Btw you can count to 12 on your fingers with one hand. Starting from the end of the index finger tap each segment of the “remaining” four fingers with your thumb.

I heard someone claim that’s how Babylonians invented and used the base 12 system in the first place.

If they knew their vocabulary they’d knew that

• ICE is a fucking train
• ICE is always late
• ICE has broken air conditioning
• ICE arrives in the wrong order, today

That’s hard to find out. When I was in school I was captivated by American movies and music, mostly all blockbuster movies came out of the us. I’m Gen X and as a teenager I had my TV tuned in to MTV a lot (when it wasn’t in use with the Commodore 64)

Before that - I’m from the southern part of Germany, so we had a lot of US influence after WW2, whereas other parts of Germany had French, British and Russian military here.

I suppose WW2 had a big impact in Europe, as English speaking troops came in and saved people from Nazi Germany. Interestingly that’s how it feels in some parts of Germany even (they saved us from the Nazis) - as absurd as it is, when you’re aware how much support the Nazis had in the population.

Nevertheless English was a big positive thing - and the answer probably is “both the UK and the US”. My dad was a huge Beatles fan as a teenager and fans want to understand the lyrics. All you need is love.

Also don’t forget Europe has so many languages - so when we talk to each other we use what the most of us know - English. I do believe that the “EU” with its more open borders also brings people to use more English.

Unfortunately I (unsuccessfully) was taught Latin in school as a third language , not French - so English is my only tool in Europe to communicate beyond my native language. It worked everywhere I visited. From Latin everything I remember is “Marcus hodie in colloseo est. Ubi est Cornelia?” (really. that was chapter 1 in my first latin book, and it’s all I remember)

In some countries there’s a age gap, with people below 40 or so are much more fluent in English, but AFAIK it’s mandatory as a second language across schools in a big part of Europe. Even in my Generation - I have a lot of friends whom I just share English as a common language with.

English had that role even before the internet. Do you really belive we became fluent in English only in the 90s?

This is not a reddit, Sir.

Wenn der Scheiß Zug kommen würde, könnte ich auch Scheißpfostieren.

What’s the difference between the US and Germany?

In Germany the ICE will probably not show up at all to take you away.

Also reddit:

My gf didn’t close the tooth paste in the bathroom.

Reddit: Red flag, LEAVE HER

IIRC Germany is named weirdly different around the world with names stemming from several roots.

Deutschland, Germany, Alemania, Nemezky, Saksa,…

I’m living with undiagnosed Adhd for all of my life. My son got a diagnosis when he was 6 or 7 - thus I know the symptoms, and frankly I know too much of the diagnosis method now to get myself an honest diagnosis. (I know how to answer to get the results I want). And I don’t need it anymore, I adjusted my life to play more into my strengths and less into my weaknesses. (And the last 10 years - in my 50s - I feel like symptoms are getting milder)

The complicated thing is: Every single symptom of adhd is being experienced by the majority of normal people. It’s just being “more” of that statistically.

It feels like setting the difficulty level on a video game, you’ll see the same things, you’ll see the same bosses. You play on hard while the guy how got to play life in story mode tells you how lazy you are because you didn’t fight all the bosses, yet.

A big part of dealing with adhd is accepting that my challenge is mine and is different from yours.

And that probably is why “being neurodivergent” is so “attractive”. It gives us the freedom of not being seen as lazy or stupid, and that’s something that I think should really apply to every single fucking human on this world.

We all have our challenges. You are OK as you are. You are worthy of love. And yes, life is hard, you’re not lazy.

If seeing people like this were the norm, “neurotypical” people wouldn’t need to see themselves as divergent. People just use “adhd” or “autism” to say “look, I have my challenges, too”.

Ah reminds me. My dad did smoke. And as tobacco was taxed differently he had once used one of these small sliding machines to put tobacco into “empty” cigarettes, sold separately.

He had stopped using these and was back to store bought cigarettes when I found his cigarettes and the machine.

I carefully pulled out all the tobacco from one of his Camel filters, and put it back in with the sliding machine - adding the tiniest firecracker I had.

Few days later he was sooooo angry. And the angrier he was the more I had to laugh.

It did explode in his ashtray when he was concentrating at his desk.

Oh fuck, thats was over 40 years ago and I still have to laugh like a madman.

Remembering him fondly, even when he was mad as hell at me the worst that would happen was him shouting.

The Floppotron

Since 2022 it is Floppotron 3.0 playing on 4 flatbed scanners, some hard drives and 512 floppy drives.

https://youtu.be/kCCXRerqaJI

Ok, you forgot the Kickstart boot disk loading the Kernel before. But yes, the Amiga was amazingly resource efficient.

Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.

Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I’d insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.

Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.

Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I’d label the disk boxes with the content.

Late 90s memories…

At home, I’d install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.

All that took about a day of work.

You kids don’t know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.

Much too frequently, if you need to manage systems for a company.

THAT is my point.

I have spent too many nights unrolling and blocking Windows updates just to keep the fucking MS Exchange server happy. Or the damned 8 year old CRM software which writes to places that Windows now blocks access to.

Yeah it was paid time, but I’m much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.

So ultimately I just jailed all the Windows stuff in VMs which I can snapshot and reliably backup, which I can roll back (mostly, as long as it does not involve Active Directory) etc. Windows is inherently unstable, that’s my point.

The ultimate solution was to get out of that job. Yeah, I stilm do use Windows as a daily driver, but single use only, no centralized management and thats kind of OK.

Haha, are you aware of how many layers of Windows are just backward compatibility hacks? Architecturally Windows has changed a lot since Win98.

The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).

Btw, the same for games. Windows detects specific games and re-enables former direct x bugs.

There are numerous layers of abstraction between your Win32 application and the Kernel, there’s no reason they won’t work on another kernel.

Oh. And of course it’s badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.

I stopped maintaining Windows systems and focused on developing software - it’s so effing annoying that things always break out of the blue with a new windows patch versions because MS has bad quality control on their overcomplicated house of cards that is named Windows.

Are you wishing back for Ballmer? IMO things were even worse, then. When they built a new version of Windows that was so bad they threw it away after a few years and botched together Vista as a quick save.

Or for Gates? Who just missed and overlooked this newfangled internet thing in the 90s until they slammed the brakes and used loads of money to turn things around?

Or the Microsoft that successfully hollowed out monopoly regulations paving the way for the tech bro style off business we now have?

Your best bet to run it probably is on Linux with Wine. Or if it is MS themselves , they already have their own Win32 to Linux translation layers, for example DB2 for Linux runs that way.

https://archive.is/xsqg6

18/20 because waterbeds weren’t a common thing here and I already had internet access and a mail address before AOL was a thing. Whoever made that list should have added usenet.

It’s not only funny, it also stabilizes the mantelpiece during an earthquake and prevents the urn from toppling over.