PhilipTheBucket

Am I the only one who likes looking at my old code? Generally I feel like it's alright.

Usually the first project when I'm learning how to use some new language or environment is super-shitty. I can tell it's very bad, usually I don't like interacting with it if I have to make changes, but it's still not overly painful. It's just bad code. And that one exception aside I generally like looking at my code.

Known top Democrats Eileen Filler-Corn, Abigail Spanberger, and Tim Kaine. I mean, there are plenty of rabidly pro-Israel top Democrats, but none of them are in this article.

The emphasis on "Zionism" is a little bit weird, too. I've seen Bernie Sanders be accused of being a "Zionist," because he doesn't want Israel to be destroyed. I mean, I guess that's... true? Maybe? "Zionist" seems like something you can apply to a huge number of pretty reasonable people by that definition. It seems like kind of a textbook way to start to throw mud at a massively pro-Palestinian person, and accuse him of being anti-Palestinian, through cleverly dishonest use of language.

I don't want Israel to be destroyed. Am I a Zionist?

Edit: I looked up a little more about it. This Palestinian state congressman, who is a Democratic committee chair, has been talking vigorously on social media about the evils of Israel's most recent "war" since October 2023. It only turned into an issue with this specific post, because the language means one thing to him, but a very different thing to some people who are reading it, and so they objected.

Yeah. I feel like in a few years when literally nothing works or is maintainable, people are going to have a resurgent realization of the importance of reliability in software design, that just throwing bodies and lines of code at the problem builds up a shaky structure that just isn't workable anymore once it grows beyond a certain size.

We used to know that, and somehow we forgot.

Yeah. I have no idea what the answer is, just describing the nature of the issue. I come from the days when you would maybe import like one library to do something special like .png reading or something, and you basically did all the rest yourself. The way programming gets done today is wild to me.

I sort of have a suspicion that there is some mathematical proof that, as soon as it becomes quick and easy to import an arbitrary number of dependencies into your project along with their dependencies, the size of the average project's dependencies starts to follow an exponential growth curve increasing every year, without limit.

I notice that this stuff didn't happen with package managers + autoconf/automake. It was only once it became super-trivial to do from the programmer side, that the growth curve started. I've literally had trivial projects pull in thousands of dependencies recursively, because it's easier to do that than to take literally one hour implementing a little modified-file watcher function or something.

Reddit: Trust us we're GENIUSES bro, most popular web site in the world, we're so smart I swear

Also Reddit: Hey can we have more money, we lost it all again. This new plan's gonna work tho

Same as anything really

They actually observed the natives setting those controlled burns, and decided to themselves, "Yeah they're wild savages, they clearly don't give a fuck about anything or know what they're doing, here's me with syphilis and muskets and I think it's time to share civilization with them, they'll thank me later." All that magic prairie ecosystem (which is basically gone now) was a carefully constructed environment maintained over generations to make hunting big game cheap and easy. But no, let's have railroads and lead paint instead.

What I used to do when I lived in an area with a decent number of homeless people, was offer to get them some food, if I had the time for it. I'd walk somewhere with them, say what do you want I'll grab it for you, and come out and hand it to them. It was honestly a little bit awkward to do it without feeling like a ponce, making conversation with the person or whatnot feeling condescending, but whatever.

I would say the majority would discount the suggestion. I didn't feel the slightest bit bad saying no you can't have any money then. A minority would be really into the idea and clearly fucking light up at the idea of having their hands on a sandwich. Those dudes I felt like it was important that they get their sandwich.

I also knew a guy who used to be homeless, volunteered with homeless services and substance abuse programs and etc, spent a ton of time on it. He never gave money on the street. He got very bitter about the subject, he just said that it doesn't help them. Make of that what you will, I don't really know the ins and outs, but that's what he said.