Tcepsa

My favorite example of that kind of code reuse can be seen in the 3/4 perspective views in Sunsoft's Fester's Quest (most of the game) and Blaster Master (the extra-vehicular room explorations)

I'd also like to call out the S&C Plastics[0] "company", especially around this time of year[1] :-D

[0]https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/the-s-c-plastics-hub

[1]https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/black-autumn-hub

Thank you! I've been wondering why that number instead of, er, other numbers since I first discovered the stories earlier this year! ^_^;

Have you also been able to adjust their salaries accordingly? My interpretation is that rather than saying, "don't promote internally from IC to Lead" GP is saying "here are some pitfalls with that approach" and suggests that it can work fine if you can bring their compensation up fast enough that the money isn't greener elsewhere by the time they can spin their newfound leadership experience into a job offer.

Extra responsibility/accountability/risk without corresponding compensation reads like a promotion to some folks, but to other folks it looks more like a pay cut.

It is my understanding that the latest executive orders do require vaccination of US federal employees and contractors; other employers may offer weekly testing as an alternative. So I believe that, if you are a federal employee or contractor, you do in fact have to choose between getting vaccinated or keeping your job. (Or do you consider allowing people to choose to quit rather than get vaccinated sufficient flexibility to not be an "imposition"?)

To be fair to the operating systems out there, GUIs are part of the program, not part of the operating system. If a menu is unresponsive it is far more likely that the writers of the software messed up and put some heavy lifting on their event loop or misused the GUI framework that they choose rather than any fault of the OS.

That having been said I do agree that it is disappointing how sluggish some apparently-straightforward applications have gotten despite the hardware performance increases over the years.

One more point of anecdata: I've been with my current employer for just over 14 years, and I've worked on probably about that many different projects--generally two or three at the same time--in a variety of roles and with a variety of technologies (often with some degree of leadership, both formal and informal). There are many aspects of my current situation that I appreciate, but the plethora of options available for me to work on certainly feels like one of the big reasons I've stayed for so long.

Not necessarily. I think it is probably best, for example, that my microwave is not also a calendar.

Yes, this! I've been doing software development as a job in some form or other for nearly 20 years, and I finally feel like I've really started to get the hang of it over the last couple of years ~wry grin~

At the risk of oversimplifying, is there any value in the analogy, "It's like RAID but for data streams"?

I'd guess the news cycle, and the increasingly over-the-top antics, political and otherwise, that it seems to spawn.

I believe they were intended to be two separate axes: stupid<->clever and lazy<->industrious. This lends itself to the four quadrants referenced in the quote: clever-industrious, stupid-lazy, clever-lazy, and the infamous stupid-industrious

Serious question: Is there a way to use a Python REPL with multiple long-running asyncio tasks, some of which need a turn to run every X seconds?

TL;DR -- Possibly it has to do with the style that I use, but those things doesn't actually happen to me very often, and when they do it's not a big deal. For me, the benefits of REPL-driven-development far outweigh occasionally having to deal with these issues.

Two things. First, I've been bitten by this myself, but it's pretty much always been something like "Oops, I renamed a function and forgot to update a reference to it, but the code still worked because the old definition was still there... until I reloaded the REPL." It's always been a trivial fix for me, since when I try to re-evaluate the buffer containing the outdated function reference it throws a "cannot find function definition" error. I currently consider the advantages of REPL-driven development to outweigh that occasionally happening.

Second thing: maybe others do it differently, but I don't think I generally make manual changes to the state while things are running. If the state doesn't look the way it should, I either start iteratively tweaking functions (by modifying my .clj file and eval-ing them) and re-running with fresh state to understand and resolve the problem, or I work with a separate, similarly-shaped piece of state and run it through functions in a sort of "manual unit testing" to tweak and fix whatever's wrong, and then I re-run everything from scratch to make sure it worked. I don't adjust the state, evaluate a code path, and then continue on if it works (because yeah, I can totally see how that would lead to the sort of situation you describe, which sounds unpleasant)

I know it's not in keeping with the definition provided, but I like to interpret hubris in that context as "Believing that they are capable of writing software that is compatible with the second virtue, and that they can write it in a manner compatible with the first."

