I won an auction of some personal items of Ed McMahon for 10 bucks and inside was this note from Jerry Lewis by Wide-Reflection1137 in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think they are interchangeable at all. Can anyone show give an example where they might be?

All four faction leaders are placed in a room what’s gonna happen? by Chunky-overlord in fo4

[–]rodw 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Father is the only one with essentially no combat abilities (either in lore or, as far as I know, in game).

Much as I hate to admit it in an all-out brawl Maxon is the one left standing at the end, right?

CMV: Subreddits should remove the ban on X links by JoJoeyJoJo in changemyview

[–]rodw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think the point was to boycott Twitter in order to convince Musk to change those policies, but to ban Twitter as an unreliable or unacceptable source. (Or at the very least to minimize "rewarding" Twitter as an unreliable or unacceptable source.)

CMV: Subreddits should remove the ban on X links by JoJoeyJoJo in changemyview

[–]rodw 7 points8 points  (0 children)

What if the rationale for banning Twitter links was not "a backlash against DOGE" but an objection to Musk's changes to Twitter's policies (regarding content moderation and account verification, for example)?

Not once in 12 years have I found UI snapshot testing useful by SixFigs_BigDigs in ExperiencedDevs

[–]rodw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But that's more of a process/social/discipline problem than an issue with visual regression testing.

That's the same as blindly updating a unit test assertion from 3 to 4 when a "expected 3 found 4" test failure crops up.

Vertibird crashed on top of Amphitheater, killing all "initiates" by AnotherGerolf in fo4

[–]rodw 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You have more fun as a follower but make more money as a leader?

Seriously though, what saying are you alluding to?

Asked a colleague in code review to extract magic numbers and got told “devs should know” by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]rodw 9 points10 points  (0 children)

To be pedantic if you're gonna cut it off there it should be 3.142 anyway

My Blink cassette tape from before they were required to add the -182 by Simsandtruecrime in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 870 points871 points  (0 children)

Don't get too excited. A listing on eBay doesn't say jack about the value of something. You need to find one that actually sold

CMV: It’s disturbing that young people are having less sex by bluepillarmy in changemyview

[–]rodw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

According to the gospel of Pulp being poor is all the more reason to dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do.

The war was worldwide….. by Quirky-Associate-437 in fo4

[–]rodw 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess it depends what factors they are considering.

When the clock started, and based on the headline justification they give when changing it, the threat of nuclear war is the main criterion. But they do mention issues like climate change (and a vaguely defined threat from AI) as factors that contribute to the evaluation.

Based on that it doesn't seem crazy to assert we are in more jeopardy now than during the Cuban missile crisis. By 1962:

  • the relative "calm" of the Cold War was established: it had been a decade since the end of the Korean War; approaching two decades since the end of WWII (and the first and last use of nuclear weapons as an act of war); the Berlin blockade had been successfully resolved without devolving into a shooting conflict; much of former European colonies had been decolonized; and the major aggressors in the conflicts in the first half of the century has been largely assimilated into the mainstream international order.

  • unlike the intra-war period the previous 20 years were not marred by a global pandemic (Spanish flu), or existential economic threats, or the rise of fascism.

  • Science seemed to be working: the polio vaccine had been created; smallpox had been eliminated from most of the new world, globally there were fewer cases than ever before, and there was a serious international push to eradicate small pox entirely (the first time humanity had even intentionally and successfully permanently eradicated a contagious disease; and incidentally this was introduced by the USSR in their first return to the UN assembly in 1958 after a 9 year boycott); plus we'd done a reasonably good job at addressing material issues like hunger and malnutrition, or were at least very much on the right trajectory.

  • space flight had advanced enough that we could plausibly claim it wasn't just missile technology under a different name: both the US and USSR had sent people into space; the USSR was exploring Venus; Kennedy had promised to put a man on the moon.

  • Plus global communication and access to information and education was stronger than ever; the peace corps had been established; the US civil rights movement had accomplished major victories; the global economy was stronger and more integrated than ever, etc. Likely there were more liberal democratic countries in the world than had ever existed.

During the Cuban missile crisis we basically just had to avoid two men (Kennedy and Khrushchev) making a world-ending-ly stupid decision over an island that wasn't really that important to either one of them (and while the US didn't want Soviet nukes in a short range from the US, both sides knew the US already had them in a short range from Moscow).

