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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Not included in this answer and I’m not fully qualified to talk about: salting.

    If you knew the hashing algorithm, you could precompute hashes of all the common passwords. Then when you get steal the hashed password data, it’s a lot faster to check if any of them are in your list. You can likely find that kind of list online to download.

    One defense against this is “salting”. The site adds some text to your password before hashing it. So if your password is extremely common, like “password1!”, with the added salt the hash on this site will be different. Like maybe it adds the user’s uuid, so what gets hashed is “password1!-abcd-123-pretend-this-is-a-uuid”. The user doesn’t need to know.

    Another benefit is that now two passwords that both are “password1!” have different hashes.

    I’m not an expert by any means so please someone correct me if anything was wrong there.


  • Much of this slots into time outside work rather than the workday itself.

    • walk a different route to a destination
    • pick an algorithm and walk with no destination (eg: straight until you hit a light not in your favor, then turn. Works in urban envs)
    • go somewhere you don’t normally go. Eg: library, different coffee shop, that little art store you always see
    • go to the library. Walk along the shelf with eyes closed and pick a book at random.
    • pick a genre of music you never listen to. Listen to it.
    • cook or prepare a meal unlike your normal fare
    • go to a thrift store. Buy a cheap article of clothing you wouldn’t normally wear. Wear it. See how it feels
    • find free or cheap art (music, theater, whatever) in your area. Go.
    • journal. Spend a few minutes writing down your day’s details
    • hit wikipedia’s random article button. Read it.


  • Python.

    • It’s pretty easy to get going.
    • the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
    • you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
    • it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
    • the standard library is very good.

    You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

    I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.





  • Mostly specific to online dating, but: People who dead end a conversation. Like, their profile says they love the author NK Jemisen. I write, “oh, I love her books! Did you read The City We Became? It’s a total love letter to the city”.

    They response with, “no”.

    Friend, that’s not an effective way to play this game.

    If you are not interested in dating, just unmatch. Maybe you swiped by accident or when drunk. I don’t care. I’m not going to remember.

    If you are interested in dating, you should put some effort in. If you don’t throw the ball back, you look like you’re either uninterested or incapable. I don’t want to date someone who’s not interested, nor someone who can’t carry a conversation.

    You might be thinking, “Well they asked a yes/no question and I answered as such”. Technically true, but not productive. What do you expect them to do? Ask another first-message-tier question? This isn’t supposed to be a one sided interview like you’re applying for a job. You’re supposed to be a full participant. Ask a question (preferably related to the topic). Or, if you’re not interested anymore, unmatch.

    You might also be thinking, “well I don’t have time for a whole conversation right now”. Ok. Do you ever have time? If not, delete the app because you don’t have time to date. If you do, answer when you have time. These things are asynchronous. If you’re afraid you’re going to forget, I don’t know man write yourself a note. That’s a life management problem outside the scope of dating advice.

    This whole thing peeves me because it feels like people want “banter” and witty conversation, but they don’t want to do their half of it. They want to be passively entertained, but this isn’t some podcast you can listen to when dozing. These are (hopefully) real people looking for connection.

    My therapist told me that people have different styles of communication and that’s okay. Maybe some people would be happy where their conversations are no deeper than “Did you hear the new slothrust album?” “No”. Doesn’t seem like an effective way to get to know someone to me.


  • People don’t really like change.

    Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

    Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

    It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

    So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.




  • This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

    That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

    Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.






  • Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

    But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.



  • I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.

    But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.