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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • C# has had string interpolation for, what - nearly a decade, now? It arrived with C# v6, which was released in 2015.

    Meanwhile Java just pulled their implementation out of the latest beta earlier this year because they couldn’t get it to work right.

    Don’t know about you, but I think that Java is largely resting on its laurels as of late. That the only real reason to go for it is it’s third-party library system, and not much more.


  • They were never a thing in Europe.

    Not really a thing in Canada either. Bought a reasonably midrange ($600k) brand-new apartment back in 2006, it didn’t come with it. Also have never seen it in any other house that I’ve visited, except for the wealthy. And by that, I mean in a house that you would normally pay $4-8 million for. Which is certainly upper middle class where I am, but not overly wealthy.



  • 2075

    And likely much earlier.

    Due to the nature of science and how any predictions and projections it makes needs to be couched in exceedingly conservative tones, it has become a running gag in climate science that everything will happen “much sooner than expected”. Because invariably, it does. Sometime hundreds of years sooner than expected.

    Hell, it was first thought that the AMOC wouldn’t collapse for centuries, and now more accurate projections put it as being sometime between 2025 and 2085, with a “most likely due date” of some time in the early 2050s. And this is still an exceedingly conservative estimate. Who wants to bet that it’ll happen much sooner than even that?


  • Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.

    Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.



  • I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

    I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

    And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.






  • OMG, like North Korea isn’t bad, it’s just the US that “doesn’t like them”.

    You’re linking North Korea to the conversation about communism, when that alone is a fatal error: NK is equally as much communistic as they are democratic. As in, not in the least.

    There has never been any kind of a long-term (5+ years) communist country on the planet. Prior power structures have always stepped in to decapitate communism in favour of a violently autocratic dictatorship much like a monarchy. What remained of communism was only ever kept as a thin veneer of legitimacy, much like a rotting Edgar suit.




  • I make a meaty spaghetti sauce with various spices, but I cook the ground beef in the pan at a low simmer for about 2hrs before I even add the tomato sauce, in order for those spices to penetrate the meat.

    I call it a nuclear time bomb because it tastes totally normal - very delicious, even - but about 10-15 minutes in, you are reaching for a hand towel to wipe away the sweat which is quite literally dripping off of you. And you have felt NONE of the hot spices on your tongue.

    A much quicker dish involves Cæsar dressing, which I add copious amounts of garlic powder to (4-5 tablespoons), then prevent the dressing from solidifying by adding lemon juice, then wrapping up with freshly ground garlic. As in, a paste, *not chopped or minced._ For a salad using a single head of Romaine, the paste alone uses 15-30 garlic cloves depending on size. And this is on top of the garlic powder. Tastes amazing, but it can get garlicky enough to be barely edible. Think the same kind of burn when chewing down on a fresh raw clove. I sometimes get an “addictive overwhelming thirst” for this garlicky dish that has me gorging on it almost exclusively for an entire week.


  • Now that is a real superpower.

    I also manage to annoy TF out of my wife at being able to go from fully asleep to bouncing out of the bed like a piece of toast in under 10 seconds.

    About the only thing that can impact this is severe sleep deficit, which - years ago - mean less than 3-4hrs in a night, but these days (in my sixth decade) means anything less than 5hrs of sleep in a night or less than 7 after multiple days of a sleep deficit.


  • Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

    As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

    For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.



  • I think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.

    I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.

    The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.

    Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.