Spyke

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This should be a crime.

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You should watch the recent videos by "Nate from the Internet", he keeps doubling the amount of vanilla extract put into cookies until you can detect a difference.

Spoiler: 1tsp, 2tsp, 4tsp, etc all taste exactly the same in the final product. After adding in cupfuls, the cookies start to taste bad from too much alcohol, but don't taste any more vanilla than the 2tsp batch. He even tried with vanilla beans and whole pods.

linux

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My friend didn't have a great experience with Linux

Sounds like your friend is absolutely not the target audience for a linux-based operating system. If he wants to play Windows games and use software designed for Windows, then he should be using a Windows OS. Anything else would be providing a suboptimal experience for him.

Personally, I've been using various Linux-based systems since 2004, as a software developer I use a lot of command-line utilities, and many tools and applications designed for Linux. If I were using predominantly tools and applications designed for Windows, then I would be using Windows. No need to make life more difficult for yourself and others.

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Which Life Pro Tip disappointed you?

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Every car I've owned has been used. Some are better than others. In general, I've had really good luck and have bought some great cars, but some have been money pits. You get better at spotting a good buy, but it's still possible to get a bad one, it does come down do luck.

linux

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Well, that's offending

I get how this could be interpreted as offensive, but I think it is just poorly worded.

This option is for if you are using a legacy version of Linux such as 2.6.x (eg, on an old RedHat distro that your business systems are designed to be run on).

This enables a compatibility mode so the old kernels don't complain.

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Can anyone tell me what format this uh.. nested dictionary is?

It's not really a standalone file format, it's executable Lua code.

It returns a new item with the given table contents.

That syntax with the keys in square brackets is the "long-form" method of creating a new table, that's allows the use of spaces and dashes in the key name.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34687498/what-is-the-function-of-square-brackets-around-table-keys-in-lua

Maybe this is the lua-equivelent of a python Pickle file?

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What's the dumbest thing you've done to fix a tech issue?

In my early 20s I had a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I would answer phones or take orders at the counter. One day one of the touchscreen monitors at the counter stopped working. It was just black all the time. So we were told not to use it.

A few days later I was on lunch shift and bored, I was trying random things to see if I could fix the monitor. Switched the inputs, switched to a different VGA cable, etc. At one point I discovered the touch panel was still working, I could interact with the OS, even though nothing was displaying. I was pressing around different areas of the screen and I accidentally found that pressing right in the centre of the screen caused the display to re-appear! It would disappear again after a few seconds. Press that spot again, it came back. I was fascinated by this, I showed some coworkers, they didn't care.

Over the course of the day it was getting harder to make the display re-appear. It gradually needed to be pressed quite forcefully to come back. I started using my knuckles to knock sharply on the spot, and that was working.

When my manager arrived for the night shift, I was excited to show him my discovery. I said "hey man, I kinda fixed this monitor, watch this!" And I enthusiastically knocked hard on the centre of the screen with my fist. The LCD lit up and showed the display, but at the same time shattered in a rainbow ring the shape of my fist.

The look on my manager's face was of awe and horror. I was trying to explain what I had meant to do, but I realised what it must've looked like to him. "Hey man, watch me fix this monitor!" Before smashing the screen with a swift punch. It wasn't possible to explain it a way that didn't sound crazy.

In the end I convinced him that the monitor was faulty anyway, and we were going to replace it anyway, so my accident breaking it more is not a big deal.