IMO, it is/was an advice and self-improvement trend that, like all such trends, ends leaving a vacuum for something else. Kind of like fad diets. So yes, I think that has been largely replaced by the alpha/guru influencer thing now.

That’s an extreme simplification, but yes, that’s the gist.

It’s also a very Paulie take on things: so close, yet so far.

IMO, peak Sopranos is Tony’s reaction to his voice while in a coma. We finally get an idea of how he really comes across after many seasons.

The real tragedy is how stale that bread is; Subway^™ crust isn’t supposed to do that. Is it too late to rescue the lunchmeat and start over?

Paging Mr. Munroe…

It would sit well with my conscience that I likely prevented a worse fate for exponentially more people, and prevented another person from having to make a worse choice. Which they themselves would likely only make twice as worse, and so on. I could live with that.

What I’m not sure of is how I would handle being a deicision-maker N steps down the line. Being the first guy, sure. The 16th? I dunno.

2³² is roughly four billion. We’ll need one or two more doublings to get every last person alive on the tracks.

This introduces a new wrinkle in the experiment: all the switch operators are also tied to the track. Somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Criticism

In 1934, Roosevelt defended himself against those critics in a “fireside chat”:

[Some] will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical… Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty. Answer this question out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?[279]

At the same time, there was an actual (failed) attempt at a fascist coup on Roosevelt’s watch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch[1] and the White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator.

So, yeah. Fascists hate this stuff and will do anything to fight it, from name-calling to revolution.

NGL, writing pure functions in Rust is fantastic. Writing responsible code that handles all the error conditions turns the “happy path” into hamburger. Even with the ergonomics of Result, Option, and even ?, code just sprawls and becomes a readability tradeoff. I’m only a few months into Rust at this point, and I have a lot to learn, but it’s tempting to just .unwrap() and .expect() where I think it’s unlikely to fail.

Gurpreet is your co-worker on the sister-team, over in India. He’s hard-working, a family man, and takes care of his aging parents, all in their home village over the weekend. He spends nights in Bangalore, debugging and reviewing your code while you’re asleep. His contributions to the project are pretty solid too, even though he’s only been coding for four years. His management treats him and his team like garbage, but they don’t let that stop them from showing up and doing a good job. If you ever came to visit, he’d roll out the red carpet along with his co-workers, and give you the kind of hospitality typically reserved for a minor god; doubly-so if it’s a holiday.

Gurpreet is awesome.

One of many reasons why I love BSG. As a retro-computing enthusiast, the idea that antique systems are naturally impervious to conventional digital attacks, just felt so validating.

Sure, our navigation system is based on a Commodore-64, but good luck getting it to divulge mission-critical information over bluetooth. Or any information for that matter.

Warning: this will destroy medication if it’s left out. You may want to move your pills to the refrigerator first (after first checking the temperature - see article).

Actually, if you live in a hot climate and don’t use A/C, you should probably do that anyway.

i was gonna say. Properly deep/stacked pizzas, casseroles, and calzones are the way to go here.

You’re lucky. They’re well-intended, but really awful. You’re supposed to traverse the intersection in the order you arrive. All it takes is for one jackass to waive* their right of way, or run the intersection, and the other three drivers are thrown into disarray. Add multiple lanes to this and, well… good luck everyone!

* Often literally waving at you to go. Through the intersection. At the wrong time.

I learned on a 1st gen Saturn. That’s before GM ruined the brand. It had a good deal of pickup to it, and was a lot of fun in the snow.

I don’t miss it though. If I lived somewhere I could joyride with zero hills, traffic or parallel parking, sure. Otherwise? It’s not worth it.

Honestly, this is why I fled suburbia for someplace more integrated and communal.

I looked around and realized that I barely knew who lived there, and nobody had my back. Likewise, if someone was in trouble, I would never hear about it. I’m not unfriendly by any means, it’s just the whole tract-housing setup with no communal space is practically engineered to divide people up. Heap work hours and commute time on top of that, and all you know is someone keeps a car in so many driveways overnight; you never see any people. Everyone there really kept to themselves, as the environment made that easy to do.

I’m happy to say that I’m in a place now that would likely band together if it came down to it.

All I know is that a simple 4-way stop, with multiple lanes in all directions, has an effort:chaos ratio that is off the charts. No need for multi-million-dollar engineering projects.

I served at a restaurant that had this. Not only was the entire dining room a de-facto smoking area, despite the zoning, but it mattered for nothing if your section was smoking or not. Between the constant smell of fry grease and cigarettes, I wanted to burn my uniform after every shift. And since I was depending on a low paying job, guess how often laundry happened? :(

PSA: Tipping culture is a problem, but so are server wages. Please help 'em out; their job is miserable.

This isn’t ageist. This is classist.

You mean, like this?