My corollary: Never attempt to account for Hofstadter's Law!

Oooo, neat! Thanks for pointing this out, I'll have to look into it. Many of my struggles have also revolved around the ecosystem (pulling in and/or keeping up to date with modules that other teams have written, etc.) so I'm especially interested to see how this deals with that.

My favorite language has been Clojure for a long time, but given Python's popularity and widespread use I often wonder whether there is just some big underlying principle that would cause Python's appeal and superiority become clear, if only I could see it. Comments like yours and GP's help reassure me that there's not just some fundamental thing about Python that I'm missing. (And don't even get me started on Python's concurrency situation!)

Such a thing might finally get me to switch away from Emacs for coding!

Consider trying Emacs 27.1 with the Jansson library to help with JSON parsing if you're using an LSP-based approach in Emacs. (Apparently one of the reasons that it's sluggish is because the comms between Emacs and the corresponding language server are done in JSON, and previously Emacs' JSON parsing was a bit slow--libjansson was incorporated to speed that up). I have not used JetBrains so I don't have that comparison, but I use this Emacs arrangement with C# and have been very happy with its autocomplete/jump-to-definition/etc. capabilities. (I have used it with Python and JavaScript as well with a bit less success, but I think that is mainly because I haven't managed to get my environment configured quite right for it to be able to find everything, so that's my own shortcoming and I'd expect to have similar issues in any other editor ;) )

In addition to the recommendations for Powered by the Apocalypse games (specifically Monster of the Week) I'd also encourage you to look into the FATE system, especially FATE: Accelerated Edition[0] and its SRD [1]. It's designed to be fairly light on the mechanics, and to help the GM and the players focus on the development of a story within those mechanics. I've been running a homebrew-story FAE game with a group of 4 friends and I really like the flexibility it gives us to focus on the narrative and character development. Also it's designed to be a pretty minimal time commitment to learn the rules well enough to give it a try.

[0] https://www.evilhat.com/home/fae/

[1] https://fate-srd.com/fate-accelerated/get-started

This is a shitpost and/or copypasta, right? Maybe it's intended as a "Ha, look at the ridiculous sorts of FUD that folks posted about this stuff back in the day" but its tone is earnest enough--even with tons of obvious flags like the ones I mention below--that I'd encourage you to seriously consider adding a disclaimer of some kind.

Some of the "tells": The whole thing has a "Chick Tract" vibe to it (personal, relatable story but with oddly specific details segueing into actions you can take for the good of your soul/safety of your family). Most of the items are obviously and patently false to anyone with any kind of domain knowledge, but are phrased earnestly enough that someone who assumes the writer is acting in good faith may not realize this. For example, number 4 suggesting that Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Neuromancer, etc. are "hacking manuals" or number 5's conflation of Disk Operating System DOS with Denial Of Service DOS.

It would be great if by this point in time everyone who saw something like this would realize it was either in jest or bad faith, but I suspect that computer illiteracy--and the number of folks who would take this at face value--is far higher than most of us realize (then again, maybe I'm just being overly cynical. I hope so; that's the sort of thing that I'd love to be wrong about! ;-) )

The first thing I put in my .vimrc on any system:

  inoremap jk <ESC>

I learned it through Spacemacs and it's one of the things that really made modal editing work for me, so I was thrilled to discover that Vim itself also supports it. (I'd tried to learn Vim before, but always having to jump over to the Escape key was a huge downer for me, and coming from Emacs I'd already mapped my CapsLock to Ctrl--though the idea of having it be Esc if pressed by itself is intriguing and I need to look into it more!)

Going to have to "me too!" on this one--I also learned to juggle from the Klutz juggling book. Never got past three balls, but I still do that many fairly regularly ^_^

There's also a line from the Klutz Book of Card Games that ended up being an in-joke with my family that we still use 20+ years later: "You poor fool, I can read you like a book!"

