Take a look at this:

This is in the Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, and it comes from an ancient Roman Villa in Rome. Probably painted in the first or second century CE. There's walls of this stuff in the museum.

It's not realism, but minimalistic sketches that, in many ways, outdo realism in artistic quality. To me, this looks more like something that you might find in Leonardo's sketchbook than on the wall of on ancient Roman Villa from 1200 years earlier.

Calling customers, "guests". A customer is someone with a business relationship with someone/something else. They're exchanging money for goods and services and have a right to expect certain value for their money.

A guest is something else entirely. A guest has no implicit right to expect a certain any particular level or quality of services. They are dependent on the magnamity of the "host".

Calling a customer a "guest" robs them of status.

The workplace should have a zero tolerance policy about abuse of the staff. If the particular location is one where there is a significantly non-zero chance of such incidents happening, then there should be a big red button on the wall that sounds and alarm, and summons security and possibly triggers a police response.

Employees should be trained to hit the button at the first hint of abuse. The employer should support them.

It's just as much a sport as figure skating or synchronised swimming.

I'm not sure if traffic is "convenience" at this point. At least where I live, it's a nearly essential piece of functionality.

In fact, for local driving it's often the only reason to use a map app. I already know how to get to most of the places I want to go, I just need to know the best route to avoid traffic now.

I think it's a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.

It's the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.

Just thinking out loud isn't quite the same thing.

I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.

Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.

Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.

I'm not sure a corvette has ever counted as "major" warship.

I always thought Timothy Zahn was an above average author, and to wrote more than a dozen of them.

I think that the idea is that more Dems use mail-in ballots than Reps. Hand in hand with tactics like restricting the number of polling stations in minority neighborhoods, it's just another component of putting their thumb on the scale.

It doesn't have to be BYOD. The firm might willing to procure a specific machine for her. Or she might have enough clout to make them get her what she wants.

Back in the 70's and 80's there were "Travesty Generators". You pushed some text into them and they developed linguistic rules based on probabilities determined by the text. Then you could have them generate brand new text randomly created by applying the linguistic rules developed from the source text.

Surprisingly, they would generate "brand new" words that weren't in the original text, but were real words. And the output matched stylistically to the input text. So you put in Shakespeare and you got out something that sounded like Shakespeare. You get the idea.

I built one and tried running some TS Eliot through it, because stuff is, IMHO, close to gibberish to begin with. The results were disappointing. Basically because it couldn't get any more gibberishy that the source.

I strongly suspect that the same would happen with Trump's gibberish. There used to be a bunch of Travesty Generators online, and you could probably try one out to see.

As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

The "Troubles" in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing "Tiny Talent Time" on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn't any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn't traumatize you, nothing will).

You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

F*CK me. "No experience". Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

Kids always think that they know more than their parents....until they don't.

You might want to think about it a bit more before putting it to work. The comment with the streams example is far, far better.

Kotlin is a very easy transition, and it sorts out a ton of issues that you find in Java. Certainly easier than moving to Rust.

"Row headers" seems wrong to me. Maybe "row labels"?

Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn't have space for a third terminal.

At another job I had an office with a "U" shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the "U" and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.

To me, as a non-American, the most baffling thing is that everyone in the States just assumes, and accepts, that these appointed justices are going to rule according to some political bias.

That's not the way it works in the rest of the free world. Judges are, by definition, trusted to be impartial interpreters of the law/constitution. That's their role.

I live in Canada, and I'm vaguely familiar with some of the names of our Supreme Court justices, but I certainly don't know their political leanings, nor do I care. Nor does any Canadian I know. That's the way it's supposed to be.

So as far as I can see, the problem isn't that SCOTUS is stacked with Republicans, nor that it can be. The problem is that everyone seems to assume that this is the way it should be.

Anubis and Thoth weighing the heart of the dead to see if it is as light as a feather before letting them into the afterlife.

I love the idea that there's no "do this, do that", or a concrete set of rules or commandments. But the idea that if you can look back on your life, and if your heart isn't weighed down with the burden of all of the things that you did that know we're just wrong...then you can go on to the afterlife.

It's just no much more of a reasonable, adult approach to morality.

I'm not sure about the value of questioning the authenticity of something that has been canon for almost 2000 years. It's like quibbling about how the Latin translation of the Old Testament doesn't match Hebrew sources.

Who cares which misogynistic jerk wrote that passage? It's been part of the bedrock of the faith of countless generations of misogynists since then.

