I locked myself out of the house this morning. The weather app on my phone said it “felt like” -2 degrees, and I agree with it.

I had my coat and hat, but my legs were underprepared, I was wearing sweatpants without long underwear.

My wife was at work about a mile away and she didn’t see my texts for about a half hour. I could’ve walked to her work in that time, but I was so paralyzed by the situation that I couldn’t do it.

(We live in a big city, we walk or bike everywhere, or take trains when it’s far. Walking to her work is normal…but cold is cold.)

I have “a thing” about not wearing clothes like that outside, and I’ve only ever done it once or twice, I just went out to bring my kid to school a few blocks away… I have a lot of “things.” And I don’t deal with crises super well; my actions tend to be ok but my communication fails.

So anyway, I eventually got frustrated with my wife’s lack of response and I texted her in a frustrated tone. If the situation was reversed, I would’ve raced back home to save her, and if I had missed the texts, I would’ve been apologetic, and more than understanding if she was frustrated.

She said I should’ve called instead of texting, but I couldn’t talk. She called me and I tried to tell her I couldn’t talk but she insisted. I ended up hanging up on her, which is…not good. She wouldn’t listen, “I don’t want to text” she said. She’s very verbally oriented; she spends like half her time on the phone with her sister or her mother. I prefer being quiet, and I frequently just can’t.

I had immediately apologized for my frustrated tone and for hanging up; I learned to apologize a long time ago and I mean it when I do it.

It felt like she didn’t want to have to go out in the cold, take time out of work, and go through the effort of coming to help me. I get that, it was very cold, but…, idk, I guess sometimes you do it anyway? It felt like she was using my rudeness as an excuse to not help or to be mad about helping.

I had gone out to drop off my kid without my keys, but we have a garage door and a little keypad for it. I knew I didn’t have my keys but I also knew i had a fallback. The batteries in the keypad had been dying for a while, which made it not work in the cold; the problem was resolved — until today.

She called again, I think just to yell at me. She had already texted telling me she had left work and was headed home to help; she didn’t call to tell me that. She was furious on the phone. I hung up on her when she said she hated me. I think hanging up on her may be the most egregious offense; I try not to do it, I know she hates it, but idk, I guess sometimes you do it anyway?

I tried warming up the keypad with my hands; I alternated hands, one under my shirt on my bare stomach to warm up while the other hand exhausted its warmth on the keypad. Shockingly, it worked.

I told her immediately and tried to avoid communicating after that. I think we talked on the phone again? I don’t remember. I apologized several more times — not “I’m sorry but”, it was just “I’m sorry”, with a “I hope you can understand the situation I was in” afterwards.

Our “fight” has not yet been resolved and there next time I see her, or kids will be there and maybe also one of my parents, so we won’t be able to talk about it. Not that there’s anything to talk about. Either I will grovel and agree that I did everything awful and she was perfect, or we deal with a cloud over our heads for a few days until she/we eventually move on, and it just gets added to the vague cloud of indecipherable reasons why she should’ve married someone else.

Sorry to dump on the thread, I needed to vent and I don’t really have anywhere safe to do it.

In that very specific way I am not like a lost bat, but in many other ways I am exactly like one.

For me the noise and over stimulation is a big part of it, but there’s also a much more complex web of expectations that I don’t understand, and my “over confidence” (read: my failure to have adequately absorbed the cultural suppression of self esteem) tends to put me into a social position that someone with me lack of skills should not have.

When I do a conference presentation (like I’m preparing for later this week), I can prepare a very scripted set of remarks, and that tends to go well, but off the cuff, I feel like a plate of spaghetti.

I’m not sure tbh – I use a mbp for work, but if I’m on it, I’m usually not gaming… That said, I bought a steam deck last summer and it’s amazing. I haven’t played a console or handheld in like 15 years so my thumbs are weak and flimsy… but spending a summer evening out on the stoop with the steam deck while watching my kids run around like kids… doesn’t get much better than that.

Bill Gates has made anti-knowledge sharing his lifelong legacy, from crushing OpenGL by bribing game developers not to build in it, to pushing the US gov’t to give away COVID vaccines to poor countries rather than making the data available so they could make their own. His influence in the industry towards proprietary and closed source code is unmatched. Like, we all love the nerd jumping over the computer with the goofy smile but that dude is a piece of shit.

My point was that if we (you!) were able to level the windows/Linux gaming playing field before he died, that would make him mad, and make me happy.

Please can we destroy Bill Gates’s open source legacy before he dies. I want him to see it die. I want him to be lying on his deathbed, reading an article in Ars Technica about gamers switching to Linux.

And by “please can we” obviously I mean “please can you,” I’m just a lowly full stack dev (aka a lamprey) who wears a Red Hat sweatshirt I got from a friend

My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.

HTML is pretty straightforward so just understanding the very basic stuff is probably all you need. CSS is where html gets any challenge it might have.