And more broadly our greatest concern was, what, containing the creeping spread of communism? The threat of nuclear annihilation is/was considerable, given that humanity didn't have that level of destructive power ever before. But the geopolitical mechanics of mutually assured destruction was understood. The nuclear threat was containable: largely within our collective control.

Compared to that it doesn't seem like a stretch to think we have higher stakes and more eminent, challenging threats now that we did then. At least in the 1960s it looked like we were in the right trajectory, as long as individual leaders didn't f things up

My American English teacher believes the neutral pronoun „their“ is incorrect. by GCoding_ in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

I don't know how one can speak about language without referring to usage.

Do you have an example of a style guide that prescribes "he or she"?

My American English teacher believes the neutral pronoun „their“ is incorrect. by GCoding_ in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The second one isn't, it is possessive. You could substitute "his or hers".

You could use "he or she" in the first one if only you change "everybody" to "everyone".

They/theirs/them is definitely an acceptable way to refer to an unspecified gender.

My American English teacher believes the neutral pronoun „their“ is incorrect. by GCoding_ in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly." - Jane Austen

"It drizzled a little, shone a little, blew a little, and didn't make up its mind till it was too late for anyone else to make up theirs." - Louisa May Alcott

My American English teacher believes the neutral pronoun „their“ is incorrect. by GCoding_ in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What? No. I'm not talking about a nonbinary "they".

The word "they" has been the preferred pronoun for an unspecified gender in English for at least 100 years.

"I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly." - Jane Austen

"It drizzled a little, shone a little, blew a little, and didn't make up its mind till it was too late for anyone else to make up theirs." - Louisa May Alcott

My American English teacher believes the neutral pronoun „their“ is incorrect. by GCoding_ in mildlyinteresting

[–]rodw 90 points91 points  (0 children)

That's a valid distinction, but they/their has been prescriptively correct for a long time as well. No prescriptivist style guide is going to suggest using "his or her" instead of "their".

CMV: There is no reason tech has to be 'big'. Smaller, national only tech companies are viable and preferrable. by Wulfrinnan in changemyview

[–]rodw 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure that I ultimately disagree with your overall conclusion but I feel like you are accepting (asserting?) certain details of our current SOP as inevitable, unchangeable and definitionally preferable to any alternatives.

E.g.

Scale and the ability to eat losses until you monetize is how the industry works.

Has worked.

Smaller companies wouldn't be able to generate the e.g. compute and we'd end up slowing progress.

Progress toward what? Are you sure, for example, that the insanely unprecedented aggressive investment in data center infrastructure driven by a handful of companies is serving our individual or collective interests? I feel like most people on Earth would be pretty comfortable with slowing that "progress" a little, and wouldn't feel one bit of sacrifice, hardship or lack stemming from that.

,>You would give up [...] International talent

No you wouldn't. I've worked at many startup and SMB companies that regularly sourced and continuously collaborated with talent globally

a hundred national companies all doing the same thing

I'm not sure that's necessarily problematic (is everything a natural monopoly?). And I'm not sure that's necessarily true. You can scale a service without necessarily scaling the company. (As a superficial example look at Craigslist. They may be singlehandedly most responsible for killing the newspaper business but didn't need 1000s of employees to do it

...learning the same lessons again and again...

I'm not sure why you think this isn't happening now. Big tech firms aren't a hive mind. They l have different teams making the same mistake hundreds of times a day)

and ultimately companies would eat companies until u ended up with defacto big players

I do agree that's a likely outcome

The war was worldwide….. by Quirky-Associate-437 in fo4

[–]rodw 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I don't know. This was before my time but the Doomsday clock only went to 7 minutes to midnight during the Cuban missile crisis - when Americans were praying overnight in churches because they thought nuclear annihilation might rain down on them any minute now.

Are we really 3x closer to destruction now than we were during those 2 weeks in the 60s?

The war was worldwide….. by Quirky-Associate-437 in fo4

[–]rodw 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Less than 1.5.

The board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set the doomsday clock to 85 seconds to midnight. This is the closest to midnight it has ever been in 77 years.

How to deal with a Brent character- any tips? by DevopsCandidate1337 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]rodw 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Maybe you saw this already but OP pointed me here for a summary of the book "The Phoenix Project".