I wasn’t aware my mediocrity was on display. 😅

Honestly, I liked the professor. When he had time to teach something he was clearly interested in, he did a great job of connecting. He didn’t get to teach us OOP though because there was a staffing emergency. The person we did get normally taught Hardware, so he was basically just reading aloud the textbook. Poor guy.

And you’re right, the professor did let us know that there was going to be a change of requirements partway through. But it wouldn’t be a good lesson if he told us what was going to change, although he did give some examples from previous times he’d taught the course.

A lot of people got burned when the change came. For my part I thought I did pretty okay, the refactor didn’t go perfectly but it was better than if I hadn’t been prepared. But I’ve also written a bunch of really gross objects that served no purpose just because they might change later. As anything is, it’s all about finding that happy medium

I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager.

I thought that too, but it turns out I just got fat

That’s a fair assessment. It’s kind of like the rule for premature optimization: don’t.

With experience you might get some intuition about when it’s good to lean into inheritance. We were definitely lacking experience at that point though.

OOP is a pretty powerful paradigm, which means it’s also easy to provide enough rope to hang yourself with. See also just about any other meme here about OOP

There’s a couple things at play here when you talk to people online.

Ultimately, there’s a difference between feeling attacked and being attacked. Both are common in online discussions.

Why do people attack people?

The anonymity and distance of the internet makes it easier for people to share strong opinions - for better or worse. There’s a certain amount of psychology around the design of social media that pushes people towards confrontation.

Sometimes aggression is the default state for people. Depending on your world view that might be either sad or necessary.

That said, I believe there’s a difference between a justified attack and an unjustified one. If someone is spreading hate, we all owe it to the community to fuck that person up with our words. If someone shares a harmless opinion then there isn’t much call for a personal attack.

Why do I feel attacked?

If you feel attacked on the internet, there’s ultimately two possibilities: you’re being attacked or you’re mistaken. For the sake of this section, let’s say you’re mistaken.

Non-verbal communication is an essential part of communication between humans, and is something that’s hard to replicate in text. Ultimately, our non-verbal cues set an expected tone.

Sometimes when writing we recognize this and use a tonal indicator to set expectations. Emoji 🙄, gestures *rolls eyes* and, appending flags /s are all ways that we might set tone. These three examples all indicate “sarcasm” which for many people seems to be the default way to express themselves.

Sarcasm in particular is problematic because it often inverts the meaning of what was said. The phrase, “oh yeah, brilliant idea” has opposite interpretations if you’re being sarcastic. Sometimes the writer assumes the reader will know what they intended because they were feeling sarcastic when they typed it. Of course, as a reader we have no way of knowing what the writer’s feelings were at the time of writing.

Another element at play here is that a good deal of conversation on the internet is debate. Some people equate disagreement with condemnation, so if your feelings are hurt by that it’s common to lash out. Many debates on the internet start civilly enough and then deteriorate to name calling and cursing in short order. It’s wise to try to be the bigger person and assume no malice, because once it gets out it’s hard to put back.

Statistics and Bias

You probably had the right idea that only about 1% of users are active commenters. Similar to that, there’s also a phenomenon where the most vocal (and often inflammatory) users represent a similarly small portion of the group.

Our brains are evolved for survival, so they pay special attention to negative stimuli. Basically, they’re always looking for trouble, and if you’re looking for trouble you’re likely to find it.

What this ultimately means is that we remember the bad things far more memorably than the good things. It also means that even if a small percentage of people are attacking others, because they dominate the conversation we start to believe that everyone carries that opinion. But as you point out, 99% of users aren’t even commenting, so we really don’t have a good grasp on what the larger population is like.

It also means that if you exercise your block list, you don’t have to put in too much work to remove the most hateful people from your feed.

Closing

Anyway, I think you have the right idea. It sounds like you don’t go looking for fights.

I try to keep a similar philosophy. If I disagree with someone then I’ll seek to empathize or educate. However, if someone is vocal about my erasure or directing hate and violence towards people then I’ll let them have it. I figure those people are looking for trouble and by golly I’ll give it to them - it’s always morally correct to punch a nazi.

