I think you meant to say:

I knew it, no comments yet, everyone’s a sheep

NO! Don’t make it bad.

I feel like the modern name for it would be just “Script”.

My taste buds disagree that this is “unfortunate”.

Censorship sucks and I can’t believe we let an entire country get away with it and still did business with them the whole time.

It is not clear to me that the country would be less censored now and the people there better off if we had refused to do business with them.

(Just to be clear, I am not saying that we handled China as well as we could have over the last few decades, but hindsight is 20-20.)

Personally, I like to plant gardens that help out natural pollinators in order to change the bees that I want to see in the world.

Ah. In that case, I look forward to there being a new keyword in C++26 or later that you add to enforce that the enumeration really only does take one of the enumerated values, rather than just being a strongly typed number, since that seems to be the way that the language likes to do things…

I think that sometimes what happens to people is that they build the life that they implicitly believe they are “supposed” to be living because that is what they see everyone else around them doing, rather than based on an honest self-assessment of whether this really is the what will make them happy. When they realize that this life is not actually making them very unhappy, they look for outside factors to blame because they did everything that they were “supposed” to be doing so it could not have been their own misinformed choices that led them to this point.

And in fairness, no one chooses where they are born and the cultural conditioning that we receive, so this is not entirely their fault. It is really a societal problem that we do not encourage enough people to engage in true self-introspection to figure out for themselves what is important to them and what they want to get out of life so that they make these kinds of decisions with great deliberation and personal self-insight rather than taking the default option.

Could someone explain to me what the value is in making it really easy to initialize an enum class with a value that is not one of the enumerated values?

A Linuxponential curve!

Choosing to have a child later on generally has fewer negative consequences than unchoosing a child you have already had.

Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there’s literally no way you can write pure Python that’s 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there.

Completely agreed, but it can be surprising just how often C++ really is written that inefficiently; I have had multiple successes in my career of rewriting C++ code in Python and making it faster in the process, but never because Python is inherently faster than C++.

Genuine question: does anyone actually use Vala for anything? I think that the idea of a language whose OOP system is native GObjects is a nifty one, but I have seen no evidence that it has caught on in any significant way.

Sure, but if you are not regularly expressing code that has the potential of summoning elder gods that will swallow your soul into a dimension of ceaseless screaming then are you really living?

I don’t always use regular expressions, but when I do, I use it to parse XML,

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

I tried reading the article and gave up because life is too short for me to read a tiresome article making points that aren’t even particularly that new.

Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

I disagree; I think that we do care about it being popular enough that it incentivizes software and hardware vendors to support it rather than ignoring it.