I worked for a developer at a Web hosting company for a while. I really wish my story about flaming text wasn’t true, and that the words weren’t “permanent unrecoverable data loss”, and the audience wasn’t internal support technicians.

Gotta have a way to delete a vps, and there’s only so much you can do to get someone to check that they have the right one.

So, sure that might work. More likely they forgot this bit is even here on account of it being 20 years old.

Also, never doubt the persistence of a sufficiently motivated and impatient user. I don’t think needing to read something has ever stopped one.
You can literally put animated flaming text and people will click right past.

Yup, you found the developer. That’s his phone number.

It’s not exactly a new change either. In 2006 people weren’t going to the specific page from duckduckgo, they were probably finding the sqlite homepage, and then tracking down the contact info.

20 years later it’s probably better to maintain consistency with the prefix than to change it even if it’s weird.

Totally agree on the sensitive or decisive topics point, but I include a caveat that what some people call “sharing decisive viewpoints in public”, others call “not hiding their gender/sexual orientation”, and similar things, so it’s not always perfectly clear cut.

I try to avoid being inflammatory in general, anonymous or not, and I’m not perturbed if people know my city, industry, trade, and vague interests. Basically what you could figure out from a polite conversation while waiting in line.

I’ve got a lot of code up on GitHub, and some of it is absolute garbage. If an employer judges me poorly for sharing my pile of one-off scripts, or “basic human decency and lack of respect for neo Nazis in a casual setting”, then I frankly probably don’t care to work for them.
Admittedly, other than a script that automates figuring out which web hosts are hosting hate groups, there’s not much political content in my software.

I do alright, so my system seems to work.

It is funny to picture the hypothetical person they need to find to interview for the data though.

This is Larry.
Larry once took a Valium he wasn’t prescribed at a friend’s house, but Larry respects his body too much to smoke weed.
Larry is addicted to intravenous heroin.

I’d give it to alcohol, not caffeine personally. I wouldn’t say most people “abuse” caffeine, they just drink it.
Abuse to me implies having a negative impact, and I can think of more people who have been negatively impacted by weed than by caffeine, but way more from alcohol than either, and with a significantly more negative impact.

I know people who smoke too much and it’s definitely made them stagnate in life and gain a lot of weight.
I know people who drink way too much caffeine and get insomnia, leading to a cycle of discomfort and heartburn from all the coffee.
I know people who drank too much alcohol and died, or developed terrible health complications.

Most people are totally fine with all of them, but alcohol is easily the worst and most common.

Hrm, I always thought it was just a mis-name for PTSD after an excessive dose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder

It looks like there’s at least a degree of clinical validation to it being a combo of PTSD and “sometimes colors stay funny for a while”.

Are you sure you’re not thinking of “the entire war on drugs, but particularly pot and heroin”?
That’s what I thought was an invention by the Nixon administration.

Yeah, that’s the thought. That or ecstacy or something.
In reality, it’s mostly that it’s so common that everyone who might do “hard drugs” would have been exposed to pot as just background noise, like alcohol or chocolate ice cream.

It only gets a shade of credence because there have been studies indicating that some people start with pill based drugs and then just leave it at that with a “hard drug” incidence rate lower than someone who smoked pot.
The sample sizes are so small that the only real conclusion someone can draw is that it’s not definitely false and it needs more study. But it’s not that important, so funding is slow and unlikely.

It was just difficult to hear the personal opinions that officers had of people who had been on particular drugs that are so often used in a hospital setting.

Try telling a third grade kid that she is a bad person because the hospital put her on intravenous pain medication

Forgive me for thinking these phrases imply discomfort. I can only go by my life experiences, which led me to think that calling experiences “difficult”, or being called a “bad person” by an authority figure would be aptly described as at least “uncomfortable”.

Dare was dumb because it was an abject failure. Presenting information in the most alarmist possible context while being dry to the point that kids tune out any significant information is a terrible way to treat health education.

You have some very confusing issues tying your hospital experience to a personal judgement of people who use drugs.
Do you think that other people haven’t been to the hospital? Do you think that I haven’t been to the hospital? It’s not that uncommon. Hell, you mentioned breaking your arm falling off some playground equipment. I had the same injury as a child, except I also had a greenstick fracture in my humorous that I had to be put under to have corrected. I was so ill coming out of anesthesia that I remember it less fondly than the actual injury.

