Yeah. I worry every day that there’ll be an article on the front page that says Israel actually did nuke Gaza. It’s a very real concern given how things are going.

“We are acting with full transparency whilst maintaining the safety of our troops and operational readiness.”

Uh huh. Yup. Sure you are.

Who’s better known for their “full transparency” than the IDF?

Strength is EAT MY DAMN FRUIT SALAD OR I’LL SMASH YOUR FACE IN.

I really preferred it on the right, too. It was the default on my Galaxy. But I have a Pixel for work and it doesn’t seem to let you choose which side the back button is on. I can’t stand to have an inconsistency.

I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.

The “somehow” is because IRC is extremely bare bones. It doesn’t stand up to modern expectations of what chat software does. Plus accounts aren’t all a bad thing. Anti-spam is vital for the internet today, as is rigid ways of preventing impersonation. IRC is a relic of a simpler era.

Agreed. It’s also frustrating that the labeling of anything anti-Zionist as anti-Semitism just gives actual anti-Semites the opportunity to claim their actual anti-Semitism is anything but.

Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you’re good at it (and when there isn’t major time pressures).

Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you’ll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.

High speed is a big thing. And actually high speed, at that. A massive number of trains are very slow and even a number of “high speed” trains are not even remotely as high speed as they could be, with proper investment. It’s hard to replace planes when we’re talking at least twice the travel time.

I’d love to have more train options in Canada. There is a train that spans the width of Canada, but it is so slow and deprioritized that it’s not actually a viable means of transit across Canada. You can fly Toronto to Vancouver in a little over 4 hours. So maybe 6 hours with the airport overhead. By train, it’s 4 days. That’s something you’d only do for the experience and it’d be a significant part of the trip (one person I know who did it said that they wish they utilized more stops along the way, because by the end of the trip, they were getting pretty sick of it – despite the fact that they recommended it glowingly). With a high speed rail, that could become less than 1 day trip, making it a lot more feasible (a lot of people already view the day they fly as a day spent only on travel).

And that’s an extreme. Getting around southern Ontario is far more common and practical (it’s an extremely population dense area). But the trains we have for that are very low speed and have mediocre schedules (sometimes only good for commuting). Even though a train is an option, I often find that the bus is actually the fastest way to get to my destination, cause the train is so infrequent and really not fast.

At the very least, it should be illegal to use the misleading tactics they use for things like seats. Not sure if airlines in the EU differ (I’m Canadian), but seemingly every airline here tries to make the seat selection seem like it’s mandatory. While I’ve never fallen for that, I wonder how many people pay for their seats simply because they didn’t realize it’s possible not to?

And Flair here in Canada is the budget airline whose whole thing is that they advertise prices that don’t include a carry-on (which is standard with every other airline in Canada). But if you want a carry-on, they’ll charge so much that their flights are often roughly the same price as the competition (and they push bundling carry-on + checked bag so that people will pay more than they need). Flair is great if you know what you’re doing, since a backpack fits the “personal item” size limit and is all I need for short trips, but many people don’t realize how it works and think they have to pay for the carry-on, plus Flair gets their listings to show up higher in search results because they will list the base price. Google Flights makes it clear that there’s no carry-on, but it still shows those flights first and someone without familiarity with Flair won’t expect carry-ons to cost as much as they do.

Bash is so bad. I literally use it every day and have written many Bash scripts, yet I’m constantly having to search for how to do things in it because syntax is so bizarre and difficult to remember. Need to do a for loop over lines in a file? You can bet I’m googling the syntax for it. I have a general idea for what it looks like and know what to search for, but no way in hell can I write it correctly in the first few tries.

String manipulation is the absolute worst. Have fun getting to learn the unreadable syntax of most sed and awk programs (the only thing most people have memorized is find and replace). Stuff like “split a string of comma separated ints and add them up” are way harder in Bash than in Python, despite the fact I often need to do stuff like that in Bash. Well, in the terminal anyway. Sometimes I’ll just use Python, but Python’s weakness is executing programs and getting their output, which is nowhere near as convenient as it is in Bash.

Side note, isn’t it weird that for a language where flags like --foo bar are so commonly used, there’s no built in or standard tools for accessing flags?

The most recent C++ thing I worked on (not that recent, like 5 years or so ago) was a fairly new project and the people working on it were really passionate about C++. But it was C++ code that ran as a Python library and was using the official Python C bindings. Not sure why we didn’t use one of the unofficial C++ libraries, but the usage of that C library (and such a fundamental one) held things back. We wrote was was modern C++ (at the time), but big chunks would be a completely different style.

I hate writing code in either language. But at least what C has going for it is that it’s waaaay simpler than C++. Simple can be a really good thing. Sure, all those cool features can save you time, but they can also be gotchas that will cause bugs.

Though it is a balancing act. Too simple and you’ll make mistakes due to how much you have to repeat yourself or using unsafe equivalents (like using preprocessor directives to mimic features that C++ natively supports).

I remember wondering this when I was first trying to self learn. It’s because I needed a map (or list + struct or something) and was such a noob I didn’t know what maps were. Whatever material I was learning from wasn’t good enough, especially for winging things. Plus I was trying to learn C++ and maps aren’t quite so built into the language as they are with a better first language like Python.

To be honest, pretty much all my files that actually matter are under my Dropbox folder. Everything else is ephemeral. I mostly depend on Steam or the likes to backup game saves. Not much else I care about. I’ve upgraded my PC a few times (with no full backups) and never missed a single thing that got lost in the upgrade.

You definitely still want locks because most people have no idea how to pick a lock and a lot of crime is crimes of opportunity. But I don’t think there’s that much of a difference in most locks. A slightly better lock might dissuade a thief who learned how to pick cheap masterlocks, but someone who truly wants to get in doesn’t even need to pick a lock. I’d hazard a guess that break-ins happen far more often by breaking the window than picking locks.

Happened to me, too. Some unknown people caused damage to a common room and they billed everyone in the building. I tried to email about it, but they didn’t budge. I felt I had to pay it because the university threatens to withhold transcripts and stuff if you have outstanding fines.

The fact that there is an organization of the same name does not mean they own the slogan. People using the slogan almost never do so in reference to this organization nor are necessarily even aware that such an organization exists.

BLM is more of a human rights statement. Anything is “political” if the right choses to whine about it. An example is putting pronouns on name tags. It’s a great idea to ensure employees are addressed correctly and frankly shouldn’t be any more political than a name tag containing your name, but the right choses to view them as political because they need a constant culture war.

Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.

Plus often we’re talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I’ve written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.

Only thing I can think of is if you are developing a website or extension and need to make sure there isn’t some subtle browser difference. Though since it uses the same engine as Chrome, that use case should be a lot more niche than it used to be.