In high school, we used to play a game colloquially called Spoons/Assassins/Spoon Assassin/Marker tag. Long story short, everyone playing gets assigned another player as a target. You tag your target on the back of the neck with a spoon or marker to “kill” them + take over their assignment. Rinse and repeat until only the winner is standing.

Major catch here is that for the game to work properly, the targets have to be chained in a loop, so there usually has to be a trusted individual running the game who can validate the assignment list.

So I scraped the online school directory to pull names, emails, and school photos of everyone. Then I built a Java Swing app to track a list of who was playing, and the app would shuffle a random list and email everyone their assignments blindly, photos included. Flash forward a few months, and eventually we had a full roster of ~80 people playing across grades, which was ~10% of the student body.

Unfortunately, a group of freshmen started their own take on the game, which devolved into mauling one another with Crayola markers and Sharpies. The principal catches word that I’ve been running a ring, and brings me into his office to tell me to shut it down.

Uncharacteristically for my teenage years, I went all-in on diplomacy. I plead my case, tell him I’m not involved with the freshmen, hear out his concerns, volunteer to modify the game rules, and point out that our group been playing for months without issues. No dice; the dude was a jackass with a chip on his shoulder. So we come to an impasse, staring at one another in silence.

Eventually, to break the silence, he asks about a stray bandage I have sticking out the top of my shirt. I’d had a small melanoma removed from my collarbone that week, which was caught as early as possible and removed without issue. Seizing the opportunity, I tell the principal “I have cancer”, and immediately walk out before he could formulate a response. Poor dude went white as a sheet. Good times.

Bit of a lame ending for the app, but building it taught me the skills I used to jump-start my career, and drove home the point that software isn’t an end unto itself — it’s the way people use it to come together that makes things great.

If you haven’t boofed toad, you haven’t lived.

Now get off my Lemmiwinks fan club site.

¡Soy loco por los cornballs!

Dangling commits are unlinked objects, and happen pretty frequently if you’re using hard resets instead of explicit git reverts.

Not arguing that it’s good practice but it’s very common.

Great answer on the whole, but worth noting that both Git’s standard CLI client and most hosted git services do run periodic GC to prune dangling commits.

I second the suggestion to take periodic snapshots of your mirror. Because the majority of file contents will not be changing over time, you can make these snapshots very disk-space efficient by taking binary diffs of the tar’d repo using rdiff or the like.

Cornographic af

Probably not what GP was referring to, but Discord works totally fine in-browser without a client.

Less potential for vulns, telemetry, regressions, etc.

Check if you have hardware acceleration enabled for Firefox. It’s usually disabled OOTB for some reason.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

Yeah, top two photos are oysters, and the bottom two are chants.

Based on the time of year and their appearance, I think the oysters were a native oyster variety, but your point still stands in the general case :).

Gz king!

What’s next on your roadmap?

Not tryna drag OP in the slightest, but having a Google search tab open in a faang extermination meme blurs the messaging a bit.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve done that sorta thing before with ffmpeg; should do the trick for ya.

I’m a big fan of this approach to software; it works. PHP5, cgi-bin scripts, perl spaghetti, etc. are lit for hobby work.

The tradeoff is that you have to pay a lot of attention to do things securely, and you have to hand roll a lot more of your codebase instead of relying on external packages.

1000% agreed; it’s not terribly risky in the general case.

But I don’t want to mislead anyone into getting their bank account stolen if they like to hang out on russian warez sites.

I know I’m about to get rotten fruit thrown at me… but if you’re finding this rig almost good enough and don’t use it for anything security-sensitive, disabling CPU exploit mitigations will get you a substantial boost (~20-30% additional IPC throughput).

Only go this route if you understand the repercussions; see Arch Wiki for details: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance

Friends don’t let friends use Oracle.

Tkinter might work, depending on what you have in mind.

Oh no!

Guess we’ll have to attainder Musk to make up the difference.

Samples of every form of biological matter we encountered were ingested, and the results were recorded in a logbook. Most of the leaves and twigs were unpalatable, chewy and inert, while the animals universally avoided analysis because they were too fast to catch.

This is a banger. RIP to our boy George.

That’ll be your culprit then.