Tootfinder

I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…

I'm 37 years old and I finally finished a #JRPG game for the first time in my life ( #SeaOfStars ).
I like them a lot, but I often get bored of the grinding, or I have to leave it for some time and when I come back I don't remember what I was doing.
Why I managed to finish it this time? Because I had more important, stressing and boring things to do instead, and my brain demanded procrastination. #ADHD

Après maintes hésitations, j’ai tâtonné pour trouver une police de caractère pour Le Sillon. Au départ, le modernisme m’a fait douter de l’usage d’une police Š empattement pour le site du club Sillonesque...
🌊 Lire sur le Sillon https://sillon-fictionnel.club/apropos

"Quite simply, if you have not read this book yet, read it. If you have a colleague who has yet to read it, get them a copy. If someone asks you what one book to read about software engineering, it is this one. It is not Code Complete, Second Edition, nor is it Clean Code, nor any other book that claims to teach you how to get software right the first time around (you will not)."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/michael-feathers/

Looks like the USPS shut down the covidtests.gov at 8:00 PM EDT on 3/9/2025, per text on the website.
I'm feeling somewhat fortunate in that I got my order placed and received in the last couple weeks.
If they had too many tests stockpiled, better management and allowing people to order additional test kits seems like a better choice than destroying good tests. 
#CovidTests…

There is a new #Fediverse bot that facilitates web forensic analysis of websites.
You can submit a domain for crawling by messaging @…, and it will respond with the analysis results.

Lookyloo
Lookyloo captures websites and let you investigate them.

Did you know that all of our current and past issues (and volumes) are available as DRM-free PDF and EPUB files? Download and read them in whichever your preferred medium is. All of this thanks to the continuous support of our patrons!
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/volumes/

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

True story time. ~7 years ago, onsite team meeting
New hire said when starting job, they thought "model" in job description meant we take photos, wondered where the girls were. Initially sounded like joke, but as they kept going, I realized they were serious. Next few years confirmed laziness, lack of curiosity.
How do you see "model" in #DataAnalytics job &amp…