It’s better to buy them food or give them homeless care packs. There are good lists online of things you can give to homeless folks that will help them a lot, socks are a main staple.

I give all three depending on the scenario. I almost never have cash on me, so I don’t hand out money very often just because of that.

It’s important to show them compassion and care. Homeless people are often treated like trash by most people. Saying a kind word to them and giving them a small gift might be the only instance of kindness they experience for days, possibly weeks.

Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS here. Been using for about a year and a half, and loving it.

An oldie but a goodie lol.

For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.

Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.

I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.

She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.

When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”

A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”

I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.

Two stories:

I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.

For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.

But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.

One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.

I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.

He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.

Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.

Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.

Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.

I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.

I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”

Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.

Modern web engines are basically mini operating systems. Long gone are the days where a web browser just needed to render basic HTML pages, handle some simple protocol actions, and render images.

To build something that supports all of the latest web standards, is secure, is always up to date, and on top of all that, is performant, requires a large group of very skilled devs working constantly on all those components.

Web development, for better or worse, has become a massive and rapidly evolving ecosystem that is constantly morphing and changing. Web apps are becoming the standard, and even “simple” modern websites are absolutely filled with different widgets and frameworks for all the different elements they contain.

If a very large/rich org or company decided to dedicate a whole team of devs to build a FOSS web engine, it could happen, but that used to be Mozilla, and look how that has slowly been failing.

What person with a website that has any significant traffic would willingly break it for 80+ percent of its users? That will never happen, sadly.

How did you set up the kiosk? I’ve been looking for an alternative to Windows Kiosk mode on Linux for a while now.

Tell me you don’t work in IT, without telling me you don’t work in IT.

Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.

Oh…oh this is some sweet justice lol.

Buy beans folks, canned or dried bulk. Stock up on some frozen fruit if possible too.

He claims he is a man and wants to learn and grow from his mistakes, that’s admirable honestly.

And what better way to prove it than to calmly accept his prison sentence like a mature man who understands the weight if his crimes and the consequences of his actions.

They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.

Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.

I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.

A health company where they have that poor of security practices? Get the hell out ASAP! When they get ransomware, (and they will,) you do NOT want to be on the hook for trying to recover their systems.

Trust me, I had to help recover from a ransomware attack at a small company a while back, it hit early in the morning, I got there a little before 8am once I got the call.

22 hours later, we had only just finished wiping and re-imaging every computer, let alone getting all the software reinstalled, configured, tested, backups re-synced, etc. It took weeks to get everything fully recovered, and that was with a team of half a dozen people.

In the meantime, CYA hardcore. Document all security issues you can find in email and make sure whoever is in charge is aware and is on the email chain. There literally could be legal charges brought up if it’s involving private health information.

NCIS, or its variants. I think where I lived, it came on at 9pm, and because my parents didn’t want me to watch it, (violence and all that) it was a convenient bedtime marker.

I’m starting to get the hang of it. I was using Debian, so I had to figure out the basics of venv because many of the frameworks I was trying to learn require newer versions of Python than what comes with Debian.

vscodium works really easily inside it though, so it wasn’t too bad, but I still feel like I’m treading water a little bit.

As a baby Python Dev, I’m glad it’s not just me.

Lol