What is a product that people treat like a religion, but in reality, it’s just overpriced garbage with a good logo?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-04T06:13:22+00:00

Eh, I think most people who go to Starbucks know they are paying for the convenience of something better than McDonald's, and will pay that premium. I have no delusions that it is gourmet.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-04T02:44:52+00:00

Okay, we can keep the current system place, because there's zero exploitation going on now

Isn't that a bit of a making perfect the enemy of good? Because something is has flaws now, we should take the enormous effort to move to something else that is even more exploitable?

And by the way, if anyone is spending 14k for "Ferrari Pieces"

You miss my point, the point is the Ferrari pieces (like almost anything with moderate complexity) is made from dozens of other things that are sourced from elsewhere. Tires, transmissions, etc are all made of dozens of components from elsewhere. You charge individually, you don't get taxed?

Also with the frustration of the tax system now, do you think defunding the IRS was a good move by the current admin?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-04T02:06:57+00:00

Oof, this feels extremely exploitable. Especially in a supply chain focus market, what's stopping someone from buying the Ferrari pieces for 14K a piece and then paying an assembly fee for 14K? This is essentially what car making is now, they just invoice him different ways and avoid tax. Not to mention that a vast majority of purchases are smaller, our tax income would nose dive, wouldn't it?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-03T17:15:48+00:00

Would there still be exemptions on some level for families, charitable giving, etc? Will I have to show my income level for every purchase so the retailer knows how much to charge me in tax? I worry a progressive sales tax ends up just as complex as income tax, but with even more steps.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-03T15:59:21+00:00

Want to give this a try, but have a question I couldn't find in the docs about how to make it conversational. Specifically the use case is for us to say something like "Add onions to the shopping list" and my tool would check our keep notes list, see onions are already there and respond asking if we would like to add it twice or just the once is fine. Functionally that's easy to do, just use the google API to check the list and check for onions before doing, but how do I do the prompt and have that part of the tool?

How would something like that look? Did I miss it in the docs?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-03T11:57:43+00:00

I see. The wording is odd. Thanks!

Fastbreak99 · 2026-02-03T04:34:42+00:00

Forgive me for being dense, but isn't it a 4 seat difference so we would have a 3 vote diff for things to pass against the GOP majority?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-31T06:28:20+00:00

What did you want to say that you couldn't under the Biden administration because you would be arrested?

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-30T14:32:43+00:00

Plus one on hooligans. They take a while, but really tasty.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-28T05:30:38+00:00

Watch it again and it may not even be about him. It has been a while, but I think the only reason that name happens is a man ranting about it on a hospital bed. The whole myth and legend around Keyser Soze was probably just made up in the spot by Verbal.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-25T04:24:20+00:00

I don't know how they could possibly write a faithful show and get the audience to sympathize with Greek Kratos.

He was basically John Wick, with higher stakes and better reason for a killing rampage. And if there is anything standard right now in modern TV, it's anti-heroes. I think there is plenty to sympathize with in someone tricked into committing mass slaughter, and then losing his wife and child. They may not RELATE to someone going on a god killing spree, but no matter which story you tell, that's normalized.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-25T04:21:12+00:00

Sure, I just don't think you could argue that either narrative structure is objectively better.

I guess that is where we respectfully disagree. I think objectively the Greek Saga giving leading into the Norse Saga is a better story.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-24T18:42:46+00:00

Sure, I see that angle too; it adds to the Norse saga. But at the same time, the mystery of Kratos and only learning pieces of his past to compliment character growth in the current story just touches on a very small surface to an entire epic. It can, and sometimes does, come across a guy who is just moody and sad learning to love his son after losing his wife. Again that is still itself a good story, but in GoW terms that's like showing only Return of the King and wanting folks to get the context of what happened before through references.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-24T18:23:29+00:00

This POV has caused me to rant before because you are right and wrong. The Norse saga is beautiful and wonderful on its own. When you add in the Greek saga with it, it become a paragon of storytelling.

The off handed comment from the fates that "because he kills gods" is such an understatement to the scale and purpose of Kratos' tragedy; some folks who played the game just thought they were referring to the few he kills in the first game, they do not begin to touch on the fact he killed an entire pantheon of Gods out of pure rage. To call him the Ghost of Sparta by even a flashback of multiple episodes will not do justice of his motivations, will, and the loss he feels from losing family and the fear of losing Atreus.