Jumping from a bad experience with intravenous pain killers to “I hate people” is weird. Those people didn’t have anything to do with it. Why do you hate them? Not understand? Sure, that would make sense. Find foolish? Totally get it. But hate? Why hate?
And why all drug users? What does a pothead have to do with it at all?

You’re making a lot of leaps there from me calling it “dumb”.

You’ll have to forgive me for thinking it made you uncomfortable, considering that’s what you said.

And none of that even touches where you get the connection between “I was in the hospital” and “I hate drug users”.

Wait, so you think dare wasn’t dumb, but you have specific negative memories associated with it mischarecterizing drug users due to your legitimate usage?
I would call a program that makes children feel bad for going to the doctor “dumb”.

Your dislike of people who use drugs because you went to the hospital a lot is quite strange. I’m not sure why those would be related.
Did they put you in the hospital, or make a police officer come to your school and tell you you were a bad person?

Yup, that’s a good one. Gateway drug notion is generally iffy at the absolute most generous.

This one wasn’t as “smoking the weed will make you do heroin and die” as others, just “some people do other things after doing this one”, but it’s still not super worth mentioning.

What specifically stands out to you as a ridiculous bit of probaganda?

It’s certainly not the most accurate or clinical, and some of the categories are a bit “eh”, but nothing popped out to me that I would describe so strongly.

If nothing else, it’s a lot more objective and grounded in reality than what they gave me in that dumb dare program. Might be why my reaction is just “close enough”.

They don’t, but every plan and instruction going back a looong time refers to things that way.

Essentially, where they make the wood calls it a 2x4. So the places that process the wood calls it a 2x4, and so on.
The kilning and planing process used to be much less regular, so if you used actual, you couldn’t buy four 1.5x3.5s, you’d get a 1.6x3.4, a 1.3x3.9, and so on.

The only consistent way to refer to it was the original sawmill size, and people who built things knew you had to measure the actual size of each piece of wood, or just accept the slop.

We got better at planing and kilning, and eventually the actual size was standardized. We still had all those plans and bills of material referring to things by their nominal name, to say nothing of the actual builders and engineers who were both used to the nominal measurements and didn’t think it was necessary to change. So stores kept selling things by the name people expected when they were looking for products.

Most stores now label in both nominal and actual to accommodate for people who don’t know this, since buying lumber and building things isn’t as regular occurrence for a lot of people as it once was.

I believe, and we’re at the edge of my understanding here, that the satellites need a consistent adjustment for local relativity. Because the satellites also have their clocks tick differently.
So they define a new time standard for the moon so that lunar operations can function based on that time standard, rather than having to recalculate relative to earth.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11150

That’s the paper from NIST that’s basically the timezone part of it all.
They’re basically defining how to calibrate moon clocks so we all agree exactly how they differ from earth clocks.

That’s pretty close to what they’re doing. The tricky bit is detailing how you convert a lunar timestamp to a terrestrial timestamp.

Jostling clocks with things like leap seconds turns out to be more trouble than it’s really worth. Better to just let them get out of sync but be able to precisely define what the drift is.

So, there is an actual utility for it, it’s just not people centric.
Having a framework for how you convert the clock measurements from the lunar reference frame to terrestrial reference frame is helpful for orbital maneuvering and navigation, as well as communication coordination.

They’re not building a "UTC+5” style timezone, but a “given the moons mass and orbit, here’s how we define the time ratio between the earth and moon so we can consistently calibrate our clocks”.

They probably actually will end up with atomic clocks on the moon, or at least in close lunar orbit. If the plan is to have something like gps on the moon, that’s a first step.

It’s that relativity thing where each person will see the oscillations happening correctly, but when they look at what the other person did, the answer will seem wrong.

The difference is small enough that it really only matters if you’re NASA and building moon GPS. MPS?

It’s also important for things like GPS, as related to other planets, as well as orbital maneuvering.

What they’re actually being told to build is “write down the rules for moon time”, which is basically what you said but defined in terms of “this much faster than earth time”, and a system doing the same thing on other planets or places in the solar system.

So it’s less a timezone and more a time system, and instructions for how you calibrate your atomic clock on the moon and reconcile the difference with terrestrial clocks.