Lovable Sidekick

The old school method of learning a programming language, database, framework or whatever was to read books and take classes, do a series of exercises that teach you how to use the features, and the errors you get if you don’t do it right. Then you write code that way for like 10-15 years.

The Information Age method is to find some sample code, copypaste into an editor and hit Compile, then paste compile errors into google and fix them until there are no more. Then hit Run and copypaste/fix runtime errors until there are no more runtime errors. Old-schoolers used to call this hacking, but now it’s called not having time to deeply learn the hot new thing because before you do you’ll have to start over with the next hot new thing.

Even as a nongamer I appreciate the stylistic aspects of gaming computers, but tbh if I were going to buy one I’d probably put the money into better specs and a plain case.

I remember when all we had was the hamster dance and zombocom.

I was lucky, my worst childhood injury was breaking a toe on the bottom of a swimming pool I jumped into.

Yes. Yes it is.

This brought to my mind Battery of Hate, a 1933 sci fi story by John W. Campbell, about an inventor who comes up with a super-powerful battery and uses it to power an electric airplane. A battle ensues with an industrial tycoon determined to quash the invention. I remember it being a pretty well written story for the period. Wish I could find it online - amazing that it’s not on gutenberg, given that it was published 92 years ago.

I heard there’s 104 days of summer vacation, til school comes along just to end it.

I’m in Seattle too. Bite your tongue, today is perfect!

This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, but he isn’t known to have said it. Could be based on a similar statement about Paris by an English actor named James Quin in the 1700s.

It’s always fun and games until somebody calls the cops.

Completely disagree. Summer is my favorite season and would remain so in the complete absence of PR.

This post reminds me of a friend in the ad business who told me people only think iced drinks taste better because in the early 1900s some advertising genius created a campaign to convince people of that. No, sorry, cold drinks are more refreshing. The ancient Romans thought so too, and used to haul ice down from the Alps, centuries before the advertising industry even existed.

I’m probably remembering it wrong, it was a long time ago. It definitely always either won or tied but could never lose, because it knew the right responses to every move. No, it didn’t cheat lol.

This reminds me of one of my very first programs, a tic-tac-toe game I wrote in high school. It displayed hardcoded grids of Xs and Os and blanks very similar to what’s shown here. This approach worked because of the much more limited move possibilities. The program could always win if it made the first move, and always win or tie if the human moved first, depending on if the human made mistakes. I wish I still had the code.

Do you want to get rid of the beard? Do what you want.

Flour I buy from Costco costs 90 cents/lb, salt and yeast for one loaf are less than a nickel, and gas to run the oven (including preheat time) is like 15 cents where I live. So maybe $1.15-1.20 per loaf. I’m talking about the basic loaf of bread I make all the time. Brioche etc. will be more, and you can get as fancy as you want, but those items correspondingly cost more from a bakery too. Doing a little of the actual math, eggs are abnormally expensive right now but say $1 each, a cup and a half of milk from Safeway would add another $.65, so call it $2.80 per loaf for fancy bread that would cost 2x-3x that much already made.

OP specifically asked for a random line but everybody’s posting carefully selected lines.

Overall I’d say pretty accurate.

Nice to hear that about Poland. In the US people love to have DoorDash deliver them fast food at double the price so they can spend more time consuming entertainment.

I’ve been making bread regularly for years. A 1-lb loaf costs me about 90 cents USD for ingredients and 15 cents to run the oven. “Nice” Safeway bakery loaves that roughly correspond to what I make cost anywhere from $3-$6, and the whole process takes me 10-15 minutes of actual effort (including cleanup). I don’t count rising and baking times because I’m doing other stuff.

Having also consumed a lot of packaged food (I’m not a crusader against it) I would say cooking meals from store-bought ingredients costs around half as much. Home-growing vegetables adds a huge amount more work. I did a garden for 2 years, many years ago - it was more of a fun project. On the scale I did it I never felt the hours of labor paid off dollar-wise. And what with mulch and other things gardening is something you can pretty much spend as much money on as you want lol.

Fun fact: if you go to the deli counter and get them to slice meat for you it’s about half the price of the store-brand deli packs on the shelves, which are the exact same meats, sliced and packaged by the same people. The only difference is you stand there waiting for a minute while they do it instead just grabbing it off the shelf. The high price of even marginal convenience.

Also most people can’t throttle their work hours as needed like that. We cook during free time - free as in both speech and beer.