Thanks for all the fun! <3

It's not just Figma; a project that I'm on has been having basically the same challenges with Sketch/Sympli, and Axure before that. Breaking it into two separate "wireframe" and "mockup" steps has helped, but folks are still rushing to the "mockup" step too soon IMO; lots of things that could have been caught in the wireframe stage are still having to be corrected in the mockup stage instead, pretty much as described by parent. It's a fairly recent change for us, though, so I am hoping that things will get better with practice.

Personally, I'd rather just implement the wireframe (or something like it) and try to iron out the interaction wrinkles there where it's much easier to update the design and you don't have to worry about fonts and spacing nearly as much; once the interaction implementation is nailed down, then I think it's a better time to move on to the mockup. Hopefully we'll get an opportunity to try this at some point, but it was enough of a struggle to do a separate wireframe at all that I'm guessing it'll take awhile ;-)

Probably too late to be noticed, but I want to mention that I've found that HP Premium LaserJet paper has worked very well for writing on with fountain pens for me. I started with 24lb and now am on 32lb [0]

As some folks have mentioned, normal US notebook paper doesn't work particularly well with fountain pens (they tend to show through to the other side enough that I can only use one side of each page). Most printer paper also suffers from this problem. You can get nicer notebooks that address this but they tend to be very pricey and I take notes prolifically (and of things that I don't particularly care to keep) enough that those aren't a great solution for me either--I go through them too quickly, and then I have a collection of random ephemera that I feel bad about tossing. So I use the paper mentioned above with off-brand Levinger rings, which let me reorganize them fairly easily (though it's still enough of a hassle that I'm thinking about giving the good ol' 3-ring binder another try...)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/HP-Printer-Paper-Premium32-Letter/dp/...

There's also a risk-to-brand incentive for these console companies to control who gets to publish what games. If you make a console and then the games for your console suffer from quality control issues or are otherwise inconsistent with your branding, people associate that with your console as well and don't buy your (in their perception, even if not objectively) crappy console.

Being in the SCA (though mostly peripherally) and having several friends in the SCA, I think it's safe to say that "it's all about sex" is too broad a generalization. Certainly that is an aspect of it for some people, but from my experience the SCA is not significantly more "about sex" than Sci-fi, Anime, or Video-gaming fandoms--as at least one other person has already pointed out, it's there, but it's not the main focus.

Perhaps more to your point, if these are mating dances, why do so many people who already have stable, long-term mates participate?

Not saying there weren't false starts, but your example of eliminate() is actually a fairly common idiom[0] where, when a function is testing things for "truthiness" or "falsiness", it will return the truthy or falsey value rather than actual True or False. It lets code be more brief because you can do e.g. a check for null and perform assignment of either the value or a default in a single statement, so for example something like this:

  if( maybeNullValue ) {
    myValue = maybeNullValue;
  } else {
    myValue = defaultValue;
  }

can instead be expressed as this:

  myValue = maybeNullValue || defaultValue;

I'm personally a little bit torn about it. On the one hand, now that I'm familiar with it I love how much more concise code can be. On the other, it can have a fairly negative impact on code maintainability: if someone comes along who isn't familiar with that idiom, they might have a bad time trying to figure out what's going on (or worse, they might take offense that all these predicates aren't returning True or False values and rewrite the whole mess--or you could end up with a mix of the two, where some functions follow the idiomatic convention and others return actual boolean values which is arguably the worst)

Also I'm not trying to say that there's not some YAGNI going on here--just that I suspect he did it that way somewhat reflexively, and that in that particular case we probably cannot infer he had originally intended to do something else with those results and then changed his mind later.

[0] at least in the Lisp world, which Norvig has extensive experience with[1]

[1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

I regularly VPN into work from my home and experience 200ms+ delays quite frequently. In my experience, that delay in updating the screen to reflect my typing is not particularly problematic.