Most of my college coursework was around OOP. That said, they actually did a pretty lousy job of explaining it in a practical sense, so since we were left to figure it out ourselves a lot of our assignments ended up looking like this.

At the end of the program, our capstone project was to build a full stack app. They did a pretty good job simulating a real professional experience: we all worked together on requirements gathering and database design, then were expected to build our own app.

To really drive home the real world experience, the professor would change the requirements partway through the project. Which is a total dick move, but actually a good lesson on its own.

Anyway, this app was mostly about rendering a bunch of different views, and something subtly would change that ended up affecting all views. After the fact, the professor would say something to the effect of “If you used good objects, you’ll only have to make the change in one place.”

This of course is only helpful if you really appreciated the power of OOP and planned it from the start. Most of us were flying by the seat of our pants, so it was usually a ton of work to get those changes in

My dad recently got hearing aids. The technology has come a long way. His are bluetooth and pair with his phone.

Back in the day of you wanted to ignore someone you’d just turn off your hearing aids. He uses his to listen to music now.

I’m sure there might be some practical difference between hearing aids and airbuds, but it does seem like there’s a lot of overlap

It’s funny you say that, because I think the cart is what most diehard fans of the first game disliked. It replaces the dungeon crawl. I suppose the Stress system gets a significant rework, but it keeps the spirit of the original

I think it’s a big step forward though

I’m a big fan of Darkest Dungeon, but I’m also a chronic restarter. Building a roster of heroes is fun, but permadeath is so punishing. I have a similar problem in XCOM where you spend so long in a campaign building up your roster, then you lose your ace squad and the whole thing unravels

I really enjoyed Darkest Dungeon 2. There are some radical changes, but it still hits the core vibe and offers a more roguelike experience. Even if I fail my run in spectacular fashion, I’m able to start over on the next one. Far less frustrating than a whole new campaign

Oh sure, I don’t disagree with that.

But I also don’t think a group of teenage soccer players are the people who deserve to receive extrajudicial violence

Sounds like you need an ice cream eating partner.

I volunteer as tribute

My general experience has been that furries are people, and people aren’t homogeneous - so even if they share some traits it’s not fair to make blanket assumptions.

I’m reserving judgment until I hear what the joke is. Not really enough to go on otherwise.

Reading articles like this you always want to be careful. People are often pretty quick to pick sides when it’s about whether or not a mob was justified.

There’s a genocide being perpetrated by Israel, but not all jews are Israeli, and even if they were you can’t really hold individuals abroad culpable for the sins of their government.

So this mob is racially motivated and engaged in terrorism - what else do you call turning an armed mob loose on a bunch of teenagers? This will surely come back to say that Palestine supporters are terrorists, and now you’re right back to lumping everyone into a group.

There would be a certain amount of irony that goes with racially profiling a racist mob. Too bad that means lumping a whole people in with the shitheels who’d be prepared to threaten kids with knives

This seems to be about oppressing women while uplifting the creepiest sort of men.

To give the maximum benefit of the doubt (which frankly, I don’t think they deserve), there’s evidence to suggest that birth defects become more likely as the mother gets older. I’ve always understood that to happen in women of a more advanced age though, 30 is too young to be a cutoff.

Also, women can’t marry older than 25? What kind of bass ackwards handmaid’s tale bullshit is that? If you want to have a family I guess you’ve got to hitch your wagon to any horse you can get your hands on. They’re so fortunate though that the law doesn’t apply to men, so they’ll have plenty of creepy fifty year old dudes to choose from.

I think as a rule we should start sterilizing politicians who endorse sterilization. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Of course, a hysterectomy is quite an invasive procedure compared to a vasectomy, so maybe in the interest of equitability we should begin with castration.

Anyway, this kind of rhetoric isn’t really for women - they just happen to be the ones affected by it. For the men that this appeals to, they’re probably believe they’re more likely to attract a virginal beauty if they start removing women’s options. It’s truly abhorrent.

Answer unclear, try again later

This one is completely different from your typical ARPG, but I’m going to recommend Noita.

