I will never understand why people are scared of jumping spiders because all of them literally look like this
Yeah, this seems about right.
Load Bearing Coconut
From The Hackers Dictionary, a tale recounted by Guy L. Steele (GLS):
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone’s idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn’t affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don’t know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we’ll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I’m silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
(source)
see also: phase of the moon bug, the 500-mile email, and the story of mel
this is why you print error messages and save them to a log
When I got hired one of my first tasks was to re-make the excel files for our budget.
The files had around 15 years. Were created by one guy in times when excel had waaay less functions.
Said guy basically used then-existing functions to achieve more advanced ones - only added properly years later.
He also created several macro commands to mass-edit the data for printouts and such.
Instead of actually making new files from nothing I simply fixed and optimised the old ones because that guy’s work was amazing.
Except. Some excel files had images put into them. Images that could hold a spot for a signature or just be pure white square to hide pieces of stuff not needed for printouts.
Deleting those images could crash multiple macro commands. In some cases trying to replace a signature spot image with a data cell with “signature:” in it caused the entire macro to work several times longer.
In the end - instead of fixing unknown number of lines of code I… Replaced images with 1x1 white pixel images under the same name…
At this point I am the only person at work who knows those exist.
A very famous moth, the African death's head hawkmoth :) Named after the skull shape on their back, though honestly i dont care about the skull, i care about the fact that they can SQUEEK!!!
I LOVE THEM SO MUCH
time was never on our side
“i dream of you every night. but i no longer remember what your face looks like.”
have some katya & sofia (goncharov, 1973) angst, because how could i not
Toph is an architect in her free time and she's always free
(So badger moles are atla's earth kingdom/chinese equivalent to lions, yeah? And you know the lion guardian statues that media keeps accidentally making gay? (Ex: Disney Mulan 1998). Yeah this is where my thinking was)
