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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • SAME. I know without a doubt the brown cornucopia was part of the fruit logo.

    There is zero doubt in my mind. It’s literally how I learned what a cornucopia is.

    I was in 6th grade and our school was going to have a Christmas play, which involved some kids dressing as reindeer. The teacher showed us an example of the kind of sweatpants we’d need to wear, and they were Fruit of the Loom, still in the package. I asked the teacher what the brown fruit was, and she told me to look it up and that it was a cornucopia, except she said it like “Cornycopia,” which I couldn’t find in the dictionary until she told me it was spelled with a ‘u’ and not a ‘y’.

    I didn’t misremember that, I didn’t confuse it with Thanksgiving, etc. The only reason I know what a cornucopia is is because of that and how she mispronounced it.


  • Before I replace it with something that won’t catastrophically collapse when the wind blows the wrong way, I get some sort of sick satisfaction out of doing autopsies on the house-built-of-matchsticks “solutions” that users come up with and I don’t know why. Some of them are truly fascinating and make you wonder how someone could possibly arrive at that conclusion based on what they were actually try to achieve.

    It’s also why if I’m asked to implement something, my first question isn’t “When does this need to be done?,” it’s “What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve?”

    What a user asks for and what they actually need very rarely intersect.



  • While on the topic, this isn’t how passwords work in systems.

    Passwords are stored as one way hashes. So it’s cryptoed only in one direction, it’s lossy, and can’t be recovered back to the original password.

    When you log on, your cleartext PW is hashed in ephemeral memory/storage and then the cleartext password is thrown away.

    That hash is compared to the hash in the DB. If the hash matches, then you have access. If it doesn’t, then your PW is incorrect.

    Oh my sweet Summer Child. This is definitely how it’s supposed to work, but there are plenty of services that just don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

    Have you ever been on a site that has a stupid-low character limit for a password? There’s literally no reason to do that, all the hashes are going to end up the same size in the DB anyway regardless of the original string length. Even bcrypt’s max secret character limit is 70-something characters.

    Ever change a password and have it not work on the next login because they’re silently truncating it after a certain character limit? Ever get an email with an actual password in it?

    The only reason you would do things like this is if you’re storing/processing passwords in plaintext and not hashing it client-side first.

    I can think of 3 offenders of this off the top of my head. It’s a lot more common than you’d think.





  • They really don’t, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it’ll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don’t work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.

    I use Kagi for search now and it’s 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it’s like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.