AnyOldName3

That’s a proprietary software problem rather than a being connected to the internet problem. One of the send-a-notification-when-it’s-done devices I set up took about as much effort as setting the right time on a phone alarm about ten times because the device’s firmware was open source with no companies’ bullshit involved, so all I had to do was navigate to the right page in Home Assistant and pick the right phone from a dropdown and the right even for the notification to trigger on from a dropdown. That’s not wildly different from picking the right time from a dropdown on a phone.

Again, that’s specific to it being proprietary software. I’ve got some devices in my home that are connected to the local network (but not the internet), and have configured Home Assistant (which I’ve got running on an old desktop PC) to send a notification to my phone when it detects that those devices report that they’re finished with what they do. That’ll keep working until I turn off the Home Assistant server or replace the devices.

That’s more effort per wash instead of being something that only needs setting up one and then will work forever. Also, it’s common for post-90s appliances to include sensors and vary the cycle time based on how dirty the water gets. Except for the data privacy and security concerns, which are mainly because it’s proprietary software rather than inherent in Internet-connected devices, there’s no advantage to using your phone timer over getting a notification.

Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time

when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It’s not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it’s a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.

And it gets worse when combined with Rowling’s later comments that she’d always imagined Hermione was black.

This isn’t a hypothetical thread. Rowling’s Pottermore blog had this post https://web.archive.org/web/20170929062836/https://www.pottermore.com/features/to-spew-or-not-to-spew-hermione-granger-and-the-pitfalls-of-activism (which has since been removed, but only after it had been up for years) full of slavery apologia and with the premise that whether or not slavery is bad, Hermione’s actions to try and stop it (which amounted to asking people to stop having slaves) were worse.

And don’t worry, if some of your readers are so strongly anti-slavery that they think the book is ridiculing the characters ridiculing the anti-slavery character, you can host a guest post on your blog explaining that it’s supposed to be pro-slavery and anyone getting any other message is wrong.

I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.

Unlike Reddit, it’s possible to edit the link a post links to after the fact, so it’s possible to swap in an uncropped link later instead of just removing the post.

The context: the UK ended slavery within the empire by taking out a huge loan to buy all the slaves in the empire, then freeing them. The loan wasn’t fully paid off until recently, so UK taxpayers were effectively paying for money that had been given to slave owners. However, it quickly and decisively put a stop to slavery in a lot of the world without much fuss or objection, when it otherwise could have triggered wars.

Cultural appropriation is something like McDonald’s advertising a new Indian burger and it’s just a beefburger with some chillies in it, i.e. someone’s attempting to gain from a bastardised caracature of the culture that wouldn’t be something someone from that culture would participate in. Right wing pundits intentionally misrepresented it as things like eating a traditional dish from another culture to make it sound stupid so people would dismiss it, and then people who’d only heard the misrepresentation but wanted to do the right thing or at least appear to be doing the right thing started acting like it was immoral to participate in any culture you weren’t born into.

Premature optimisation often makes things slower rather than faster. E.g. if something’s written to have the theoretical optimal Big O complexity class, that might only break even around a million elements, and be significantly slower for a hundred elements where everything fits in L1 and the simplest implemention possible is fine. If you don’t know the kind of situations the implementation will be used in yet, you can’t know whether the optimisation is really an optimisation. If it’s only used a few times on a few elements, then it doesn’t matter either way, but if it’s used loads but only ever on a small dataset, it can make things much worse.

Also, it’s common that the things that end up being slow in software are things the developer didn’t expect to be slow (otherwise they’d have been careful to avoid them). Premature optimisation will only ever affect the things a developer expects to be slow.

While you can generally also earn them through gameplay, it’s normal for lootboxes to be available for sale, either directly with money or via an intermediate currency that can be bought with money (which is generally specifically to skirt anti-gambling law or to force you to buy an amount of the intermediate currency that doesn’t exactly match anything you can buy with it).

I think it’s possible that loot boxes (and real-world equivalents like trading cards) don’t violate existing anti-child-gambling laws, but if so, that’s a flaw in those laws that needs to be fixed rather than an indication that they’re totally fine and should be allowed to exist in their current form. They cost money and give an unpredictable reward where different options have different perceived value, so they’re quite clearly gambling to anyone who defines it based on its characteristics rather than an individual territory’s specific legalese.

They stock things they make more profit on. If the margins on sugar water are much higher, then they don’t need to sell as much to make it worth stocking it instead of juice. If the margins are higher because consumers are unaware they’re being sold a cheaper-to-manufacture product for the same price because the packaging is deceptive to anyone who hasn’t been told they have to look or is in too much of a rush to have time to look, then shops end up full of sugar water that few consumers actually want.

Pre-mixed 100% juice drinks are readily available (depending on where you live). You don’t have to buy several juices and mix them yourself if you’re thirsty when walking past a shop as long as the shop stocks them.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t create a society where buying juice requires having and using a skill.

You can cut strong juice with other juice instead of with water and HFCS. Mixing passion fruit and orange juice at a level where it still mostly tastes of passion fruit makes something nice and not so expensive that it has to be sold at a different price to other orange juice.

TOML’s design is based on the idea that INI was a good format. This was always going to cause problems, as INI was never good, and never a format. In reality, it was hundreds of different formats people decided to use the same file extension for, all with their own incompatible quirks and rarely any ability to identify which variant you were using and therefore which quirks would need to be worked around.

The changes in the third panel were inevitable, as people have data with nested structure that they’re going to want to represent, and without significant whitespace, TOML was always going to need some kind of character to delimit nesting.

I reckon it depends on how warm someone’s home is and how good their circulation is. If I don’t have shoes on indoors, then for half the year it feels like my feet have been stabbed because they get so cold (slippers are not enough), but I don’t wear the same shoes indoors as outdoors. I suspect that if we set the heating higher and the house wasn’t constructed in a way that makes the floor always much colder than a few inches above the floor, this wouldn’t be a problem.