npsimons

You can't. Neither can I. The difference between you and I is, I didn't waste my time or energy keeping up with utterly inane "news" that I have zero agency to react to in any meaningful way.

Here's the really ironic part: Fox news viewers are less informed than those that watch no news[0]. So not only are news viewers more depressed and angry about things they have zero influence over (see also other comments regarding "circle of influence" and "circle of concern"), they are more ignorant to boot!

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...

and this makes it even more ironic:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/19/survey-fox-...

See, I don't believe that's an improvement. Having used printf in C, I was relieved to be able to "redirect" whatever to a stream, and not care about whether it should be "%d" or "%02f" or even if it was a struct/class.

On top of this, treating files as streams, strings as streams, or even extending streams to make a tee-stream[0] all seem clunkier to me with a printf like system.

Maybe fmt fixes these problems, I don't know. But I feel a lot of people don't like iostreams because they have some form of Stockholm syndrome with printf.

[0] - https://wordaligned.org/articles/cpp-streambufs#tee-streams

It didn't. We tried it.

Look, I'm all for reducing consumption. I'm on board with trying to improve public health, or just health of everyone in general. But prohibition does not work. Didn't work for alcohol. Didn't work for marijuana. Didn't work for sex education.

So the question to ask is, what does work? And realize that an all or nothing, black and white approach is counterproductive.

Educate, inform, regulate. That's the best we can do, and there's a lot of room in the 'regulate' part to make inroads. Perhaps someday we'll get to synthehol, but we're a long way from that today.

This is what I want to know. Having come from C to C++, iostreams were a big improvement over the "strings" and print functions of C. I even extended a base iostream class to have a "teebuf" logger, that could output to multiple streams and had the standard logging levels.

It's been a while since I last had mastery of C++, but I'd like to hear what is as portable and better than iostreams.

Even more ridiculous is that last I've heard, there is still alcohol being consumed in muslim countries.

I am firmly opposed to prohibition. As many have pointed out, it just doesn't work. Regulation and taxation, sure. And definitely anyone who is considering quitting should be encouraged and supported. No matter what else, support systems for those addicted (and victims of abusers) should be in place.

But prohibition did not, and will not, work.

Yes, but I've also been blackout drunk, more than once. I can't really keep beer in the house, because much like a binge eater with sweets, I have surprisingly little self-control and will consume it all in little time.

I recognize I have a family history of addiction. I also recognize I can slow down and moderate, but honestly with no level of alcohol consumption being safe for our health, why shouldn't I just quit altogether?

What's really funny to me is the following quote from "Cluetrain Manifesto" that sticks out in stark opposition to the above:

> We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers, we are human beings. And our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

As you say, it's probably okay to drink rarely. But I wouldn't discourage the instinct to quit completely, and recognize that there is a high amount of pressure through culture to imbibe.

[0] https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

[0] - https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

Then explain how consistency is a bad thing.

But yes, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The question is, what is "foolish"? I'm arguing against things like `strpos` and `str_rot13`. I'm arguing against having similar functions where argument order is inconsistent. These are the sorts of things that slow developers down and force them to check the documentation every time just to make sure they aren't introducing bugs by default.

"Shaka, when the walls fell."

Sure it's poetic, but WTF do you mean?

Not excusing or defending it, just trying to serve up a reason why it happens.

This is where I'm at now.

Decades ago, I was an "only spaces, no tabs" guy. Still am to an extent. But what made me more open was realizing it wasn't spaces or tabs specifically that mattered, only that code is readable, and consistently formatted code is more readable. Seeing things like `gofmt`, which mix tabs and spaces, and comes with the language? Your debate about spaces versus tabs is over, now we can get back to tackling real problems, and your code will be rejected at CI if it isn't run through the standard formatter. Same thing with `black` for Python.

Above all else, be consistent. I can understand hate for "standard" language libraries that have functions with wildly different naming schemes or input and output arguments that aren't consistent - those should DIAF (looking at you, PHP "standard" library). But as to the names themselves? Doesn't particularly matter much. Unless you're the Bruce Tognazzini of API design, you probably don't have anything of substance to back up why it should be "make_" versus "create_".

As it is, if you have the knowhow you could do it yourself. But that's a lot to ask the tech illiterati, and even I find myself just falling back to manual methods since they Just Work with no fiddling about with wires.

So, I do a bit of this myself, manually. I've got a table of appliances and wattages, both rated and measured (using a Kill-O-Watt). I also have a 6kW (max) solar panel installation, plus I'm on a time-of-day metered plan.

I try to make sure that anything that uses hot water (tankless full electric water heater; 29kW rated max) like the dishwasher and shower are done between 1000 and 1400, as that's the highest time of solar insolation during the day, plus the time of day turns over to the highest tier at 1400.

