You’ve had a great prof! Mine unfortunately wasn’t as good and just handed me the book and asked how much energy it would take to lift it. Myself, thinking of muscles as linear motors rather than solid structures, said something along the lines of: “Depends on how fast you want me to do it. Just holding it I have to exert something like 10 watts, give or take”, and he went absolutely wild, calling me names and saying that I’m dumb for even asking it, implying that it takes no energy to hold things, hence the plank challenge. Gotta admit, though, that I might have missed the topic of that particular lecture as I wasn’t paying as much attention to it as I was about writing everything down with perfect formatting in LaTeX, hoping to catch up before the exams… Which got me in trouble with another prof who denied me from even taking the exam because she thought I was playing games during her lectures (I was the only student who brought a laptop), and to get to her I had to deal with a yet another prof who thought I was an outlaw biker because she saw me wearing a leather jacket, and tried to humiliate me in front of the board. Still a step up from a different uni that had the audacity to post a price-list for the grades on the door to exam room… One is the top university in my home region and second is mid-tier in the capital, so this is basically the sad state of academia in Russia, and, by certain extent, CIS countries. Speaking of which, do you happen to know any good (and preferably free) online courses on maths and physics? I know about khan academy, but it’s a bit hard for me to chew through, and 3blue1brown who’s been absolutely invaluable in clearing some of the crucial concepts I needed both for work and for learning stuff in general. Even though I’m fairly well off without it, I’d like to someday figure out what’s the deal with quantum computing is, and not just that “a qubit is both 1 and 0 at the same time” which doesn’t seem to make much sense to me.

It’s about the followers of this guy.

There’s barely information about him in English, but he basically wrote quite a few books “decoding” words off shitty photocopies of photos of historic artifacts. He was largely a laughing stock, but he did get a few followers, mostly elderly with early onset dementia, but also notably a few of high profile personalities, maybe even a couple of Putin’s advisors.

For laughs, here are some of the most famous examples of his “deciphering” works:

• Here’s the sun saying that it’s a church of Rurik of varyags
• This one says that Smolensk is actually Moscow
• Or that Pushkin was a house cat
• That 9/11 was a god’s punishment (and also that martians are apparently dyslexic and only know 3 words)
• Or that a bunch of photocopying artifacts tell how great Russian warriors were

The dumbest shit I’ve heard throughout my year was at uni, from a physics professor, no less. He, with a straight face, was telling us that highlanders live longer because oxygen content is lower at high altitudes, and since oxygen is an oxidant, it makes people corrode away(??) faster and causes aging.

He was also a Chudinist, which is pseudo-science about searching the words RUS and names of old pagan gods in random, sometimes absolutely ridiculous places, like freshly crumpled A4 sheet or on the surface of the sun, and claiming it to be a sign of existence of greater ancient slavic race.

I once got into an argument with him because he was claiming that lifting an item in hands takes constant amount of energy, no matter how fast you do it. So I challenged him to a 5 minute plank… and he kicked me out from the class. But I didn’t care, as I soon flunked out of that uni because he wasn’t even the most schizo prof over there.

Всмысле блядь нет русских ботов? Я что для вас, шутка?

Oh they most definitely do. I briefly worked at a company that sold data to car flippers and we for sure knew if any particular car was ever used as a taxi or not. Even if we didn’t buy this data off taxi company directly, we could easily determine it by seeing unusually high mileage between services and checkups. And we definitely know the identity of the driver, so it’s just a matter of putting 2+2 together.

I know a place where they still do this. They’ve got an 8-digit user count, 7 digit monthly profits, all running on one server that costs something like $20 a month. They’ve downsized a few years ago to single-digit employee number and just sit there and collect profits. And this is why I’m now working for a company that casually dropped a few grand for a glorified CPU usage meter and a few grand on top of that for deployment tool that does the same thing that the old guy at a former place was doing with his trusty FTP client.

Just the other day I threw a brick into a car window that had a Z sticker on it. Sue me.

Still do. ADHD is still not recognized in lots of places and I certainly do, in form of vape. Tried lowering concentration only to find myself smoking at higher power and more often. Also, energy drinks, I don’t know what they put in them but withdrawal from them feels exactly like quitting smoking.

Yeah! Why can’t I use a base64 representation of a pirated 4k TS copy of Jon Favreau’s “Chef” as my password? /s

Jokes aside, I’ve heard some hashing algorithms have a high cap of like 20 characters, so developers are probably just too lazy to switch them out or to read the docs on how to properly use said algorithms. Either way it’s a very bad sign, maybe just a tad better than them emailing you the password in cleartext.

I know regex!

This means:

• Must not contain whitespace

• Must contain lowercase latin letter

• Must contain uppercase latin letter

• Must contain a number

• Must contain one of the symbols you’d normally be able to type on US keyboard !@#$%^&*()-=_+[\]{}|;:,./<>?

It is a cursed way to do validation, though.

Grant NATO membership to what? The charred remains of Lviv?

For me it was the reverse - ntfs-3g was constantly corrupting my windows drives because apparently NTFS is incredibly complicated and it can only handle a subset of that. But, the last time I used dual boot setup was more than 5 years ago. Has this gone any better nowadays?

I was about to say the same, but then I remembered that I’m ignoring any business that use WhatsApp or Instagram as their sole means of communication. Fuck yeah I’m a petulant teenager, it’s their loss, not mine.

Feels lonely, most of all. I don’t fear the cops or ex-wagners I walk past every time I go to the store. It’s the radio silence in once popular channels whose owners were “disappeared”, and friends either in exile or too scared to even go out, that makes me feel devastated.

I’m more of a medovukha kind of guy, but yes, indeed, we do. Thank you for saying this

Barrel chest. Probably due to some lung condition that he had before

Oh yeah. Given how close the keys are together I might have tried to use dc and ss as well

I’m literally crying looking at this. People are mad that there are 8.6% of nazis, meanwhile, over here in Russia, there’s like 7.8% reps in the upper house and <4% in the lower who might secretly NOT be a nazi. The rest are pretty open about it.

Exactly! I rant about this a lot, but I know at least couple of people who run with laptops that have broken audio. As it turns out, installing sound card drivers is not really an option as the janky-ass drivers that the manufacturers put out nowadays can irreparably brick your entire system. It is beyond my understanding why recovery, restore, and even safe mode would even try to load them in the first place, but, apparently they do, and then crash before you could even do anything, leaving re-install as the only option.

Meanwhile, I rm -rf-ed my /boot directory the other day, and then df-ed a couple gigs of /dev/zero straight into /dev/sda. Got it back up running in just a few hours… of kicking myself for why would I do such a stupid thing.

Re-installs are for scrubs windows users. We don’t do that here. SSH from other machine, chroot from live usb, switch to TTY or even UEFI interactive shell. Fix your shit, and get to understand how it works while at it.