duncan_bayne

It's the way he explains things that makes them crystal clear - it builds a strong bond with his students. None of them are ambi-valent about it.

Thanks for the tip. My eldest child is nearly old enough to introduce to tabletop RPGs. I'd been planning to start him on Fighting Fantasy though.

Sure. The two are by no means mutually exclusive.

The military industrial complex lobbying for billions of dollars of taxpayers money to be siphoned into their pockets is one example.

But that would spoil the symmetry!

No, seriously, that sort of thinking is baked into Apple's DNA. Jobs once tried to intervene in memory bus layout on aesthetic grounds.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

"But look at the memory chips. That's ugly. The lines are too close together."

So, how was your IT department treating them at time time?

As valued employees, pairing with the Java devs on code, attending team lunches and other functions, generally integrated with the teams to which they were passing on their life's work?

Because to be honest I'm struggling to believe they were being treated as equal members of a team if they were behaving like that.

"So, an advertising company that used to have a motto about not being evil, but abandoned it, built a web browser."

Realistically that wasn't going to end any other way :)

The GDPR does exactly that.

You forgot to capitalise the a in "are". And "olympics" should be "Olympics", because it's a proper noun.

I missed that entirely. 3rd Ed destroyed my interest in upgrading; I'd been playing since 1st Edition, too.

Upvoted. In my opinion, this is what broke AD&D 3rd edition relative to 2nd Ed.

The latter - although I've read that it's never attracted the kind of money you see in high stakes poker.

Bridge is the first that springs to mind, and that is most definitely a gambling game.

Haha! I actually missed the typo altogether. I thought you were intentionally using a phrase originating in gambling ("follow suit") as a joke, given the context.

Was your use of the phrase "follow suite" intentional? Because if so, bravo, that's the funniest thing I've read all day :)

Why do you ask?

Could be as much as 20% of the population of Earth back in 10,000BC. Modern society is amazing.

Meh. Not all of us here are American :) "One sixth the population of Melbourne" would have worked as well.

Come off it. Socialist groups were still fawning over him and his "success" as late as 2013.

http://www.socialistinternational.org/viewArticle.cfm?Articl...

Not all, of course. Socialism is a broad camp. But many.

Edit: and in fact they're still at it in Australia, where I live:

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/venezuela-solidarity-gr...

Edit:... and how about Castro? Is he your idea of a real socialist? https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/hugo-chavez-and-fidel-castro...

Which is why socialists around the world mourned Chavez' election at the time, right? /s

Venezuela, like Cuba, North Korea, China and the USSR were feted by socialists the world over, right up until their failings (often in the form of millions of people starving to death) became visible to the world.

Then of course they ceased being real socialists.

Shades of A Gift From Earth there. Good novel.

I can't speak for Vipassana, never having tried it, but I think that's an unfair characterization of stoicism (but perhaps not of some who claim to practice it?).

http://modernstoicism.com/

To them, yes, but not to the prostitutes they use.

That's only true for the middle class. Once your social status is sufficiently high it doesn't matter. Case in point, the current POTUS is known for banging hookers.

To elaborate a bit: what I mean is, it is easier to build an acceptably performant system in Python than in C++.

Yes, an arbitrary algorithm will probably perform significantly faster in C++.

But that probably won't matter in a real-world system built from multiple integrated components, when the performance is more likely to be determined by the abstractions chosen and the system architecture in use. And IMO Python and its surrounding ecosystem makes it easier to make good choices in those areas.

Then they shouldn't have blamed SpaceX.

Perhaps you should consider this a different way.

Consider the end to end performance of a system - from inputs in (say, timesheets and HR data) to outputs out (bank payment APIs called, emails sent).

Would you bet the end to end performance of a system built by mediocre C++ programmers would be better than that of a system built by mediocre Python programmers?

I certainly wouldn't.

There were a number of alternatives back then; and if you wanted OO, Smalltalk was still strong in corporate circles I believe.

I was programming back in '96 (recreationally and as a student, not professionally) and C++ would not have seemed like a good choice even then.

Depends on the employer and employee. I've worked out a several month notice period; I wanted to leave, but didn't want to abandon a small team a couple of months before a hard deadline. Everyone involved was okay with that.

But then I wasn't leaving because the place was a train wreck; I was still engaged, and liked the team I was on. Had that not been true, it would have been a bad move on everyone's part.

> I notice you tried to justify immorality

Hmmm. Perhaps I wasn't clear. You are reading a _lot_ more into my post than I intended.

I'm an Objectivist Libertarian who thinks that (a) what China is doing in this case is positively evil, and (b) that any level of resistance up and to including violent revolution on the part of the Chinese people would be entirely moral and justified.

By explaining the pragmatic 'justification' for this abhorrent system, I was trying to make the point that the Chinese Government gives exactly no shits about the morality involved; they want to exercise power, and this is seen as a cost-effective means of doing so.

The implied point I was _trying_ to make (and, clearly, failing) was that pragmatism in politics is the devil.

Counterpoint here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-nation-indulges-in-some...