Fun fact: Roko’s basilisk is not from QC. It’s a thought experiment about AI that predates the comic character by about 6 years. The character’s just named after it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

Alternative image for C: Mr. Incredible: “A PARAMETER IS A PARAMETER!”

Me for sure. Every so often, I’ll pull something up just for the sake of some tears.

My go-tos include (in no particular order):

• Avengers: Endgame
• The Fellowship of the Ring
• Patch Adams
• The Deathly Hallows (Part 2)
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• The Owl House
• House MD (Season 4 finale)

Probably some more I’m not thinking of, at the moment.

I literally fainted (i.e. got dizzy and lost the ability to stand)

This is how we know you’re a real adult.

I did it last week. We were out of power for about 30 hours. But I actually have a degree in Computer Engineering, and I did it with a friend who is a professional Electrician.

It is indeed EXTREMELY dangerous. If you don’t know what you’re doing, or make a mistake, best case scenario, you fry your generator. Worst case, you electrocute a lineman from the power company, who isn’t expecting lines to be live when there’s an outage, because yes, if you feed power into your house, that will flow OUT of your house onto the main lines (to some extent), if you let it. You could end up trying to power your whole block on your little gas generator.

We made sure both the indoor and outdoor main power shutoffs for the house were turned off, as well as all breakers. Then we unplugged the oven, and used that for the feed from the generator. Then we gradually re-activated breakers so as not to add too much load to the generator at once. Ultimately, we were able to run the whole house, except for the AC compressor, which the generator actually would have had enough power to run, but not to kick-start.

The proper way to hook up a generator to feed your house is to install an “inlet” which is both nominatively and physically the opposite of an outlet: instead of holes going into a box, you have prongs sticking out of a box. Generally, it’ll be one of the big fat 4-pronged round cables, like what your oven might use. That’ll feed down to a large double-breaker, in the top-right slot of your breaker panel. That breaker stays off until you want to run a generator, and, to meet code, you have to also install a special bracket that prevents you from turning this breaker off without turning off the primary feed for the whole house. Still kinda dangerous, but they make those brackets surprisingly foolproof.

Love the followup to that verse.

Master, who then can be saved?

Jesus, internally: Oh, shit, good point, uhh…

What is impossible for man is not impossible for God.

Dude was just talking out his ass the whole time.

But im not sure how to apply it to anything realistic

I think that’s a misconception a lot of people have: unless you get a job in the field, or get into open source work, you probably won’t. Not at any amount of scale, anyway.

Like, you go to your computer and start working in…what?

For myself, I find that (outside of work and open source) I don’t really USE my programming skills, except that knowing programming enables me to think about problems in my life in a more analytical way. Every once in a while, I might be doing something tedious and techy that I’ll take an hour or two to automate. For example, I’ve done that for re-organizing and renaming video and music files. I also helped my wife a few hundred pages of text from a wiki she maintains for her D&D guild, when they were migrating to a new provider.

im just unsure what people do especially when starting out.

If you have an idea for something that you find interesting or are passionate about or would use personally, great! That’s extremely rare, so don’t stress about it. My go-to recommendation for starter projects is to just re-make something that already exists. That gives you very specific, achievable goals. Specifically" I recommend re-making “dir.exe” or “ls” (the Linux equivalent), which are command-line programs that list files on your computer.

If you can work a project like that, even if you never “finish” it, and you get any enjoyment out of it, that’s a good sign. If you find that you dread working on it, or really struggle with it, then that’s a good indicator that maybe programming isn’t for you. It’s a useful skill to have, but you shouldn’t feel bad if it just isn’t your thing. I always like the idea of being a musician, and toon guitar lessons as a kid, but whenever I would sit down to practice, I found I would rather be doing almost anything else. Eventually, it occurred to me that I can love music and musicianship, without being a musician.

What is really meant by “programming” when people say they like to use linux for it?

I think it’s just a matter of personal preference among the type of people that are drawn to programming. Linux doesn’t just LET you have a very high level of control over things that happen “under the hood”, it often MAKES you have to deal with some things that Windows or iOS would traditionally keep hidden (to varying degrees, depending on distro). That ends up being appealing to the kind of tinkerer folks who are also attracted to programming.

I don’t think there’s any inherent reason that Linux is better for programming, except MAYBE that there’s more of a programming ecosystem built around it, because more programmers end up using it. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Interesting that several people are reporting using “you” for negative sentiments, because I use “I” for those as well. E.G. “Well, I’m a fucking idiot.”

