detached from reality to just be more and more abstract

2:06 PM

alt-tab, control this, control that, tab, enter, alt-tab, esc... it was good

user image

Is this what you want a save icon to look like?

Or a "new document" or whatever?

daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomorphism

what is that icon supposed to mean?

Why it's the libre office new document icon of course

And @FireQuacker I understand that something like emulating what real hardware is supposed to look like and making physical rotary switches instead of scales is a bad idea.

I understand that creating 1024 x 1024 "icons" and scaling them down isn't the easiest of tasks, but by god does it look better than "flat circle with gradient and a letter on top" via vector graphic

We have displays that have higher DPI than our eyes can perceive. Why not make use of them?

Why not make UI that actually looks good instead of this flat color bullshit, just because it's easier to make?

We've reached a point where we have such minimalist icons and UI design that people cannot interpret anymore what they're supposed to mean. How often have you seen an icon like ≡ be referred to as "the burger icon"?

Material design is the devil's work.

2:28 PM

yeah, that's terrible... burger icon for a menu?

2:41 PM

@ThoriumBR The three lines are supposed to symbolize a drop-down menu as far as I know

But it's not at all obvious, so people started calling it "the burger icon".

Some icons are very self-evident in context and work well on small scales, like a plus for "add something", a cross for "delete something", "cancel" or "no". A check mark for "yes". A trash can for "delete something". An arrow pointing left for "undo" an arrow pointing right for "redo".

A lot of icons work because we've just settled onto these meanings. They're nigh identical in every application you use, so they make sense intuitively.

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Oct '2022

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