It’s a 2d game where you play as a wizard off spelunking. The magic system is rad as heck, you find wands with spell slots in them, and spells that you can put in the wands. You can rearrange and combine spells to get some truly bizarre effects

I’ve killed myself in a dozen hilarious ways trying to make the perfect wand. It never gets old

I heard a report recently that suggested that Microsoft Recall (the program to take a screenshot of your PC every few seconds to process in AI at huge ecological damage for dubious benefit to the user) is an unlisted dependency for the file explorer.

What that means is if you somehow manage to remove Recall entirely, then you won’t be able to view your files.

And sure, they’ll probably fix that. And they’ll probably also include a “disable AI” checkbox hidden eight levels deep in the control panel to give the user a small sense of control over their own machine - which will turn itself back on with each update because Windows

I don’t think you’ll be able to actually remove AI from Windows. At least, not easily, and not permanently. Your plan to switch to Linux seems like it’ll be less headache in the long run

I feel like if I stocked up, I’d then feel more tempted to shop as my supplies dwindle. I also find that if I have a large supply of something, I use it faster than expected.

That said, there’s a few replacement parts of things I use regularly that I have no idea where I’d shop for something compatible physically. Things like produce savers for my fridge and filters for my air purifier

Math is one of those funny things that’s always all around you even if you’re ignorant of it. The ancient Greeks calculated the circumference of the world to an impressive degree of accuracy and they didn’t even have calculators - they just looked at some triangles and made some guesses.

Do you need to know the circumference of the world in your day-to-day life? Probably not. But it’s cool as heck knowing that you can figure that out by applying the right formulae.

If you know math and you’re faced with a problem that can be solved with math, then you can solve the problem. If you don’t know math and are faced with the same problem, you might not know how or if it can be solved.

Your specific question: “Are there any upsides to go beyond everyday math?” is an interesting question because of the implication of what ‘everyday math’ is. Depending on our professions or interests, your definition of everyday math might be radically different from someone else. Numeracy is enough to go on for a lot of people, which often implies arithmetic. But hey, fractions are always coming up in places, and if you add algebra to the mix you can start solving some interesting problems.

Some level of applied mathematics are used in all sorts of fields. Construction, Finance, Medicine, Software, Logistics, Conservation, Cooking, you name it. And the beautiful thing about a lot of these cases is that you don’t need to know very complex math in order to follow along an established procedure. For instance, I don’t need to know how to find the proof for compound interest, but I can easily look up a formula so I can make some projections of my investment plan.

Anyway, long story, but math is one of those ‘use it or lose it’ things. And if you’ve lost the math, then you start to be unable to see where math can be used. Keeping the math alive or rekindling it opens you up to possibilities that you might otherwise be ignorant of. Learning math for its own sake is fine, but finding ways to use the math you’ve learned is what helps keep it alive, and broadens your own horizons too.

Speaking from the purely meritocratic view that capitalists take, I’d hazard that if the wages were similar then men would still get better employment because they’re less likely to take time off for menstruation.

I suppose that’s only really a benefit if you’re employing salaried workers though, so if you’re hourly they might actually be more likely to hire women because then individually they’d each get fewer hours. Depending on legislation, that might interfere with their requirements to pay benefits or something. We often see that businesses prefer to employ four employees at 10-hours per week as opposed to one employee at 40-hours because individually the part-timers are less expensive.

There’s always going to be some way to be exploited.

My wife and I have this conversation from time to time that women should get an extra week off every month to deal with their period. She has a pretty rough go when she’s menstruating, and I totally get it. She’s not even a particularly exceptional case and she has a nasty period. So many people have it even worse off, I don’t understand how they keep showing up for work.

I’m anti-discrimination and believe in equality, so honestly I think everyone should get an extra week off. Men and post-menopausal women should be equally entitled to worker benefits.

Some people think that’s pretty radical. “How are we supposed to get anything done if we have to pay for people who aren’t here a quarter of the time?” Well, the average CEO’s compensation package would probably pay for each of their workers to take a week off each month. And they’re usually not even in the office even a quarter of the time.

Something tells me that if we strove to be more equitable, they could afford it.

Didn’t they only announce the mascot like two weeks ago?

This has taken longer than most porn sensations to establish themselves, I’m a little disappointed in the community. Then again, she’s an underage anime girl, so I guess disappointment is the default state.