Neither are more gay men and straight women.

I’d say it depends on WHY you like the art. Does it tie into the toxic or reprehensible traits of the artist? Was the artist trying to send a toxic or reprehensible message with this art?

If not, then it’s just a matter of ensuring that your enjoyment of the art doesn’t translate into support for the artist. Or, at least, that it doesn’t cross your personal line of support for the artist.

So, for example, does the Kanye music you like have nazi themes or messaging? Far as I’m aware, no, the nazi-ism is just his newest shit, so you’re probably fine as long as you’re not streaming from Spotify or YouTube, or otherwise giving him revenue.

Por que, no los dos?

Honestly, if you’re having trouble finding stuff for vanilla JS, I’d recommend looking at jQuery. Not that you should USE jQuery, necessarily, but the library is basically a giant wrapper around all the native JS APIs, so the approach to building stuff is essentially the same: it all focuses on tracking and manipulation of DOM elements.

I do vanilla JS (actually TypeScript) dev at work, daily, and that was my big takeaway from spearheding our team’s migration from jQuery to vanilla TypeScript: I honestly don’t know what benefit jQuery provides, over vanilla, because all the most-common jQuery APIs that we were using have a 1:1 native equivalent.

We do also use 2 third-party libraries alongside vanilla, so I’l mention those: require.js and rx.js. Require you probably don’t need, with modern JS having bundling and module support built-in but we still use it for legacy reasons. But rx.js is a huge recommend, for me. Reactive programming is the IDEAL way to build GUIs, in my opinion.

Blue Prince sure feels like it counts, our whole family is hooked, and has been playing it every day for about 2 weeks now. Even well after rolling credits.

In a similar vein, I’d have to say Hollow Knight and Outer Wilds. Together with Blue Prince, they all have a storytelling strategy of “you have to put some effort into getting the story out of it”, but the effort makes every new discovery or revelation feel super rewarding.

Celeste is the one that comes to mind for a more traditional story that REALLY hit.

Persona 5 comes to mind, too. I was ENGROSSED in that story for months. Even if it went off the rails a couple times.

I’m also gonna shout-out Tales of Symphonia. That game was formative for me.

If you’ve only ever been exposed to the depiction of non-verbal, extremely sensitive-to-stimuli, routine-oriented, potentially-violent, autistic kids, that you see on TV, you could be forgiven for thinking this.

But, no, that’s only an exceptionally small window of what autism is. Most cases of autism aren’t so severe, and most people learn coping strategies as they grow up that let them live relatively-normal lives. Even severe cases can do this, but it tends to take more time, and more focused, expert care.

You probably know autistic adults, and aren’t even aware. Or, potentially, you just write them off as being loners or not good with people or having some other character flaw, that ultimately stems from their coping mechanisms.

My big reason would be “it hurts readability”. That is, when writing code, readibility for others who aren’t familiar with it (including future me) is my top-priority, and that means indentation and alignment are HIGHLY important, and if I spend the time to write code with specific indentation and alignment, to make it readable at a glance, I want to be certain that it’s always going to display exactly that way. Tabs specifically break that guarantee, because they’re subject to editor settings, which means shit like the below example can occur:

I write the following code with an editor that uses a tab size of 4.

myObject.DoSomething(
    someParameter:      "A",
    someOtherParameter: "B",
    value:              "C");

If someone pulls this up in an editor that uses a tab size of 8, they get…

myObject.DoSomething(
    someParameter:          "A",
    someOtherParameter:     "B",
    value:                          "C");

Not really a big deal, in this simple case, but it illustrates the point.

My second reason would be that it makes code more difficult to WRITE, I.E. it’s not that hard to insert spaces when you mean to insert tabs, considering that you’re not LITERALLY using only tabs just only tabs for indentation and alignment. And if you do accidentally have spaces mixed in, you’re not going to be able to tell. The guy on another machine with different editor settings will, though.

I’m aware there are fonts that can make spaces and tabs visible and distinct, but that sounds like a NIGHTMARE to write and read code with. I mentioned above, my top priority is easy readability, and introducing more visual noise to make tabs and spaces distinct can only hurt readability.

Denying that the logo used to have a cornucopia is a thing? Sheesh, TIL.

Arcane.

You twit.

Also depends how much presence you have on social media, and how public you are avout your political opinions there.

Nutritious breakfast cereal.