The reason for leaving in the password.trim() would be one of the few things that I would ever document with a comment.

I think there might be a better way to deliver "ballistic missiles to Russia".

Whenever we visit the UK we set the GPS units to metric. I have no feel for what, "In 140 yards, turn right", means. So having directions in metric while the street signs are in Imperial actually works best.

As a Canadian driving around the UK I always found these signs strange. When passing one we would raise our fists in the air and shout, "End road work...end road work everywhere!!!".

It amused us.

Yes, $15 CAD/day to "roam like home". I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don't need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.

So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for "roam like home" for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn't matter which one as far as I can tell.

We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.

And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there's an emergency and it will ring through.

In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text "Yes" back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.

I always feel this way about tailgaters. They don't seem to realize that they have given up all the power to the person they are tailgating.

Very often the copyright holders of the content have different distribution arrangements for different countries/regions. If you can get the content from some other region, then your local content provider isn't getting whatever fees/and revenue they would get from you.

My first experience with this food was in Halifax decades ago. The Halifax Donair is a unique thing.

And it's definitely Donair, not Doner.

Try living in Canada. Pretty much all the providers charge $15/day for roaming! No monthly plans available.

I think that a good starting place to explain the concept to people would be to describe a Travesty Generator. I remember playing with one of those back in the 1980's. If you fed it a snippet of Shakespeare, what it churned out sounded remarkably like Shakespeare, even if it created brand "new" words.

The results were goofy, but fun because it still almost made sense.

The most disappointing source text I ever put in was TS Eliot. The output was just about as much rubbish as the original text.

Technically, he would have three drives and only two drives of data. So he could move 1/3 of the data off each of the two drives onto the third and then start off with RAID 5 across the remaining 1/3 of each drive.

I just installed it and I'm very impressed. The widgets are especially cool.

There's two kinds of issues: instance and pattern. The first time or two, it's instance. You deal with those with specificity. Something like, "I would prefer not to talk about this subject with you, please stop".

If it persists, then it's a pattern problem. You deal with the pattern, not the instance. "I've asked you not to talk about subjects like this in the pant, but you haven't stopped. This makes me feel like you don't respect my boundaries and it's making it difficult for me to work with you. Why are you doing this to me?".

You can escalate from there, and this might involve management involvement but at least you'll have the clarity of having made the situation clear before it gets there.

Honestly though, unless the coworker is actually deranged, they'll be mortified when they find out they are making you uncomfortable and they'll stop right away.

I'm not sure that what developers really, really need is faster programming cycles. Most teams could benefit more by controlling the process - from idea to deployed. How much technical debt is incurred because users/customers can't prioritize features or give accurate requirements, there's way too much WIP, features are huge, releases are huge and infrequent and the feedback cycles are far too long.

So yeah, as programmers it's always cool to look at ways to program faster, but what's the point in programming stuff nobody needs faster? Or programming the wrong things faster?

I'd be willing to be that if you asked any team, "What are the biggest impediments to delivering value to your users faster?", the answer would be that you can't cut code fast enough.

COBOL is not hard to learn. But it takes years to develop the muscles in your fingers to the point where you can write a subroutine in a single session.

And yet I never see any mention of this anywhere. Even here, it seems that Biden is more concerned about whether the court can administer justice because it is so much out of balance. No mention, though, that the "balance" shouldn't even be a factor.

SCOTUS justices are appointed for life because it's supposed to put them above political considerations. No politician can influence them by threatening removal. Yet, there you are, SCOTUS is just as political as the other two branches.

Stone only makes sense for people used to pounds, shillings and pence. For instance, "This costs 3 pound, 4 shilling and 8", and, "I weight 12 stone, 6 pounds and 3 ounces".

Unknown domains often get refused connections from mail servers. Also, it can be easy to get blacklisted.

Canadian providers all charge about $15 a day to "roam like home". For about $20 I can buy a 30 day 5GB data only plan for Europe. Getting a European phone number doubles the cost as most of those plans have much more data as well. You can buy the plans before you leave, download and install the eSIM so you're ready to go when you arrive.

The wife and I both bought Pixel 7's this year as they support eSIM. We're in England right now. Our cost roaming would have been $600+. Only one of us needed a local phone number, and the has just data, and the cost was maybe $70.

For me Bazzera Magica and Baratza Vario grinder some time back. Better coffee than most cafes.