denis bider

Last year, my Alienware laptop died after 18 months of service due to a power-related failure. I replaced it with an MSI because I could order it quickly, but it came with problems. To summarize my main issues with the MSI - it only boots successfully about 50% of the time, and otherwise freezes while booting, so it's often challenging to get it started. To avoid this, I have to keep it running most of the time. In addition, the keyboard misses keystrokes, and has an exceptionally awkward layout. Among other things, pressing Home and End requires a combination with the Fn key. Overall, not great for work.

Because I really liked my previous Alienware, and my wife likes hers, I decided to buy a new machine sooner than I otherwise would have. I opted for another Alienware. Oh boy. That was a mistake.

Ladies and gentlemen, what I have in my hotel room, resting in a suitcase next to me, is a $3,720 paperweight. I'm still typing this on my MSI laptop, because the Alienware shipped d…

Money makes problems go away. That's nice. But when the problems in your life are gone, the remainder is not happiness. It's vacuum.

If life were a game, then getting rid of the problems is like skipping to the end, past all the obstacles. You have the entire map uncovered. You can travel any place, buy anything you want that in-game vendors are selling. You can complete all the little achievements - find all ten of this, kill all six of that. And it's easy; you have all the upgrades you want, and you can kill everything in one shot.

But it feels hollow, and shallow, and it's nothing like playing the story for the first time - with appropriate difficulty, where fights are a challenge, and you have to keep trying to win, and winning feels rewarding, and you're at the center of a story with dramatic turns, and you don't have the means to know everything yet. You can deprive yourself of the advantage - unequip your gear, try to kill everything with a knife in clos…

I have a love/hate relationship with /r/polyamory. On the one hand, it's the one place to discuss my favorite topic - on loving people without owning them. On the other hand, it's disproportionately populated with participants who somehow manage to push my buttons. While many are great conversational partners, others reek of unfounded superiority of the liberal arts type, combined with a firmly held belief that they can write, even though they couldn't read to save their lives. I think of them as neckbeards and beardettes, which seems to about fit the profile, if I can believe photos and reports of their meetups. In addition, the place is overseen by this perfidious type of moderator who consistently fail to police subtle insults, but are quick with the banhammer against someone who explicitly counterattacks.

As a result of this setup, participating in that subreddit makes my blood slowly boil. For months at a time, I'll try to remain calm against people whose obstinat…

A funny little thing happened. A few days ago, I woke up after dreaming about a problem in our SSH Client. The dream called my attention to an issue I had never really thought about, or considered a problem. In currently released versions, when the client is run for the first time by the installer, it starts elevated - it runs with full administrative permissions of the installer, which means it runs in a slightly different security context than every next time it is run. I dreamt that this is causing problems, but after I woke up and thought about it, I couldn't quite put my finger on what these problems are. I wasn't even sure that it runs elevated in the first place. So at first, I didn't want to make a big deal about it. It seemed like a theoretical issue more than one with immediate impact, and we have other issues to deal with.

Still - later that day, before I went to bed, I remembered the dream again, and gave it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I couldn't think …

Fascinating article on US drug culture hypocrisy with regard to speed in the form of Adderall, vs. speed in the form of street meth:
The Speed of Hypocrisy: How America Got Hooked on Legal Meth

Most people understand that heroin and Oxycontin are both hard, addictive drugs. Not so with speed. When it comes to amphetamine, we’ve chosen a national split-screen in which doctors airily put millions of healthy children and adults on daily speed regimens while SWAT teams throw concussion bombs in baby cribs in pursuit of small-fry meth dealers.
...
“By the time I had the seizure, I was taking 90 milligrams of Adderall a day,” she says. “I knew girls who were taking the same amount or more. I don’t know if any of us had so-called ADHD, but the effects [of the Adderall] started to look exactly like how ADHD symptoms are described. I was told I needed it, so I believed it, but it was really just addiction.”
...
No pimply meth dealer ever tried to tell me his product was a harmless stimulant. No…