queerlilhayseed

You are correct, I guess “Permanent Ubuntu Live USB” isn’t really accurate as I tend to distro hop. I picked Purple because I was using Ubuntu at the time, then I came to associate that one with “current linux image” and the others were more situational. This was about the same time I came to realize that for 99% of file transfers it was easier to just scp things across the network rather than dig a USB drive out of the drawer, so pretty soon after I bought them the only thing I used them for was bootable images, and for whatever reason Purple has been the first choice for that task, so I’m pretty sure it has had more writes than the other four put together.

It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.

cross-region failovers are a thing, but they’re expensive to maintain so not everyone does it. I am kinda surprised one region failure had this much impact though

No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Something about the circle of life

Fun dinosaur fact: Chickens (and all birds) are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs, where crocodiles are descended from a distinct branch of Archosaurs (the group that also includes dinosaurs and by extension, birds). So of the two, the chicken is evolutionarily closer to dinosaurs. In fact, technically speaking, chickens are dinosaurs.

You might be able to do a find and replace with https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF . I’m not an expert on PDFs, so I’m not sure if it can be done in a way that preserves all the important formatting, but if you feel comfortable DMing me the PDF (or one of similar complexity) I could try to write a script that replaces all instances of the target text in a way that preserves the rest of the document.

To make matters worse, Jurassic Park spliced together dino DNA fragments with frog DNA to make their “dinosaurs”, so your dino meat might taste froggier depending on where you get it from. Non-GMO dino nuggets probably taste indistinguishable from chicken.

I bought a 5-pack of 8GB USB drives for making live USBs, many years ago it feels like, and have somehow managed to hold onto all of them. I tend to use Green and Black the most for file transfers and they have started to fail pretty regularly but I can’t throw them out, they’re a family. Funnily enough Purple, the one that got assigned “Permanent Ubuntu Live USB” duty and has seen more than its share of writes, is still rock solid.

I loved having a smartwatch, for the brief period of time I had one. They fell to (IMO) the pitfalls of being annoying to charge and being tied to massive smartphone walled gardens. After a few years my smartwatch couldn’t even hold a charge through a single day, and had lost support from the manufacturer anyway, and was hard to keep synced with my phone, and eventually the hassle became too much for it to be worth it.

But if we had a standard API for wearables that smartphone companies adhered to, and I didn’t have to charge it every night, I would love to have another smartwatch. They’re so convenient.

One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We’re still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can’t really imagine how that doesn’t have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.