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At my last job we had a lot of old code, and our supposedly smartest framework people couldn’t be bothered learning front end properly. So there was a mix of methods for passing values to the front end, but nobody seemed to think of just passing JSON and parsing it into a single source of truth. There was so much digging for data in hidden columns of nested HTML tables, and you never knew if booleans would be “true”, “TRUE”, “1”, or “Y” strings.

Never mind having to unformat currency strings to check the value then format them back to strings after updating values.

I fixed this stuff when I could, but it was half baked into the custom framework.

I had a look at the Smite roster, and yeah it’s cool to see some Celtic and Polynesian representation there.

I would personally love to see indigenous Australian mythology represented much at all in media. It would be challenging because you’re dealing with hundreds of individual nations, most of which had their culture taken from them before it could be well documented, but there are a few recurring themes to draw from.

The closest thing to a god entity would be the rainbow serpent, which you could argue is related to common global themes of flying serpents. Similarly, the yowie has almost spiritual status in some places, but is similar to yetis and sasquatch. I recently learned about the Seven Sisters myth being another one.

Which mythologies would you like to see represented?

I think this would apply to all media, and probably just comes down to some traditions being more familiar and having more cultural impact in general.

I’m assuming it has social networking features shoved in for no reason?

That reminds me of an image I meant to create myself once.

@[email protected], can you show me a painting, reminiscent of Magritte’s pipe, but replace the pipe with an emoji poo, and the text with, “Ceci n’est pas une poop.”

M

Yeah, but he’ll need to borrow a vehicle to get to work now.

I kind of miss when No Man’s Sky was an endless, empty expanse. That sense of loneliness and futility was an emotional experience that it doesn’t have now. It’s become a much better game, no doubt, but putting time and careful planning into that long crawl towards the galactic centre felt right.

PLACEHOLDER_TOKEN

We could offer to shut down their military sites, but that’s probably what Putin wants us to do.

It has to appeal to his ego. We rejected his bid to build a casino in Sydney decades ago, and now that casino is going bankrupt, so we could let him “save” it by buying it out. No doubt he’ll lose money on it anyway, we get a fat investment and tariffs dropped. Shittty deal for Trump but he won’t care if it gets his name on a building with Sydney Harbour views.

As most have said, doubling up compression won’t usually get you much.

However, video compression is usually designed to facilitate performance of sequential reads because videos are typically played beginning to end, so theoretically there may be ways to compress them more if you’re willing to make sacrifices there.

I doubt RAR is the way to do it, though. It just hasn’t been designed for this kind of data.

Maybe there’s a video compression format out there designed specifically for archival storage, but I’m not aware of it.

ISO won’t get you any further compression, that’s for sure.

You could certainly test this out yourself and let us know if you get any space savings.

Feels like you’re stuck in an exoskeletoooon.

I thought the same, until I spent a few years on a codebase where self-documenting code was enforced with detailed code reviews. That does a very good job of clearing up the ambiguity.

If you can’t get that kind of review, then by all means use comments.

I’m still waiting for the day I see UML in a professional context. My undergrad teachers were all about it.

Similarly, I don’t design software using design patterns, and I’ve had to discourage juniors from forcing them into projects where they don’t add any value. But that’s not to say design patterns aren’t useful. They do exactly what you say, allowing your brain to recognise a pattern so you can remember or communicate it without having to go into details. Most of the time it won’t be an exact fit for the ideal pattern implementation, but it’s still easier to remember the variation.

I wish they were taught more as communication and cognitive tools than silver bullets for good software design.

In the real world there aren’t even that many patterns. On a very large project you’re likely to see the same patterns repeated throughout the system, because a good architecture doesn’t add variation and complexity unless there’s a lot of value to gain. You learn the default way, and then the diffs.

The US needs to break the two-party system so minor parties and independents actually have a chance at representation.

Of course there’s no incentive for the establishment to do that. Is there any way for new candidates to run with the major parties, but on a platform to introduce preferential voting when they have the numbers? I don’t know much about factions within US parties, but they certainly exist in my country, and can transform parties quickly if they think they have election-winning appeal.

It would have to happen bottom-up, as you say, so people can get comfortable with such a big change. Also, people are much more likely to elect independents at a local level.

Living in rural Tasmania, trying to work on (often) 5 mbps down, with frequent drops, looking at the garden that produces fruit and vegetables faster than we can eat them… that agrarian lifestyle is looking mighty tempting right now.

I can see what they’re going for. We have a good history of exemptions, and getting another one would be a big win domestically with an election looming. You might think there’s no way it will happen, but we do hold some cards, so to speak. I wouldn’t be surprised if in more private negotiations they’re threatening to close Pine Gap or cancel other cooperative military arrangements.

Retaliatory tariffs just aren’t our best option.

Stopping timers has always been like that for me.

Through trial and error I found the most successful command is “ok google shut the fuck up”.

Just like Android loses features on every major version, and Maps is a skeleton of its former self.

In a company where nobody is incentivised to maintain anything, cutting features is the easier option.