Knusper

Oh, right, isn't that another oddity with the US, that not everyone has an ID card? Searching the internet tells me there is no such thing as a general ID card in the US. 🙃

Over here, everyone who's eligible for voting (adult citizens) also has an ID card.

Voting registration. I get a letter that I can vote and what the options are. Then on voting day, which is on a Sunday, because why would it be on any other day, I just walk into my town hall with that letter and my ID card, put down my crosses and leave. It's like a walk in the park, often quite literally.

One time, I got hit with "You're a programmer, you should be able to count." and yep, made that exact joke...

It's like "busy", but a noun.

Don't ask me why the y becomes an i and silent...

In one of the bathrooms at my workplace, the light timer used to be far too short. It reacted to sound, but not very well, so whenever it switched off, you'd hear me clapping my hands like a dumbass.

Then one day, I had a co-sitting with another guy. And of course, the light went out on us. I was already thinking, great, now I'll get to applaud that guy shitting.

But instead, the guy lifted his leg, stomped a single time and the light went back on. That was the day I learnt that I'm a rookie at pooping.

If anyone's interested in the general network behaviour of infectious diseases and the like, this is a pretty cool interactive article: https://meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/

Yeah, I've done responsive grids before. Problem is, I'm currently working on a single-page web music player and it's so easy to just nail all the UI elements down. Like I might want to have the play button always appear to the left of the playback bar. But that obviously can't reflow naturally on smaller screens. Although reflowing that example won't look good either.

I guess, I'm still figuring out, if I ever actually want things to reflow. I might just need to define static rules, so that on a small screen, the play button should appear in a different grid cell, next to the previous/next buttons, for example...

I only do webdev occasionally and yeah, I've noticed this tendency that I want to put everything in a CSS grid. At this point, I'm worried I end up with a layout that's about as responsive as the early-2000s table layouts. 🙃

You haven't seen the best part yet. They're holding back security updates, if you don't do this whole Pro-shit. I really don't know how much pot their executives smoked to get that awful idea.

And like, to be fair, for personal use, you can get Pro for free, so you 'just' need to create an account to get a secure OS.

But yeah, you basically don't really hear people complaining, because we simply don't use Ubuntu. Plenty better Linux distros to choose from. I only know this shit, because my work laptop unfortunately comes with it and I'm not necessarily allowed to change it.

Well, as per above, these are extremely complex requirements, so most don't make for a good story.

One of the simpler examples is that a customer wanted a solution for connecting special hardware devices across the globe, which are normally only connected directly.

Then, when we talked to experts for those devices, we learnt that for security reasons, these devices expect requests to complete within a certain timeframe. No one could tell us what these timeframes usually are, but it certainly sounded like the universe's speed limit, a.k.a. the speed of light, could get in our way (takes roughly 66 ms to go halfway around the globe).

Eventually, we learned that the customer was actually aware of this problem and was fine with a solution, even if it only worked across short distances. But yeah, we didn't know that upfront...

Yeah, I'd expect them to stay as far away as possible from actually fulfilling the spirit of the law as any technicalities allow them to. As in, they'll definitely violate that law, but they won't violate it more than necessary to make it practically useless.

WhatsApp uses (a variation of) XMPP under the hood...

https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/#projects-using-xmpp-based-instant-messaging