The long, drawn out metaphorical explanation was unnecessary and frankly kind of condescending.

I’m not over here trying to be some champion of the electoral college and I’d be more interested in seeing a real push for ranked choice or one of its cousins.

The point I was making was that if you sat at home and didn’t vote at all, your chosen candidate would never see the inside of the oval office and I went into my understanding of why it is the way it is. Ultimately, voting under the current system is not entirely worthless as you seemed to claim in the original post I responded to.

We’ve had something like 59 elections in total and 5 of them involved the winning candidate losing the popular vote but winning the election by way of the electoral college. Only one of those elections - the very first - involved anything even remotely close to your example (but still not42.3% vs 31.6%). The other 4 had a difference of like 2% or less between the two leading candidates.

The electoral college was devised as a compromise between direct democracy and congressional voting and I’m sure it was done in good faith to try to make sure everyone was represented, but this system seems to truly show its cracks when we’re facing an insanely stark national split like we see today and there’s no argument that we should probably shake things up and get rid of it.

I mean, that’s not entirely accurate - a vote for a presidential candidate is a vote for the slate of electors tied to said candidate - effectively a vote for your candidate, albeit indirectly. Electors can, however, be required to vote according to popular vote as required by the state they’re electors in. Or they could have pledged to vote according to specific party. I don’t know for sure, but I assume state elector requirements override party pledges.

My understanding is that when it was devised, it was a compromise between direct democracy (which would honestly be potentially dangerous - how many people do you know where you can’t help but go, “Fuck… This guy can vote.”) and election via congressional vote. It certainly ain’t perfect and I have no bias towards it, but it’s a system like anything else that people tend to point at and blame when things don’t go their way or just ignore or even defend when things do go their way.

- George Costanza

I can’t remember what it was specifically, but friend basically ruined a major plot point in Witcher 3 for me fully knowing I was a good ways out from discovering it on my own. As a kneejerk reaction and knowing he was about 20 or 30 hours into Fallout 4, I told him who runs the Institute and what relation that individual has to the protagonist.

He was angrier than I was because I had assumed Witcher 3 turned out the way he revealed, but my spoiler absolutely blindsided him. He never ruined anything for me again.

They’re there… err… the remains are, at least.

Hah, fair enough. I’ve never been there, but I’ve always wanted to try living somewhere in the PNW at some point. This is clearly a him problem and I wonder if being a working stiff would have begun tainting his view of NY with time, too. He doesn’t realize it, yet, but what he’s doing in that regard is looking back fondly on his college days.

I feel bad for this dude, but not for the reasons he wants me to.

Nearing 40 and being pretty staunchly no-kids, I always got along great with all of the devs and admins I work with who have kids and we find plenty to talk about. I always thought what I do for a living is pretty cool, but I certainly never expected that to be my ticket to getting laid or being praised as some big-brain special boy. This dude felt one-dimensional because he is one-dimensional. Maybe he just never really spent the time developing his personality and maybe its time to do that now. It’s one thing to love what you do, its another entirely to make your job your identity - you gotta bring more to the table in social situations than shop talk and Squid Game.

As for complaining about a routine… I mean, that’s unfortunately how being an adult works for 90% of us. We have jobs, we often end up kind of worn out even if we sit at a desk all day, and it can suck - you make the best of it and break the monotony as best you can. If he wanted to be in the remaining 10%, he probably should’ve put in the effort. Those folks he mentions at Y Combinator, or starting nonprofits probably busted their asses to break through. Even content creators who put out quality content often are often run ragged from overworking. