dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
Developer at Meta.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb
- Comment on what 2 days ago:
List it on a Buy Nothing group in your area? I give away a lot of stuff that way.
- Comment on what 2 days ago:
As a buyer, I do this to annoy scalpers. Keep sending them offers far below what they’re asking. The more time they spend dealing with me, the less time they can spend scamming people.
- Comment on TikTok is being flooded with racist AI videos generated by Google’s Veo 3 1 week ago:
Hand-crafted, locally-grown, artisinal racist videos.
- Comment on Venmo overdrafted my bank rather than use the balance in my account 1 week ago:
Some people aren’t good with money management and may forget to transfer money across, especially for scheduled things (bill payments, rent, etc)
- Comment on Venmo overdrafted my bank rather than use the balance in my account 1 week ago:
Small banks are good too. I used to use a fantastic local one called First Republic where every customer had a banker they could call or email if needed. First Republic were acquired by Chase, who wanted some huge amount of money in the account (something like $200k) to get a similar level of service through Chase Private Client. I closed the account.
- Comment on Beaches 2 weeks ago:
TIL my gender is legs.
- Comment on Moth go brrrr 2 weeks ago:
Why are there so many moth posts these days? Isn’t that an old meme?
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
When you sign for something, they’re supposed to verify your signature against the signature on your ID, credit/debit card, etc. Companies have gotten lazy about this, though. For example, the last time a store asked to see the signature on the back of my credit card was maybe 10 years ago?
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
Plenty of companies don’t actually check signatures these days.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
There’s 29 Microcenters in the USA! One just opened near me.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
A lot of companies have moved towards using Uber or Doordash for same day deliveries.
I don’t like buying stuff from Amazon, but they’re the only company I’d trust for same-day at the moment. They directly employ the delivery drivers (via Amazon Flex) so you don’t end up with issues where Doordash and Best Buy blame each other and neither takes full responsibility.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
Even if there was a signature required, the driver could just forge it.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
Does your FedEx still check signatures? In my area they stopped during it during COVID and never started doing it again. Even on packages that need a direct signature, they’ll leave them without collecting a signature.
- Comment on Bestbuy decided to use fucking **DOORDASH** to deliver my order, I couldn't cancel it. Today I was supposed to get it, and I saw the driver stealing the package after marking it as delivered. 3 weeks ago:
The standard window for a chargeback with both Visa and MasterCard is 120 days. Don’t let the retailers bully you into thinking otherwise.
Usually just threatening to do a chargeback, without actually doing it, is sufficient to get them to comply. Every chargeback costs the company money (anywhere from $15 to $40 depending on the bank) so they try to resolve issues without the customer involving the bank.
- Comment on What the fuck 3 weeks ago:
Pregananant
- Comment on Opinions on the internet 5 weeks ago:
California Pizza Kitchen?
- Comment on They don't get it. They think we are A holes. And they are right 5 weeks ago:
My wife totally skipped the “lol so random” phase of absurdist internet memes, so she doesn’t appreciate things like Badger Badger Badger, Charlie the unicorn, the Llama song, animutations, etc.
- Comment on Don't ask for more pixels 1 month ago:
I still call it Twitter because their emails are still branded as Twitter. I don’t actuslly use it any more but I do get so much spam through DMs that I’m considering deleting my account. I’m mostly holding it just so nobody squats on my name.
- Comment on Sure thing, website, my name is Gabe Newell 1 month ago:
Websites don’t have an actual check for a legit email.
Some do. You can connect to an SMTP server and pretend to send an email (send the
EHLO
,MAIL FROM
, andRCPT TO
commands, but dint actually send any content). A lot of servers will immediately reject as soon as you provide an invalid recipient email address - Comment on Thats right 1 month ago:
Do you mean in mixed language documents? Can’t you tell it that parts of the document are in a different language? You could do that in Microsoft Word 25 years ago.
- Comment on Ancient 2 months ago:
It really do be like that. I work with some people who are nearly 15 years younger than me (I’m in my mid 30s and some newer employees have just graduated from university) so I feel this.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
Thanks for the recommendation!
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
Sandboxing does use some RAM, but it was a big win for security. One site can’t crash the entire browser or use a security hole to get access to data on other tabs. Still, the majority of the RAM is taken by the site itself. The processes do share some RAM - they’re not entirely isolated.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
I’m not a game developer so I just used the first example I could think of.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
Most regular players didn’t encounter these bugs though, as often they’re edge cases that don’t occur during regular gameplay. A lot of them were found by people intentionally looking for them.
I’d argue that games today are bugger than games in the past, just due to how complex they are now. Sure, they’re a different class of bug (and arbitrary code execution via buffer overflows isn’t really a thing any more thanks to ASLR and the NX bit), but I don’t think there’s fewer bugs at all.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
In some cases, the RAM actually is in use by the site. That’s especially the case on sites with heavy client-side logic. In that case, it’s not Chrome’s (or Firefox’s) fault, it’s the website’s fault.
Chrome has a “Memory Saver” feature where it’ll unload tabs that are offscreen/hidden which helps quite a bit. Not sure if Firefox has something similar.
- Comment on My doctor's office now has ads when checking in online 2 months ago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re also using something like Google Analytics to track users.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Apps like Chrome use available RAM if it’s available, but they should be releasing it for other apps to use when there’s high memory pressure.
It’s the same with disk caching. If you have a lot of free RAM, the OS will use all of it for caching files.
- Comment on Give an inch take an inch 2 months ago:
Games were impressive in this way too. Computers and consoles didn’t have much CPU power or memory, so they had to squeeze every little bit.
This was still happening even with 5th gen consoles. Crash Bandicoot couldn’t fit in the Playstation’s memory so they ended up overwriting system memory and memory allocated to features of Sony’s standard library they weren’t using.
These days, game development is more “boring” in that aspect. Systems are powerful and frameworks like Unreal Engine handle all the core stuff. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though - it lets the game developers focus on the game itself.
- Comment on Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose) 2 months ago:
I’m just joking - it was a reference to the famous Bill Gates quote (that he didn’t actually say) about RAM.