I've bought but not yet installed an eMonPi (https://github.com/openenergymonitor/emonpi), so theoretically I could automate some things to optimize when to run devices. As it is though, by tracking and actively trying to reduce consumption, I've already managed to keep my electricity bill to zero for years, even putting thousands of USD back into the grid (sadly, I do not get money back from this; it only counts as credit, and resets every twelve months).

As for your specific example, I line dry my laundry. I don't see the point of running a space heater (dryer) in my garage; it usually only takes a few hours to dry where I live anyway. The only reason I still have a dryer is for down sleeping bags and coats that have to be fluffed up.

I'm right there with you, except I don't give "customers" that much credit.

Most people left to their own devices (ie, not brainwashed by marketing) will just stick with "good enough." But it's less fun (and less profitable) to fix and maintain old code, so companies induce "demand" by marketing. And if you're a company who decides to do the adult thing and not play that game, you'll be creamed by the ones that do.

This is honestly the best way to use Reddit. I feel a lot of the hate is from people that haven't found subreddits useful/relevant to their needs, or are just plain ignorant. And look, I understand there's not enough time in the world to try out everything, but when people like you and I tell them that they can be useful tools, it'd behoove people to take a look before speaking from ignorance a second time.

If you never curated your reddit experience, I could see how you might have this attitude.

I won't deny that /r/popular and /r/all are rage inducing dumpster fires. But if you create an account and join subreddits, just going to https://www.reddit.com/ takes you to a selection just from those subreddits. And there are a large number of wholesome, nurturing, even useful subreddits.

In some respects, it is like Usenet used to be.

> never all that beneficial.

Google would disagree, after the recent blackouts. There's a lot of useful information going on in various subreddits - to the point that some posts on specific topics compete for stack answers in search rankings! Hell, I've found more useful Common Lisp resources in the Lisp subreddits than I ever found on HN, and better solutions to (some) problems than on stack.

Obviously you aren't drinking enough.

Popularity.

That's it. orgmode format was around long before Markdown, then all of a sudden Markdown got pushed hard for some reason.

There was also a time you could paste a URL to a .GPX file into Google Maps and have it loaded. Quick and easy, well before OSM and Leaflet.

On top of this, siloing adds the extra bonus that it breaks things like The Internet Archive. There are a lot of communities on Slack and Discord that are just prime for vaporising without a trace. A TON of knowledge will just disappear once someone decides to turn it off, for whatever reason.

I'll second this.

I literally grew up on VI - my dad installed it with UNIX tools on the family 486 running MS-DOS. Then I dedicated a week to learning Emacs around the turn of the century, and I've never looked back.

To be sure, I still whip out vim for quick editing of remote server config files and it's my editor in mutt. But there's just so much power in emacs - I'm reminded of Vivek Halder's "Levels of Emacs Proficiency"[0], and the fact I do most everything in Emacs these days (I live in org-mode, play music in EMMS, run git through EGG, etc, etc). It's hard to think of anything with this level of consistency of keybindings, nor something that does so many things I need to do.

[0] - https://www.vivekhaldar.com/articles/the-levels-of-emacs-pro...

People love to bitch about the "diet industry" (which as a whole, seems to be almost entirely bro-science and snake oil), but the profits made there pale in comparison to fast food and processed food. It's really something that we should fix, like we did with tobacco and alcohol.

Fixing food deserts, even though they are not really widespread enough to entirely account for the obesity epidemic, needs to happen as well.

And taking subsidies away from animal products like meat, dairy and corn (specifically for HFCS) would go a long ways to improving the standard American diet (aka, SAD).

It annoys me too! Human genes haven't changed radically over the last 100 years. We're not dogs or cats where generations can be measured in a year if not months, we're talking roughly 30 years between generations, so no, it's not "genes" or "set point". The answer is obvious for anyone paying even a passing interest to history: we largely went from an agrarian society to a sedentary one, eating more and moving less. It's that simple. Combine this with capitalism pushing the fast food industry to make profits at any externalized cost, and the results are obvious.

As an aside, it always amuses me how people talk about "set point" but never address that it only goes up. If "set point" is a thing, you'd think there would be some people with a lower one, or at a minimum it wouldn't go up (hence it being set), but no one likes to admit that . . .

You shouldn't be - this is the crux to why weight loss is so hard, and something I try to harp on any time I get.

Yes, just for reference, I was fat too once (more than 40lb above my ideal weight). I managed to lose the weight, just like parent, through small, sustainable lifestyle changes.

It's simple: eat less, move more.

But it's not easy. Start small, do things you can do do for the rest of your life.