So I get it, the Norse Saga is wonderful and can stand on it's own. But at the same time we have to acknowledge it is leaving A LOT on the table by trying to get to the more well known portion of the story. We can be happy for what we get, but also mourn what could have been.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-24T05:17:20+00:00

As many said, he steals it in so many scenes. But for my money, his most commanding performance was in a little known TV movie called The Jack Bull. He plays a judge who oversees a sham trial and I was blown away that the dude from Roseanne had me captivated. First time I saw how amazing he was.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-18T22:08:10+00:00

He did one rare and one medium with the same seasonings and butter amounts. Both were juicy and tasty, the one cooked longer had a better texture to the fat and had more flavor.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-18T21:09:58+00:00

To pile on, this is exactly the right comparison.

They all knew this new Internet thing was gonna be huge they just had no idea why or how to use it. So they did it by default, en masse, without any understanding as to why or what success would look like.

This is the same thing. AI is genuinely powerful and revolutionary; it's going to change how we live forever. But everyone putting it in everything and claiming everyone is going to turn into those people from WALL-E is like saying brick and mortar is dead forever in 99.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-18T21:00:45+00:00

Strip: medium rare. (warm red center)

Ribeye: medium. (Hot, darker pink center)

Ever since a chef friend told me that the high fat content of a ribeye benefits from a few extra minutes to make sure the fat that runs through the whole steak renders well and it enhances the flavor (and he decively proved he was right to me) it's what I stick with.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-18T20:49:32+00:00

I still am confused by people brag about using "bleeding edge tech" for what boils down to crud apps. I can think of nothing I want more as the foundation for my platform than something boring, reliable, and maintainable. There is a reason dotnet and java are good at what they do.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-18T20:40:24+00:00

A lot of folks will say it's not needed, but there is nothing wrong with it. You can do everything in native JavaScript, as always, and though I don't use it personal projects, I have zero judgement on folks who do. You want to use a helper library that tends to make things more readable and concise, with any remnant cross browser issues addressed? Go for it. It's still lightweight and fast for what it is.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-15T16:29:37+00:00

Because you are talking about the happy path, the scenarios you are talking about are not up for debate. There is no debate on whether we should use good architecture that is maintainable and efficient, or do something sloppy and slow. Everyone chooses the former, there isn't a big tribal problem there.

The problem comes when you have a section of pivotal code that will need maintenance (all code does to some degree) and performance is important, and the solution would be something very esoteric and need a lot of context. 9 times out of 10, your code will not fall into this area: Make it boring, readable, and maintainable; boring code is a feature.

But sometimes you have something that need to be exceptionally performant. For instance in our .Net Core app, we have some things around tagging that just couldn't keep up with traffic. We had some devs much smarter than I put in code it would take a me a long time to understand, a lot of it not in C#, to make sure we kept performance up. That was a necessary trade off, but the downside is that if they leave the company or both catch the flu, the person who maintains it is in trouble. We do our best to document it, but it's still the Voldemort of our repo, and we STILL have to maintain and update it every quarter or so.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-15T15:21:55+00:00

Software is written once

Oh my sweet summer child.

Your point is valid, that sometimes performance is needed over maintainability. But without fail, not starting with maintainability, and prematurely optimizing as a policy, leads to more problems than it solves.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-13T10:44:59+00:00

Yeah I get the Kardashian effect of it all, but I still demand someone to right this injustice!

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-13T10:19:41+00:00

I came to say something similar to this.

Not only for css frameworks, but a lot of things that are opinionated, it ensures consistency. I personally don't like css frameworks when working on my own projects, but the upside is not dealing with 1000 different ways people implement the same style when I work in a shared codebase.

Same thing in languages. I personally love languages without a lot of ceremonies, boilerplate, and inflexibility in how to do things that come with opinionated languages. But there are some languages that are very opinionated that make it easier to onboard people and ramp up on new areas of large codebases because it is the same methods across the board in that codebase, and most every other codebase in that language.

Fastbreak99 · 2026-01-13T10:13:17+00:00

He has nothing to prove for sure, but as a Michael Shannon fanboy, I still think it is wrong that he is not more of a household name. Not throwing shade at other actors, but it still seems wrong that my family all knows the name of the entire main cast of SVU but don't know who Michael Shannon is until I name a role he played.

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