Very nice write up! But I think your point that time doesn't need to be a mess is refuted by all the points you made.

I know you had to limit the length of the post, but time is an interest of mine, so here's a couple more points you may find interesting:

UTC is not an acronym. The story I heard was the English acronym would be "CUT" (the name is "coordinated universal time") and the French complained, the French acronym would be "TUC" and the English-speaking committee members complained, so they settled for something that wasn't pronouncable in either. (FYI, "ISO" isn't an acronym either!)

Leap seconds caused such havoc (especially in data centers) that no further leap seconds will be used. (What will happen in the future is anyone's guess.) But for now, you can rest easy and ignore them.

I have a short list of time (and NTP) related links at <https://wpollock.com/Cts2322.htm#NTP>.

The even bigger question is, does a hot dog count as a sandwich?

In case you were unaware:

http://cuberule.com has solved this question definitively.

It's clearly an Usonian Taco.

> I think nothing short of a global catastrophe will change people's minds.

You mean like global warming and how the climate change catastrophe we are experiencing has changed human behavior to stop polluting? <sarcastic mode>

I can't imagine that anything will change the minds of the majority of people to the point where they drastically change their lifestyles.

Well, it's not a catastrophe until it affects you. It needs to severely hit a critical mass of the population in developed countries; and by that time it may be too late.

Anything less than critical mass can be swept under the rug by governments until your term is over.

This is why we make governments, to solve coordination problems.

It's not usually an option, whether to have a government or not. And when it's deliberate, the motivation is invariably protection from somebody else's government.

This situation might change if Google is forced to divest itself from Chrome. This is currently in the US courts, but it might take awhile.

Have you tried Unexpected Keyboard?

This is only true when statically linking. Order does not matter when dynamically linking. (This was a surprise to me but I have tested it.)

I'm pretty sure distro-specific spec files can make it matter.

But you really, really should be using `pkg-config` (and no other obsolete `foo-config`) so you don't have to worry about it regardless.

(If you really want to do it yourself, learn about the `tsort` program first. Although allegedly obsolete for its original purpose, it is still useful to automate some sanity, and applies just as well between libraries as within them.)

This depends on the default value of the -as-needed linker options. Fedora/red hat and debian/Ubuntu diverge here

Good to know, thanks! I only tested on Fedora. If anyone cares, here's a link for a tarball for testing this; read the simple makefile for details:

<https://wpollock.com/AUnix2/dll-demo.tgz>

(I wrote this long ago, as a linking demo for system administration students.)

Order matters if you violating the one definiton rule - the first one wins one linux. This is illegal undefined behavior that doesn't work on windows and I don't know what mac does.

hopefully this is useless trivia.

You don't know ugly. Your site is fine!

I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors. This was the result: <https://wpollock.com/>.

I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I guess.

For what it’s worth, I find it instantly familiar and comforting! Here is your first compliment :)

> Strikingly, media reports indicated that some food manufacturers began adding sesame to products that previously did not contain the ingredient following the implementation of the new allergen labeling requirements (Aleccia, 2022; Chatman, 2023; Hughes, et al., 2023).

I have to wonder if they really started adding sesame, or just began accurate labeling?

Really started adding. This is the key quote:

    Second, we document that, following the enactment of the federal law,
    some food manufacturers engaged in risk mitigation by adding small
    amounts of sesame to products that previously did not contain the
    ingredient. Doing so allowed firms to use the safe harbor provided by
    the allergen labeling rule rather than the ambiguous and non-protective
    “may contain” precautionary labeling. This was most observed in the breads
    and buns category, products for which the prevention of cross-contamination
    may have been more challenging and the likelihood of a recall or litigation
    higher.

Yes, they added sesame.

https://www.foodallergy.org/resources/fare-responds-companie...

Edit: I mean, it's also in the linked article! Just keep reading!

I should have known better than to doubt a random article I read on the Internet, how silly of me, sorry.

I also wondered if they didn't just start labeling as such since they couldn't guarantee that things didn't get contaminated with sesame. "This product is made in a facility where sesame is used"...even if we didn't use sesame in this product being the unwritten part.

That's literally exactly the reason why they did it. They made their food in a factory that also has sesame, and instead of building an entire new factory for only one item (which is expensive and might not even be financially viable in some cases), some companies did exactly that due to the FDA regulation change.

They did that initially, then the FDA started threatening companies that did that, so they responded by actually adding the sesame.

See, that's just stupid on the FDA's part. What did they expect them to do? The FDA's job is not to tell bakeries that they must produce sesame free products. They can only regulate that if there might be sesame in the product, then the product must be labeled as such. If a company wants to make some products with sesame and some without sesame while not being able to guarantee that there is no sesame contamination, then stating that on the label is the best option.

Definitely feels like overreach to me, and slapping the overreaching hand is not a bad thing. That overreach is not valid reason for shuttering the overreaching agency though.

Yes it was, handsome!

There used to be a great book for this, "JavaScript The Good Parts". Is there a well-respected equivalent for JavaScript in 2025?