I enjoy working on toy-languages, and I've spent the past ten days or so writing a compiler to convert a simple language into (static) linux/amd64 assembly.
It supports strings, integers, and floating-point operations, and is complete enough that I could implement a brainfuck interpreter in it. But otherwise it is very definitely a toy.
This is one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of camera-only systems, here in Finland. Half the year there's a lot of snow and ice around. Which I imagine means most of the view is "white" and "shiny". Coupled with the dark winters it's gotta be a nightmare to deal with.
It's possible that contributes, but to be honest most VPN users are split "privacy seeking" and "abusive". Though I grant you paid users are probably slightly more circumspect than users of Tor, etc.
It seems more likely this is just about load-balancing use against their available nodes.
Very much so. Fixing software so that they correctly recognized my preferred serial number of #12345 was valid. Using soft-ice to register itself was always a deeply ironic.
But to be honest I started before then, on the ZX Spectrum. First of all it was patching games to get infinite lives, or time. But later it became necessary to patch the loaders before you could even access the game-code - speedlock, bleeplock, etc.
Being able to pause a running game and peek/poke at the RAM would have been very useful for hacking games, though of course I'd still need to crack the loader to share the POKEs with other people.
Oh it was. It had its own handy interface where you could alot of
things live in the memory. I remember hacking for infinite lives/credits and finding out secret passwords. It was a very fun and very expensive ( for me ) device. I did not need it for copying games. There were some local hobby clubs which had almost every game and software.
On the other hand when you have a reasonably complex deployment it's easy to get swamped with dashboards showing CPU, Memory, I/O, application-metrics, signups, active users/sessions, etc.
Instead it's nice to think about how you can express the state of a complete system as a single number. It might be you divide active user sessions by database-connections, and then scale by memory capacity.
But as a single digit you can then get used to normal ranges, and have it always visible somewhere obvious. A single number won't show details, but when it changes you can go look at the specific metrics. It's a cute shorthand, and it can work well as a basic "are we normal" check.
"Korean girl Short I didn't know how to start a conversation with her, so I just asked if she was Korean and she said yes. Then I made her guess what kind of Asian I am. Then I rambled about being Asian in Syracuse before leaving. I initiated one more conversation but now we don't interact"
You bother people every day with your existence. You are one more car in their traffic, 5 minutes more of waiting in their line, you got the last bagel they were craving. Being a bother to people is part of living in a society, it would be impossible to live without ever being a burden or a nuisance to anyone. I wished I had accepted this earlier in life.
The important thing is to realize that this feeling is irrational. People aren't strongly bothered that easily. Quite the contrary, extroverted people tend to be much more popular than average.
You can easily continue this into a conversation, FYI:
"Oh, lol - you did X, and I knew another Canadian who did X, so I thought that might be a Canadian thing. Where are you from then?"
Edinburgh has some confusion of its own too, where streets will have two names. Usually because several smaller streets eventually got joined up and became one.
So walk in a straight line and you pass along Nicolson Street -> St.Patrick Street -> Clerk Street -> Newigton Road.
Sometimes you see these signposted in a fun way too with signs for both the individual components and the "main" street:
We did the same thing, more to avoid throwing away the plastic waste and keeping things reusable than out of any paranoia about chemicals.
But they worked well. We just did laundry every day for the first year and a half. Whether that's a net positive for ecological impact, or a negative is an open question.
It supports strings, integers, and floating-point operations, and is complete enough that I could implement a brainfuck interpreter in it. But otherwise it is very definitely a toy.
https://github.com/skx/s-lang/
It was fun writing out the assembly, e.g. writing the "standard library" functions to implement "getenv", etc.
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