What's wrong with typing 2:1?

In Finland, we make an independent computer magazine called Skrolli that comes out 4 times per year. Our issues are about 120 pages each, but with hardly any ads.

You should start a xanthina where you serve various xanthinated beverages.

Coukd call it... xanzi-bar

"Stand on Zanzibar" (1969 Hugo Award Winner) — John Brunner

Great book.

I've been growing bonsai trees for about 13 years. It doesn't have anything to do with computers, so it's a nice counterbalance to my software job. I don't really even take pictures or videos of my trees, I want to keep the subject as analog and simple as I can.

Are you sure?

The question is more about the hardware. Back then, TLS existed but was used sparingly for things like banking, because of the computational overhead, at both the server and client end. Today's computers are so much faster that we don't even think about it.

AES-GCM would be very slow on such an old computer, without hardware instructions for AES and for CLMUL.

However, this is precisely the reason why TLS also has the option to use ChaCha20-Poly1305, which will have a decent speed even on an ancient SPARC CPU, though on the most recent CPUs it cannot match the throughput of AES-GCM, which is preferred on these.

So if you want to use a SPARC with TLS 1.3, you must configure it to avoid AES-GCM and use only ChaCha20-Poly1305.

I work with PHP, where classes are supposedly a lot slower than strings and arrays (PHP calls dictionaries "associative arrays").

Benchmark it, but from what I can find this is dated advice. It might be faster on first load but it'd surprise me if it's always faster.

Edit: looking into how PHP has evolved, 8 added a JIT in 2021. That will almost certainly make it faster to use a class rather than an associative array. Associative arrays are very hard for a JIT to look through and optimize around.

I used to have alias rm='rm -i' for a few years to be careful, but I took it out once I realised that I had just begun adding -f all the time

Yeah, but that's because it's implemented poorly. It literally asks you to confirm deletion of each file individually, even for thousands of files.

What it should do is generate a user-friendly overview of what's to be deleted, by grouping files together by some criteria, e.g. by directory, so you'd only need to confirm a few times regardless of how many files you want to delete.

See also rm -I (capital i), which only prompts when deleting directories or >3 files

I used to run Gnome on 8 MB in the late 90s

That's an unreasonable ask. I'm not gonna fiddle with the brightness of my monitor throughout the day, thanks

If you control your ambient lighting or use automatic adjustment, you don’t have to.

I can count on one hand the number of monitors I've seen with auto brightness. The number of monitors with acceptable and non distracting auto brightness is zero.

I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.