John (i may also use bynkii as a handle. Here and there.)

Took a while, but still.

A man carrying an assault weapon at the Michigan capitol in 2020 to protest COVID restrictions. Behind him are two people wrapped in Trump flags.

More arms anti-lockdown protesters

“You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple.” — FBI Dir. Kash Patel

Fucking sciatica has driven me to consider a standing desk with a treadmill because sorting down makes my leg catch fire.

Wish List: SSH keys in Passwords It might be weird to describe myself as an “authentication enthusiast,” but I guess I’ve never claimed to not be weird. I’ve written a whole lot about passwords and passkeys…

HARD agree: sixcolors.com/post/2026/01...

Although given how passkeys work, there’s potential to adapt them for SSH as well and it looks like that’s in the works.

Once again I am reminded that the block function is a great way to deal with nerds.

How it is is broke. The fact you’ve gaslit yourself into thinking it’s not is your problem, not mine. But I’m done with the lot of you.

Broke shit should be fixed. Period.

Also, as an argument, “return doesn’t return” is not a great one. Just sayin’

Sigh. , and -NoEnumerate don’t work without either [void] or |out-null

And just because y’all are willing to live with stupid crap that should be fixed but “that’s how we’ve always done it” and “we’d have to change” doesn’t mean anyone else has to.

Seriously, why would you live with patent dumb?

I got Adobe to change their installers and fix their office integration on macOS. I got Apple to make the SNMP mib directory not part of system protection because it was dumb.

One can effect change, one just has to actually want change and be willing to do the work.

PowerShell 7.6.0 Preview 6 macOS install bug

(This may also exist on Linux and Windows, but I can't verify that) There's currently (as of the date of this post) a bug with the .pkg installer for PowerShell 7.6.0 Preview 6: it doesn't update the installed preview version, instead it overwrites the…

PowerShell function return foolishness

While working on an update to Set-PowerShellSig, I noticed something weird. Well, not just weird, but bad. Say you explicitly create an arraylist or generic list in a function, we'll call it myDumbReturn and you add things to it. Now, you want to return this…

Y’all just collectively shrugged and said “well that’s how we’ve always done it and you can’t change software ever so 🤷‍♂️”???

Dear lord.

And everyone is okay with that? For real? None of y’all reporting it as a bug for 7.X, no one thinks it’s weird or bad that if you don’t append |Out-Null or prepend [void] (which I’d never even heard of until now) the return types silently changed?

Write-Output version, still no change

Write-output version:

Still returns an array with the comma

Doesn’t seem to work for me.

But if you want to tone police, I worked on a flightline in North Dakota at night for six winters. -60 F windchills, outside, and I can show you the difference between being short because people don’t seem to be listening and being mean. I don’t think you want that, and it’s a waste of time but 🤷‍♂️

And b) provide examples that *are not what you are talking about* while talking like somehow you’re dumb for expecting obvious thing to behave in obvious fashion, the combination of all of that is going to make one short.

Dude, when people keep a) telling you something that is weird and wrong is actually okay, you just don’t understand it well enough, that’s a variant of the courtier’s reply and a form of gaslighting. One should be able to use the return keyword without 12 pages of docs on two sites….

Y’all keep saying “oh here’s an example that does that” and yet, there’s no example of the code that called the function getting an arraylist in the output.

Because so far, you’ve not shown an example of successfully declaring an arraylist in a function, putting data in that arraylist in the function, returning that arraylist and having the code that called the function get an arraylist from the function.

Okay, now how do you *return* that arraylist *as an arraylist not an array*?

because i don’t see that happening.

Doesn’t seem to work

function badArrayReturn {

$theArrayList = [System.Collections.ArrayList]::New()

$theArrayList.Add("item5")$theArrayList.Add("item6")

return ,$theList
}

$returnedList = badArrayReturn
$returnedList.GetType()

it’s an array, not an arraylist

“learning how to return specific types is a rite of passage”

Can you, for a second, step outside of yourself and see just how weird and elitist that is as a statement?

Why not just call it a “test of manhood” or “how you prove your worth” because it’s the same thing.

You really can’t see that?

Yeah, here I thought that explicitly declaring an arraylist and returning that would work as it should.

What kind of *idiot* would think that.

Clearly I was fucking stupid for thinking a “return $explictlyTypedVariable” would actually do that.

How fucking ignorant to think that.

I literally put them in a fucking box. I explicitly declared an arraylist. That’s me putting them in a fucking box. I then, evidently *stupidly* assumed that when I said “return $explictlyTypedArraylist” that sans error or weird uncommon bullshit, I would get…an arraylist, not an array.

And at this point, I think none of y’all give a shit about how this makes people just give the fuck up because when they say “this seems fucked”, y’all come in hot with “well, if you were l33t, you’d know.”

Good job.