Thank god Alton Brown is still cool. My first TV cooking heroes were Brown and Jamie Oliver, and I couldn’t have taken it if both of them had turned into soulless, money-grubbing idiots.

A couple of years ago I tried pre-butchering my turkey and it really works. It’s useful to be able to cook the bird in one to one-and-a-half hours instead of all fucking day, but the main benefit is that you can cook the white meat until it’s 155-160F and the dark meat until it’s 195-200F, and both kinds of meat taste great. When you stuff a bird and cook it whole, you have to get the stuffing inside up to a safe temperature, which means both the white meat and the dark meat have to be turned into shoe leather. Also with pre-butchering you can make stock out of the carcass the night before and it makes the most fantastic gravy.

“Awww, that’s so …”
“I’m thankful for line drawings.”

I don’t know if this is the place for this, but god damn is the original Billy Joel song cringeworthy. “Making love to his tonic and gin”, something absolutely nobody ever says (it’s “gin and tonic”). “Talking to Davy who’s still in the navy” is another example of mangling shit to fit the rhyme scheme. And it’s all just a song about how awesome and better-than-this he, Billy Joel, is (“man, what are you doin’ here?”).

Would be the most lyrically embarrassing song of all time if not for “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

Edit: I guess this is not the place for this lol.

Nah, I don’t want them thinking they’re influencing my actions in any way whatsoever.

I took an Uber a few months ago and the guy had apparently just learned to drive. The entire time he was always mashing either the gas pedal or the brake, so it was constant speeding up and slowing down. I tried to tell him that he could sometimes just have his foot on neither pedal to cruise and get a smoother ride, but he looked at me like I’d just grown another head.

I was in a car a few years ago with my cousin and her husband who was driving; they were both around 60 years old at the time. He was insanely close to the car in front while we were doing over 50 mph and my cousin was screaming at him to back off. He got irate and said “but I’m maintaining a one-car-length distance!” It’s hard to believe that a person could drive for 45 fucking years and never have learned what a safe following distance is, but there you go.

Especially in the US where almost noone leaves a good gap.

Part of the dilemma (at least on multi-lane highways) is that if you leave a proper gap someone will cut in front of you and then you won’t have a proper gap any more.

this was a sure ticket to lose the driving license

Thank you stranger. This story has warmed my heart on a cold morning.

I’m a school bus driver and I get tailgaters like this all the time. They don’t seem to grasp that I absolutely cannot see them at all when they’re that close, not in my mirrors nor even through the windows in the back door. It’s extra fun when they do it in a 15mph school zone and lay on the horn for good measure. Like yeah dude, I’m going to speed through a school zone in a fucking school bus so you can get to the red light up ahead five seconds sooner, thanks for letting me know.

I started my career with Visual Basic (3!) and I appreciated the loose typing because it meant I could get going and actually have something running quickly as a newbie. A few years later I switched to C# and saw how an entire class of errors disappeared because of the strong typing. Both have their place, depending on the skill level of the coder and the needs of the application.

Rich kids get their cars bought for them by their parents and it’s not usually a Corvette. A $90K car with no down would have a monthly payment of $1500 or thereabouts, just barely affordable for a young person with a shitty job. Having your puny net worth tied up in a sad “super” car is definitely poor people shit.

Where I live it seems that all the Corvettes are owned by young men who live with their parents. Shitty jobs and their whole paycheck goes to the car’s bank note.

Jeeps are unbelievable pieces of shit, overpriced and unreliable. But at least I understand the appeal of the basic Jeep form factor with the 4WD and the removable top and doors and whatnot; I love driving with the wind in my face and it’s probably nice to be at least theoretically capable of a little offroading.

What I don’t understand is people buying Jeep-branded cars. Then you’re just getting an overpriced and unreliable piece of shit car.

When was the last time Switzerland actively made first strikes

I’m not sure, but I know halberds were involved.

They got rid of the exploding roads, though. Or so they say.

I remember when the original name for the invasion of Iraq was “Operation Iraqi Liberation” until somebody decided that was a little too obvious an acronym.

I dunno, Harleys aren’t cheap.

It’s funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There’s no compiler that ensures that a method’s name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable’s name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says “you shouldn’t use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading”. And this is hardly academic: I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about “self-documenting” code.

There are no comments in the code

At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a “code smell”, a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It’s an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

I randomly got a job recommendation from one of the sites that looked for exactly my programming skill set. I was interested until I saw what company it was – Palantir. GOD DAMN IT. On the plus side, most of these job listings are fake anyway, so it was probably just a phishing attempt of sorts based on my resume. At least the AI isn’t smart enough yet to know they should not mention Palantir with me.