GlennS

Difficult. I will attempt to answer this in a way that won't upset people and may be informative?

Here are two ways of looking at it:

a. People in the USA* have massive fights about things that no-else cares about, and software projects put up a statement about those. This is off-putting to everyone else.

b. The USA is ahead of the curve on some political movements, and the article is expressing conservatism/anti-conservatism/a reaction towards being expected to act according to morals that aren't majority accepted in their country yet.

To decide for each particular movement whether it's (a) the wave of the future or (b) a passing fad? Who can say? You are supposedly an autonomous moral being, so use your own judgement.

*This is true of any place and any people, but everyone else has to put up with the USA's quirks because rich influential explosives. You could substitute Twitter for the USA here. Hey, who gave Twitter all those stealth bombers?

Honestly I guess it's just a difference in taste/demenour.

My background was originally in C# then Java (plus JavaScript on the side, since most of us have to do that), and when I first came to Python I found it to be a lovely language and a breath of fresh air.

I guess I would say to me it feels neat and tidy, thoughful about interface design, and gives me a sense of quality. I get a similar feeling from Clojure (perhaps even more so).

I don't find static typing as valuable as you do, and additionally I find the cost in verbosity and in time wasted solving type-checking puzzles quite painful. Perhaps if I'd spent more time with one of the more sophisticated type systems I'd feel differently (Java and C# are quite limited here), but not convinced enough to try.

Why would you ever leave a voicemail when you can leave a text message?

I think I disagree with all the advice in your comment, but this part has me particularly baffled.

I often write out callstacks/dependency chains on paper. I find that makes it stick.

Try actually using the program as an end user would.

Read error messages, read code, make predictions about what the code does, find out if your predictions are true.

I've had two climated-related jobs, and I would recommend it.

I find it very motivating personally. It also means you'll be working with decent people who care about their work.

Don't expect to be paid top dollar though!

I don't, sorry, just found it by Googling.

Not knowing anything about how Google works internally, this is very much how it looks from the outside.

They just don't seem to be able to make products that anyone wants. And the products they made before which people did want just drift in a generally worse direction as they fiddle with them randomly over time.

I was originally just going to link to a Colugo, which I think are still pretty cool, and probably good evidence of what early stages of vertebrate flight looked like. Functionally they're not doing full flight like a bat, but their flight is still quite a bit better than a flying squirrel, a sugar glider, or one of the assorted other gliding mammals can do. You can see them flapping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgv8Qw--kk

Like the flying squirrel example given by another poster, they're not closely related to bats. Actually quite closely related to us though.

Bats: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@CHIROPTERA=574724 Colugos: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@DERMOPTERA=987673 Flying squirrels: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petinomys=43434 Sugar gliders: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petauridae=323245

But the bat transitional fossils is also an interesting question. And some Googling finds this, which you might enjoy: https://arstechnica.com/science/2008/02/earliest-bat-fossil-...

The people in the past who broke from mainstream culture and went experimental faced disapproval too.

Maybe you just need to hang out with weirder people?

Still gutted they never made Grand Theft Auto: Weston-super-Mare.

This is true despite the fact that you know exactly when the market will hit a bottom. Even God couldn’t beat dollar-cost averaging.

I'm a bit unconvinced by the studies that say this, because I don't think the "buy the dip" strategy they're talking about is the same one that people are running.

The studies describe waiting for a low point in a given year (or even across multiple years!) then lumping in all your money then.

Whereas I think what people actually mean when they talk about buying the dip is shifting their dollar cost averaging buy-in by days, weeks, or at most a few months, while they wait for the market to get spooked.

I don't do this at the moment. I had a "wait for the US president to say something stupid" strategy which seemed to work for a while, but of course I don't really have enough evidence to back that up.

Ah yes, sorry, I was very unclear there.

Mediawiki Visual Editor is fine to use.

It's not fine to make plugins for.

I haven't worked with it in almost that long, but I still hate it quite a lot.

I try not to be too fussy about tech overall, but Spring is on my "I won't work with this again" list:

    1. Spring
    2. Mediawiki Visual Editor / OOJS UI
    3. Typo3

Your comment is incomprehensible.

Today I learned that there is another type of pigs-in-blankets.

To me pigs-in-blanket are sausages wrapped in bacon, not in bread/pastry.

Other people have given you pretty good answers already, but...

If you're an individual with some spare cash, buying stocks during a recession is probably a good idea, even if they falling.*

If you're a population, you probably don't have much spare cash.

There's some time lag stuff going on in there too.

*Blah blah 1990s Japan blah blah global diversification.

So why did you go for a mechanical keyboard if you're fine with a laptop keyboard?

I ask because to me the point of a mechanical keyboard is that you want more feedback/certainty on your keypress than an ordinary desktop keyboard gives.

If you don't notice the difference between a desktop keyboard and a laptop keyboard, then what does a mechanical keyboard add?

Why would that be the assumption?

I thought the phrasing of the person I was replying to implied they were grinding that particular axe.

Of course there are more complex things to discuss here, and in practice reality here is not yet modelled successfully with maths, so we certainly won't figure it out with verbal reasoning.

I was just a bit disappointed with their obvious-yet-probably-not-correct argument, and felt maybe I could respond in a way that made them think it through a bit more.

You don't need a mechanical keyboard to get full key travel.

I do have mechanical keyboards and feel like I get a benefit from them, but I think you can get most of the way there with a standard non-laptop-style keyboard with keys that go all the way down.

Although interestingly reading this thread it seems like there are a lot of people who like the laptop-style keys, so who knows. Maybe it's all just muscle memory.

As a bonus you can replace cheeseburgers with labor and they will say "lump of labor fallacy".

The trouble with this simple and seeming obvious hypothesis and labour (by which I assume you mean immigration) is that labour sits on both sides of the equation.

If you increase the supply of labour, then you're also increasing demand of all the things the immigrants consume, which means you're increasing the demand for labour.

(How much you're increasing each side of the equation - and how long each side takes to adjust - left as an exercise for the reader.)

Love it!

Thanks very much!

Perhaps something a little snappier and with less axe grinding?

Is that documented anywhere?

I've been using Nix for about 6 years now, and have mostly been using `nix-env -iA`, `nix-env -qaP --description` and `nix-env -e` the whole time.

I think this might be a broader Linux thing: we could probably simplify a lot of things by going back to the assumption that computers will have a single user.

Since you're being critical, I think you should suggest a better wording for "Columbus discovered American" that you think will piss fewer people off.

I'd guess that's not on the cards any more. Amazon has been building up in Australia over the last few years.

I think most Australians aren't yet aware how much better online shopping is everywhere else, and my bet is Amazon is getting ready to crush the local competition.

I think traditionally most people in most countries ignored the stock market and consider it boring to talk about.

Maybe less so in the USA? Not sure.

But a lot of computer folks have spare money at the moment, and in that situation you have a few options: consume more, keep it in a savings account, or invest. And some significant proportion choose invest.

Keep it in a savings account is a common option, but quite a bad idea.

Probably the majority of people who invest do so in property, considering it safer than stocks (which I disagree with, although there are other reasons to like property).

This may be changing a bit in recent years, because access is easier now. In Sydney I see adverts for stock brokers at the bus station.

Seems like some gamblers have switched to the stock market to get their fix too.

They're also using monkeys - which yes, look cute, but are not primates.

Monkeys are primates.

Perhaps you mean they're not apes?

Well, that's what Truman said.