u/mpyne

I was trying to figure out how the heck he pulled off a cover of that Flyleaf song and then I realized I was slightly off of what I thought the title was.

Wow, I didn’t know there were people who wrote perfect code consistently each time. It’s an honor to meet someone with skills like that.

No wonder he stayed in college.

I used to maintain the primary build tool for KDE developers. I run Gentoo Linux and build most of the system from source using rolling updates.

Across both of those I have basically never encountered this. ODR violations are kind of serious business so if you keep running into this, that seems like a good thing to fix even outside of contracts being on the menu.

I’d avoid Qt unless you happen to be particularly wealthy.

You don't need to pay for a license for a personal project.

REST formalized the design that made that possible.

REST formalized a design that could make it possible.

But the Web we actually got is hardly in line with REST's design, as noted in the OP discussion. So I wouldn't call REST the design that made it possible.

Man we've got to nationalize this company, if only for our own national security. If he can do this to Ukraine he can do this to us.

Hate to say it, but nowadays high uptime is not a mark of pride, but a glaring risk factor.

As much as possible we should be designing apps for zero-downtime updates so that it's safe to deploy frequently. Even including the platforms we're deploying them on.

Rail workers did it first, and might even have been more disastrous for the cause of labor. Their attempt to extort essentially the entire American economy following the end of World War 2 led directly to the Taft-Hartley Act (which was so severe that Truman tried to veto it, despite having threatened himself to draft the striking workers into the Army during the strike).

It helps that certain words, like “socialism” mean different things to different people. That’s one reason why just describing the specific policy you’re talking about often helps, because you don’t have people thinking the gulag will be an option if they vote for a politician.

Weird way to spell “AOL CDs spammed to everybody in the mail”. Trumpet Winsock was word of mouth, but the Internet had tons of hype, as did the video games that actually got popular.

“Word of mouth” is “OMG you should play Cheetahmen 2, it's so bad it's good!”

Word of mouth is a lousy marketing scheme. The NES saved video games from the video game crash caused by a market flooded with lousy games for the Atari and its competitors.

Yeah, that mentality was more or less how they nearly wiped out North American auto manufacturing. It's not stupid of them. Money can be exchanged for goods and services, but unsold inventory costs money to have made, and costs more money to get rid of. Minimizing the amount of inventory you have to carry on hand is smart business, to the extent you can get away with it.

They don't produce extra, so there isn't extra inventory to mark down. Nintendo has seen what happened to other publishers from always putting their games on sale, and it's just reinforced in their mind the value of their model of not doing deep discounts for games that are still fun to play.

You can have empathy for your neighbor without also inviting them to move into your home permanently.

In the “good old days” that people claim to pine for, they understood that. After all, it shows empathy to no one to overload a life raft, killing everyone. Meanwhile, it shows empathy to your children to hold them to the standard of being a decent person, even if it feels difficult at the moment, because the adult they would grow into would be better for it.

So don’t act like empathy is the cause of our ills. It’s not.

Hard to beat Breath of the Wild from its 2017 trailer.

I'm sad about Metroid Prime 4 because Prime is like the last Metroid series that still focused strongly on the adventure element, not just the action element. The 2-D Metroids have just turned into a twitch-fest.

The parts people whine most about I could understand, but mostly didn't bug me. I appreciated a lot of the bits of what was good about earlier games you could find Metroid Prime, especially the ice level and Volt Forge.

The voiced hints you couldn't refuse was a massive irritation throughout. But the thing that ended up having me quit was the final boss itself. It had enough elements of cheap difficulty that I remembered I'm not getting any younger and just moved onto other games. It's a shame as the other boss fights in the game I felt were actually on par with or better than in the other Metroid Prime games.

Hormone therapy is bad now? Are you going to tell the transgender people that?

Oh, I’m glad you asked!

I never said it was bad, actually. But why is it bad enough to force transgender servicemembers out of the Navy, but also essential enough to force cisgender servicemembers to take hormone therapy? We barely even force people to vaccinate to avoid the spread of dangerous diseases nowadays. Like, it cannot be simultaneously more important than preventing the spread of deadly disease while also being so heinous to force abrupt medical separation.

It’s almost like it is more about finding easy punching bags than anything else. Strange, that.

Led a type of reactor startup during an ORSE drill gone awry that basically never gets practiced on purpose. Don't think I can talk too much about it but basically there's a rare configuration to use for a reactor startup, a much more rare configuration that you can or can't use on top of that. We'd sometimes practice one or the other but never both.

Guess who got to do both at once, live? This guy. It all went fine, blessedly. We actually got a good score overall though it was looking dicey several times.

Well, we’ve put quite a few humans in the same situation since the machine computer was invented, maybe some of them can give us advice for how to adapt?

I imagine this is why so many Communist societies had a phase of killing intelligentsia or others whose labor isn’t physical labor.

It's not a problem of if we can still do it, but can we still get paid to do it?

We've had people programming without being paid for it for far longer than people being paid to do it. It's worthwhile and fulfilling.

But if your focus is just on punching in, working, punching out and getting paid, then yeah you may have to keep up with the times or get left behind, just as with every field of endeavor that's ever existed.

They own multiple, but they can only be in one spot on this planet at once. But hey, even if you just assume double the number to account for crew repositioning and maintenance, the difference is stark. People have this idea that if it weren't for billionaires polluting that things would be good, but that's not the case.

It would be different if billionaires were breaking rules the rest of us have decided to put up with, like flying (at all), but that's simply not a rule we have set for ourselves as a society, billionaire or not.

In fact few of us seem to look introspectively about whether we're being wasteful in what we do, if so there's a whole lot of things that would be different about what we purchase and why. But if we're going to accept being wasteful as the price of living in a society where we have access to the things we want, it seems hypocritical to blame billionaires for that if that's their only "crime".

I work in aircraft maintenance, repair, and avionics refits. I can't tell you the amount of times I've answered technical or operational questions with "It's in the manual. Did you read it?". To which they answer "Oh really? I didn't know it was in there."

You would if you had RTFM!

And I hate to say this, but this is the precise value proposition for AI chat bots. The user didn’t RTFM because it’s too big, they’re too lazy, whatever reason you want to throw out there. But the fact is that they were never going to read it and that’s not changing anytime soon.

The AI does not get bored. As long as the parts of the manual that are relevant are accessible to it, it will find the parts of the manual needed for the user’s problem and spoon-feed them the answer.

Tech support might even turn into an engaging job again, if the AI can filter out all the obvious problems that can be solved by reading the manual or just knowing basic IT troubleshooting skills.