A programmer with an interest in transit, making music, and building things of all types.

I have dysgraphia which makes writing difficult for me. I hope you can figure out what I mean despite my issues.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Culture will not allow a man to report being raped - there is a large double standard in play. Nobody will believes you would refuse sex with any female who wants it - even fundamentalists Christians won’t believe you while calling the girl a slut. The police are less likely to take you seriously if you do try (and many do not take rape seriously). Even if the second is not true where you live, the first almost certainly is.

    As such we don’t have good statistics. (We also have reason to believe women typically will not report being raped)





  • A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I’ve never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.

    These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn’t make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.

    Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.


  • Docker gives you a few different things which might or might not matter. Note that all of the following can be gotten in ways other than docker as well. Sometimes those ways are better, but often what is better is just opinion. There are downsides to some of the following as well that may not be obvious.

    With docker you can take a container and roll it out to 100s of different machines quickly. this is great for scaling if your application can scale that way.

    With docker you can run two services on the same machine that use incompatible versions of some library. It isn’t unheard of to try to upgrade your system and discover something you need isn’t compatible with the new library, while something else you need to upgrade needs the new library. Docker means each service gets separate copies of what is needs and when you upgrade one you can leave the other behind.

    With docker you can test an upgrade and then when you roll it out know you are rolling out the same thing everywhere.

    With docker you can move a service from one machine to a different one somewhat easily if needed. Either to save money on servers, or to use more as more power is needed. Since the service itself is in a docker you can just start the container elsewhere and change pointers.

    With docker if someone does manage to break into a container they probably cannot break into other containers running on the same system. (if this is a worry you need to do more risk assessment, they can still do plenty of damage)