blackstampede @ blackstampede @sh.itjust.works

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2

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283

Joined

2 yr. ago

The short answer is that they have nukes.

To be fair, there were a few years between when thee country was founded and five years ago.

The real answer is whichever is easiest. If you've got a master branch and it's a pain to switch, then I wouldn't do it. If you've got a badass coder who is disturbed by the terminology, then I'd say to do it to keep the peace. It depends on the situation.

A minute thirty-five times is thirty-five minutes.

You know that thing you do, where you write some code and then realize you need a main function to execute it? And then you write your main function, but it's not really your main function, it's a bunch of half commented test code to make sure that the important code works?

Do that in a unit test, and when you're done testing that particular piece, add some assertions and move on to the next piece of functionality. Boom, test driven development.

Microsoft Windows

I hate to throw out this old chestnut, but "correlation does not equal causation." Just because religion existed in one form or another in almost every single culture, does not mean it's necessary for morality. As I mentioned previously, lots of social structures existed in early societies that had things to say about morality. That doesn't mean they were necessary precursors.

Rubber band in the middle is trying to contract, pulling the top of the table up, and the chains keep it level?

For a moment I thought you said "unable to glow". And I was like- I'm not sure they'll be able to avoid it.

"Without the precursor of gender roles, there can be no morality."

"Without the precursor of tradition there can be no morality."

"Without the precursor of >insert social structure< there can be no morality."

Some of our social structures have things to say about morality. Sometimes they're saying"love your neighbor as yourself," and sometimes they're saying "burn that city to the ground and keep all of the preteen girls as sex slaves." Just because religion and spirituality have things to say about morality doesn't necessarily mean that they're worth listening too, and it doesn't mean we couldn't have developed a system of morality in their absence.

Without religion and spirituality, we may have developed a better, more universal system of morality, rather than the patchwork of haphazard and contradictory traditions we currently enjoy. We'll never know, because religion was created early in our history, and for the rest of eternity, we get to listen to asinine armchair theologians tell us "without religion, there would be no real morality."

I knew this one, but way too many times, I don't. People like you are awesome, and I appreciate the service.

Media targeted at a large audience tends to dumb moral and philosophical conundrums down to the simplest possible gesture instead of taking the ideas seriously.

Second that. I Am A Strange Loop is a fantastic book on consciousness.

Holy shit, me too. Yeah, I probably should have put and asterisk next to that.

I have very rarely had a bad outcome from speaking honestly and straightforwardly to people that I care about.

I recently wrote a little library that adds some neat little features to enums in Rust. It's tiny, does one thing, and does it pretty well, I think.

North America didn't origiy have horses. When they were brought in, the Apache, more than any other indigenous group, structured their entire way of life around them. At least, that's what I learned from Western movies.

The point of a uniformed service is to show your enemy that you have control and command over people who will follow your orders. Demonstrating this lowers your enemy's will to fight back. It gets soldiers on the other side to think "If these guys are so organized that they march in unison, we don't stand a chance."

Fair enough.

It will not surprise me if in the next year, a new division in the army is created for parade duty for the president's birthday where next year their marching will be perfect.

That would just be the chefs kiss of silly bullshit on top of everything else.

Story time, boys and girls.

When I joined the Army and went to basic training, one of the first things they did was show us how to stand at attention, at-ease, right face, left face, and about face. Then they turned the training unit and marched off.

And then stopped and screamed at us for marching like Nazis.

Turns out, you don't see US soldiers marching like that because it's stupid as hell, and you can't do it for twenty miles with a rucksack. The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn't help you do war.

So we learned how to march like Americans, which is much more casual. The only thing you've gotta do is make sure you match the stride length of the soldier in front of you, but even that is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. We got good, though, because we were assholes.

We would ease out behind someone who was walking somewhere and roughly the same height, and step slightly faster than the person in front of us, until we were close behind them. Then you perform a little skip at the last second to get back to the same stride and close the last few inches. The end result is that your chest is hovering about an inch from their back, your nose is an inch from the back of their head, and your hands are swinging right behind theirs. While walking at full speed.

You haven't had a jump scare until you've marched two blocks, turned your head, and glimpsed someone's face an inch from your own.