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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This was pre-linux for me but something you can still do in most distros so I think it’s a valid story.

    In 1999 I was using Napster on computer running MS-DOS. I was 12 years old and an aspiring open media enthusiast/stupid script kiddie. I was using the file explorer interface in Napster and accidentally gave access to my entire C drive. I also had opened ports to share certain media and to fuck with my friends using daemon tools (back then you could do stupid stuff like control a friend’s desktop with certain versions of daemon tools). Immediately I started receiving packages called things like “sleep.tight.tiny.mite” and I knew I was fucked so I clicked in the Napster interface and clicked “delete” and deleted my entire active drive.

    I panicked and installed the only operating system we had which was a random copy of Red Hat. When my dad came home I pretended like it had always had Linux on it. I do think he was more impressed than mad.











  • Programming is all about understanding relationships. You make a thing. Great. How do you identify thing? How do you reuse thing? You identify what it is and what it does. Do other things do what your thing does? Great! Make an identifier for that shared ability. Now you can call the shared identifier with other things and so on…

    Anyways, I sucked at algebra which seems to be the most commonly identified issue with those of us “bad at math”. I have never used more than basic algebra (something + something = something aka x + y = z). Maybe in 50s and 60s when programming was extremely hard you needed to be good at math, but that’s absolutely not the case any more.