A better place

The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.

You have been banned from !pyongyang@lemmy.world

I just made it 62.

The 99 bottles of beer song is (was?) a popular programming exercise to teach beginners about loops. Singing it in real life would be pretty annoying because you would essentially repeat the same two sentences for a couple of minutes. Apparently, the PHP developers were planning to order one beer each, sing the song and get on everyone’s nerves. The C++ dev stopped this by buying all the remaining beer at once.

The choice of languages is probably OP’s own prejudice. These days I’d say PHP devs are on average older and more experienced than JS and Python devs, just because almost nobody learns PHP as their first language anymore.

The bakery down the road from where I grew up used to hold the Guinness world record for the largest version of a local specialty.

I’d finally finish some of my personal projects.

Over the last few years, I’ve had so many ideas for stuff, both video games and just basic useful software. This is where the curse of being a professional software engineer kicks in. I know that I’m experienced enough to actually make those things but after a full day of work, preparing dinner and getting the apartment in order, there is just not enough time and energy left to get my ass in front of an IDE again. I’d love to have the opportunity, even if just for a year or so to pause my day job and spend my energy on something that is actually mine and has emotional value for me.

On top of that, I have a couple of hobbies that would benefit from having more time. Photography, HEMA (fencing with proper swords), board games, 3d printing and painting miniatures… one thing is for sure, I wouldn’t get bored any time soon.

My first OS was most likely DR DOS 3.41

For my daily driver desktop PCs that was followed by

• MS-DOS 5.0
• Windows 3.11
• Windows 98 SE
• Windows XP
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

On the linux side, I got started with Gentoo, experimented with several lightweight distributions for an old laptop and had a Mint VM for a few years. These days I run Ubuntu on a couple of servers and in WSL. Never got around to using it as my main desktop OS.

For university I had (in order) an iBook G3, a MacBook and a MacBook Pro, so you can add most of macOS 10.x to that list.

Learned that the hard way. Within less than a week went from happily living in the house that I had grown up in, that I was renting from my father and that I was planning to eventually buy or inherit to having to look for an apartment because he sold it. The worst thing? That he never gave me a reason or even acknowledged how much he had hurt me. Quite the opposite, he later asked me to help the new owners set up their tv as if it was nothing.

See, that kind of ambiguous abbreviation is the exact reason why I made a t-shirt with “ACAB - Assigned Cute At Birth” with the ACAB in the non-binary colors for a friend.

I got hit really hard by 2048. I didn’t even play it that much but my brain started looking for groups of identical things and imagined how they slide into each other to create something new. Plates on the kitchen table, seats on the train to work, identical cars…

And I’m pretty sure that the name “hot potato license” and the comment above the license are very strong indicators for this not being the case. The license is meant to mimic a game of hot potato where you get the code for a short moment (one commit) and have to throw it to someone else. Sure, the analogy doesn’t quite work because you can’t decide who has to make the next commit but it would make even less sense if you were able to keep control over the code and add more and more commits. That would defeat the whole point of naming it “hot potato license”.

Yeah, that should read “all other citizens of earth”.

That‘s correct and indeed unfortunate but not what we were talking about.

There’s a chance that framework might build something. Lately they’ve been asking what to build next and modular phones were one of the most frequent answers. While their parts are not fully open source, their interfaces between the modules and the firmware are. For the laptops, you can already replace basically anything with a custom version.

Not sure why you get Apple into this. Apps on iOS have been natively compiled from the beginning and they are amazing at running stuff on older hardware. My current iPhone 12 Mini is over three years old and smoothly runs everything I throw at it. Before that I had a 2016 iPhone SE for about four years and only replaced it because I wanted something with a better camera (I’m a semi-professional photographer so I want something decent for when I see something cool and don’t have my big camera with me). I gave the SE to my mom and she used it for another two years until she decided she needed a bigger screen. It probably still works and it got its last OS update just two months ago.

As long as you don’t run something super hardware hungry, you can easily use an iPhone for at least five years without any problems. Even if the battery dies halfway through, there are lots of repair shops around that will replace it for a reasonable price in case you’re not comfortable with opening up the phone on your own.

I see what you did there…

Yeah, as I said in response to exocrinous, that would work. No idea why it slipped my mind when I typed my comment. I think I even thought of something similar, it sounded wrong in some way and so I went a different route.

Oh right, that would work.

Well, you could consider the solution to the riddle a pun though that’s quite a stretch. Though there is at least one modern rendition (in German) that directly uses a more pun-ny solution. It does’t quite translate to English but I’ll try. Basically, Oedipus thinks and thinks until he starts to complain “Ach Mensch…” which is roughly equal to English “Oh boy…” but “Mensch” is literally the German for “human” so it’s the right solution and the sphinx has to accept it. If you understand German, I highly recommend checking out this version. It’s “König Ödipus” by Bodo Wartke. He plays all roles himself on a mostly empty stage with only a couple of props and it’s absolutely hilarious. The sphinx is a lion hand puppet.

Edit: for anyone interested, here’s a youtube clip of the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DogC57ZJuY8 (German with German subtitles)