A friend of mine recently told me that she is not smart (that’s a lie from her, since she is), but she pretends to be smart using one simple trick. She told me that the key to being perceived as smart is to have strong, carefully researched, and strongly founded opinions on some totally irrelevant details of the things you happen to talk about. While this may be a helpful advice, the worst part is that it will not make you any true expert. But if you are part of some phenomenon for long enough, you become an expert gradually. And then you start to notice the errors of those who err. ...

Recently my old laptop started losing keyboard keys, and I heard that in 2021 it is time to let go of that good ol’ laptop with loud HDD, CD station, glossy HD-ready LCD, dissolved keys, cracked screws, two jacks, snappy sound, rumbling mic, 640x480 webcam, 4GiB RAM, 2x bithread i5-4200M @ 2.50 GHz, especially that I use unstable Gentoo GNU/Linux distro, which requires an overnight CPU-heavy update (Portage, the Gentoo PM, compiles everything from source by default). ...

I found that Git has no Polish translation! Terrible feeling, right? So now it has one. I spent every evening for a month before Christmas on translating it. So here are the main things I noticed: Software designers (or whoever does the things I mean) are very anglocentric. They mostly don’t care about other languages, even the similar ones, not to mention the exotic (search for designed well). Like Hebrew numerals in that article, in Polish we also say “dwie” for two (female), but “dwóch” for two (male) and “dwa” for two (neutral). So a msgid saying "Only two %s found." is a 100% bad design. The same goes for having many %s in a msgid. Hey, GNU printf supports "%1$s not found because of %2$s", all non-C languages also have some way to numer the percent-esses. And then you can of course translate it to "%2$s caused no results for %1$s" if it sounds more natural in the target language. ...

As years went by, we tried so hard to push everybody towards encrypting everything. Just in case. Of course, whenever I see a HTTP (no S here) form asking you for password, or credit card details, I don’t know whether to be angry, or to feel sympathy for those who are unable to set up simple encryption. And yes, it was very hard to do encryption in the past. It consumed CPU, memory, other valuable resources, and was not even widely supported. The first web pages ever were created way before SSL was even thought of, as were the first browsers. There started to be educational campaigns (which I am a very keen advocate of), like natashenka’s (my personal favourite), or Let’s Encrypt’s, or Google’s. ...