refugee from lemmy.sdf.org

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2026

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  • between 2AM and 6AM internet would start dropping packets like crazy

    about 20 years ago I was remotely troubleshooting a microwave connectivity problem that occurred at a clients workplace about 10pm each night. Lasted about an hour. There was no one at work then but data transfers between their server and the mothership would fail.

    One night the client went to the site at night to check an alarm and noticed there was a bobtail truck parked next to the building. The aero deflector attachment on its roof blocked line-of-sight with the tower, causing the problem. He asked the driver to nap at some other location in the parking lot and the problem went away.




  • When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

    They don’t take arguments in the sense that functions do but in bash at least they are passed on as part of the expanded string. Pasted from bash:

    alias argtest='echo arg is'  
    argtest foo  
    arg is foo  
    

    So yes you could alias your yt-dlp commands and invoke the alias with the URL.




  • I’m not certain this is a “leopards ate my face” scenario, as I doubt many had illusions about their survival rate in the first place. Getting out alive would be a nice outcome if it happens:

    …signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort. – source

    [emphasis added]

    Personal note: my enlistment bonus + GI bill benefits from the 80s would be ~$88k in 2026 money. I wasn’t as desperate as the Russian recruits are but I was, as noted philosopher K. Rock once remarked, “straight out the trailuh”. We weren’t worried about normal shooting war stuff (we were surrounded by and protected by infantry) although there were other scenarios where we’d stop existing rather suddenly. A common remark in the unit was “It doesn’t matter; we’d be vaporized anyhow”. I mention this to illustrate that people can choose paths that others might think of as leopardy. The difference is the leopard folks had illusions to begin with.