What bothers me about this specific question, apart from it being dated, is that it breaks the rules of these kind of riddles. They’re implied to be in a sort of frictionless sphere universe, the whole preposition is silly except as an abstract puzzle. To then rely on the physical properties of real lamps is cheating. You’re supposed to ignore all the real-world aspects of the setting except that one.

I deny all the cookie banners

Capital “I”? Heathen!

unstable-final-release2-usethisone

It’s a joke on the “main” name vs. the main() function. That’s normally considered the entry point, but really _start() is the OG entry, used by the runtime to do setup before calling main().

Definitely the Windows Internals books, I don’t think there’s anything else quite like it (wrt. Windows). I was also pleasantly surprised by de depth of Windows Via C/C++, which I expected to be one of those beginner tutorials distracted by language basics, but instead it’s the opposite, just a really in depth dive into low level Windows APIs.

I tried John Carmack’s “program something with just the OpenBSD base system” experiment and after some adjustment I got to like vi (not vim), ksh and bmake. For a long time this stayed my go-to happy place for hobby coding. Fun thing: on a hacker camp they had a PDP/11 running 2BSD and it was just immediately familiar. Same tools, same vi -> Ctrl-Z -> make -> fg workflow.

Very different but similar in a way: I still consider the general Windows 95 - 2000 peak UI design in many ways and I still regularly use Visual C++ 6 to play around with some Win32 programming.

Web search gives you pages of slop results too, now

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I’m scared of starting this game. Zachtronics games are bad enough on my sanity!

Those are just the packaging makefiles etc though, not the actual software sources (with some notable exceptions for bootstrapping, at least in NetBSD). Still it’s comparing a kernel with an OS

Before a 4 month stay in Vienna, I tried upping my German game: consumed lots of German-language media (news, books, videos), attended a language course, really tried immersing myself as well as I could. It was enough to get by okay, but I felt frustrated not being to follow along always or express myself precisely. Since coming back I haven’t been able to pick it up and in fact have come to associate the language with the sad realization that it’s behind me.

Edit: just a positive note, I can now easily follow along with German-language talks, musicals, articles etc which feels like a superpower!

To relive anew, Ico on the PS2. I could boot it up right now but it wouldn’t be like that first playthrough, my first foray outside of PC and Nintendo.

No one who ever had anything to do with OpenBSD or NetBSD would venture such a “best guess”

Danger Dan, “Oktober in Europa”. I can’t listen to any of his stuff any more because it makes me remember this one

Ghost of Tsushima (PS5), still taking it slowly! Cleared out the act 1 side content, took a break before the final quest. Loving the moment-to-moment gameplay, very satisfying and with some skill upgrades they make you feel super powerful!

God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP), more of the same as GoW 1 and 2 which is a good thing. Those gaze enemies though, annoying as ever. In Hades now.

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Another Mine listener! 😍

I also like me some ok.danke.tschüss

That was the joke 😅

But here it is (I think?): https://xkcd.com/979/

rsync to an rsync.net account, serves me well