Aceticon

At times that shit is pretty much the opposite of what should be done.

Fail Fast is generally a much better way to handle certain risks, especially those around parts of the code which have certain expectations and the code upstream calling it (or even other systems sending it data) gets changed and breaks those expectations: it's much better to just get "BAAM, error + stack trace" the first time you run the code with those upstream changes than have stuff silently fail to work properly and you only find out about it when the database in Production starts getting junk stored in certain fields or some other high impact problem.

You don't want to silently suppress error reporting unless the errors are expected and properly dealt with as part of the process (say, network errors), you want to actually have the code validate early certain things coming in from the outside (be it other code or, even more importantly, other systems) for meeting certain expectations (say, check that a list of things which should never be empty is in fact not empty) and immediatly complain about it.

I've lost count how many times following this strategy has saved me from a small stupid bug (sometimes not even in my system) snowballing into something much worse because of the code silently ignoring that something is not as it's supposed to be.

I've been pretty much upgrading my own desktop PC regularly since the 90s (though I did buy a brand new one 6 years ago).

In my experience the upgrade that's more likelly to improve it the cheapest is RAM, then a graphics card if you're a gamer.

Upgrading the CPU has always been something that happens less often and also it doesn't help that the CPU can only be upgrade up to a point without having to replace the motherboard (which then forces replacing the RAM and possibly even the PC box).

However there were two transition periods were the best upgrade by far was something else: the first was back in the day when hardware 3D accelerator boards were invented (Quake with a 3dfx was night and day compared to software rendering) and the other one was the transition for HDD to SSD, both being massive jumps in performance.

Exactly.

A background of tinkering with stuff without fear of the consequences of breaking it (which is a common mindset mainly amongst kids and teens) is the difference between a tool-maker and a tool-user, IMHO, and thinkering is far more natural to start doing and to do much further with an open system than with a closed system.

They're about training children to comform and obbey arbitrary rules created by people in position of authority and to value impression more than behaviour.

Of the countries I lived in, Britain was the one that had most of this shit and was also the one with the strongest "know your place" and "keep up appearences" mindsets of them all, especially amongst the middle and upper classes which were the ones were this shit was more common (there was a time of working class cultural significance during the 70s and 80s, which were a veritable explosion of creativity with movements like "punk", but the social mobility and freedom that created it were crushed in the meanwhile, so working class kids can't make it in the Arts anymore and that whole class is back at being culturally irrelevant outside fighting each other after football games).

Well, there is a massive crowd of people, even here, who doggedly defend the Democrat leadership with some variant of other of "they're better than the Republicans".

That aged, compromised, out of touch and stuck in their ways leadership has pretty much zero pressure to change and over the years has even increasingly relied on "vote us to stop the other guys" a their main campaign strategy.

Everytime some Democrat Party tribalist blames non-voters for their own party's electoral defeat after having used the "vote for the lesser evil" strategy once again, they're displaying a complete total lack of mid or long term view (just ponder on what's the natural evolution of management style for people whose personality type is 'seeks power' when their only limit for 'doing bad things' is 'less than those other guys who sell Racism and Violence') and just keep on digging that specific hole for their party.

Looking from the outside, maybe there's hope for the future of the Democrat Party through people like Zandani in NY, but my own experience in Britain with Corbyn is that the well entrenched "establishment" will doggedly fight against such people and even shamelessly ally with their supposed adversaries from "the other party" in order to stop such internal challengers trying to change the direction of the party back towards left of center.

The idea of "both-siderism" is anchored on 2D politics: you can't have "both-siderism" where there are more than 2 sides, hence my point about viewing politics as 2D.

You're living inside a box and only seeing what's in that box, hence hyper-aware of the difference between those because they're all that you know, whilst I'm outside the box and pointing out that compared to the rest of the Universe what's inside that box you live in isn't actually very different.

It's like I'm talking about "the landscapes of the World" with an Eskimo - you keep insisting that "this icy landscape is very different from that icy landscape" (which I'm sure they are in the eyes of a person who has only ever known those landscapes and nothing else) even whilst I point out that they're both icy landscapes and thus very similar to each other when compared to other kinds of landscapes that do exist in the rest of the World, such as sandy beaches or tropical forests.

Worse, your persistence in closing your eyes to the point I've made repeatedly that there are more sides than just two, leaves me with the feeling that I'm talking to a particularly provincial and simple minded Eskimo who thinks that those differences they're so hyper-aware off between different kinds of icy landscapes are far more important differences that the vastly larger differences between those and the rest of the landscapes that actually exist outside the place they live in.

As a fraction of the total it's still a small percentage, unless things changed a lot in the 5 years since I moved out of there.

I was thinking that the joke part was about the ciggie rather than the coffee.

Whilst you're kind of joking (I hope!) on the health benefits, I would say that deriving some enjoyment from all manner of small pleasures is a pretty good way to keep one's mental sanity.

In my experience that very much depends on the part of Europe you're in: the "expresso in the morning" thing is mostly common in Southern Europe and France and back in the day when smoking was much more common and was actually allowed indoors in public venues, people having a ciggy and a morning coffee at a cafe was a pretty common sight.

Places in Europe without the whole tradition of coffee places serving expressos never really had this kind of "breakfast".

On the "Europeans" side that's at least 2 decades out of date.

The expresso coffee part is still true in a good part of Europe, but pretty much everywhere in it nowadays only a small fraction of people smoke and even those who do can't actually do it inside a coffee shop because they're not allowed to smoke there anymore, which spoils a great deal of the enjoyment of having a morning coffee.

Exactly.

For the Fascists, the ones they see as lesser are pretty much sub-human and to be treated as vermin, and they have no more empathy for the younger "vermin" than they have for the adult "vermin".

Just look at Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel for very obvious examples of how for these people the children of the "lesser" races aren't really human and get targetted same as all the other members of the ethnicities they literally call "vermin".

If these people were both capable of empathy and unable to block their empathy on a per-ethnicity basis, they wouldn't be Fascists.