CSS is weird because it’s very “easy” so “real developers” kind of object to learning it, but the truth is, if you gave any of them a layout design, they probably couldn’t build it. There are tools like tailwind to help, but, IMO, tailwind just helps you avoid learning css’s vocabulary, but you just replace it with having to learn tailwind’s vocabulary.

JavaScript on the other hand is a “real” programming language, though decidedly quick-n-dirtier than other languages. It lets you be a lot more sloppy. (Tbh it’s a lot more forgiving than css!). As a result, it lacks the elegance and control that “real developers” like – and, as most people’s first language, it lets newcomers get into bad habits. For these reasons, JavaScript is a bit derided – but, unlike CSS, most developers can’t avoid it.

There are a few key ideas in JavaScript that, once you understand them, things make a lot more sense. (I won’t get into them now, since it doesn’t sound like you’re at the point where that kind of clarity would help, but, when you are, come on back here and make a post!)

TLDR: HTML is definitely something you can just pick up along the way. JavaScript is a real language that will take a little while to feel comfortable with, and it will take a career to master. CSS will never be easy, so don’t let it hold you back.

I dated a girl named Password for a while. She was a lot older than me, she was born in the year 1234.

Anyway, @op the exact same thing happened to me. I gotta get smarter about opsec.

Follow up question – I’m not OP but I’m another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of “light touch” and “doing a really good job”. (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites’s repo down and got into it.

The CSS was a mess. I’ve done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (–foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a “.dark-mode” class in the body tag.

But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range – some being more than 10-15% different from each other – so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn’t give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

My PR wasn’t accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don’t mind that it wasn’t accepted, but i just don’t know why. I don’t want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.

Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

Copy designs you like, and keep a couple of CSS files +/- web components that you can carry along with you from project to project. Tweak then as you go.

Like everything else, getting good at making designs that you like will take time and effort, so if you want you get good at it, do it! I find it fun, and my designs aren’t to everyone’s taste (I too like black tshirts), but whatever.

Plus, getting good at making designs that i like has made me better at making designs clients/projects will like, so, win/win.

arguably, that’s a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive

Argue-er here, chiming in. This statement could be interpreted as considering only half of the central relationship of capitalism. (Capitalism isn’t just about deriving profit from the control of surplus, it’s about the relationship between surplus and scarcity. Surplus doesn’t mean shit if no one wants what you have.)

The decisions that volunteers make may not be motivated by the desire/ability to make profit, but they can be (and often are) motivated by the opposite; they have to account for the fact that their volunteer work is labor that isn’t contributing to their survival – aka, their day job. The demands placed on them by their other responsibilities will have to take precedence over the volunteer project.

In practice, this means they have to take shortcuts and/or do less than they would like to, because they don’t have time to devote to it. It’s not exactly the same end product as if it was profit-seeking, since that can tempt maintainers into using dark patterns etc, but they’re similar.

Ideally, they would have all the money they needed, didn’t have to have regular jobs, but also had families/friends/hobbies that would keep them from over-engineering ffmpeg.

To say this in a simpler/shorter way (TD;DR), their decisions can be motivated by the fact that they aren’t making money from it, don’t have enough time or resources to do everything they might want.

(Why is this so long?? I’m bored in the train, gotta kill the time somehow…why not say in 1000 words what I could have said in 100)

Imo they’ll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.

This is the core issue with the traditional dead man’s “switch” – it doesn’t require death to go off, just letting go of it, and there are other reasons why that might happen. By extension, a switch that requires you to log into something periodically might be problematic if you’re predisposed. Personally I’d just set a longer timer, a month is probably fine and, unless your “exposure” is extremely time sensitive, a month won’t matter once you’re dead.

This is a good point – it didn’t have to look like spam tho, it could look like anything. Or it could look like many things. Write up a 10-20 line text file of bullshit emails from one person, or even a few people – or even have Chat Gippity write them, tho that might have a paper trail, depending on your attacker.

All you have to do is put some “flag” word in the first few words so you recognize it. Then, any reply to that inbox (which could have many aliases) resets the timer.

The big problem is, imo, if you’re “dangerous” enough to de-alive, then you’ve already exposed something big. Would you have something left to expose after that?

Look Ma, this guy says it’s ok that I’m a full stack dev. He says it’s even good!

Also: counterpoint: if you teach your kids to code, you can outsource to them.

Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don’t mind paying for things if they’re good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.

So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.

Kidding aside, you’re absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN’T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it’s not perfect.

If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google’s many spywares – there’s loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.

Edit: the “federated Netflix” – I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: “anyone” (anyone federated with other instances) can “upload” videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.

And federated Amazon – that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.

I hadn’t heard it either until FD Signifier used it in a video. I guess it originally referred to the “in universe” fiction of professional wrestling, but FD took it out of that context and now I use it all the time – well, it doesn’t come up that often, but it’s a concept that’s needed a word for a while now… Especially now that “alternative facts” are becoming so prevalent.