Transposition error

.....

So awhile ago I worked on a system that moved education records between 2 different systems at a university. It kept choking on one particular record; turns out the date of birth was in 1499, and MSSQL won't store dates from before the start of the Gregorian calendar unless you specifically configure it to do so.

We sent a request through to have the record corrected - clearly someone has just typoed 1949 - and moved on, but maybe.....

Misappropriating funds to buy religious texts for a public school while insisting that the text includes the constitution that makes it misappropriation in the first place is some next level bullshit

Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much

Language specifiers include country level variants - de-DE, de-AT, de-CH

Yup, this - batteries are consumables. They have a service life of ~2-5 years depending on load. If the manual doesn't tell you how to replace them then it's basically ewaste already

Depends on what you need:

• As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
• Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I've had good experiences with Scaleway
• I just want something I can set up and not think about: don't use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You'll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it's running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades

At some point every professional computer person - programmer, sysadmin, whatever - will seriously consider piling all their computers into a big pile, lighting them on fire, and moving to the country to start a new life making things with their hands

Don't forget that he also didn't found Tesla

Unpopular (?) opinion - text/IM systems are asynchronous messaging systems, and in most cases it's totally reasonable to not immediately jump on your phone and answer a message as soon as you get the notification.

One of my friends is the sort of person who will stop mid sentence when their phone pings so they can answer whatever they've been sent and it drives me nuts

tl;dw - ed25519 keys are now the default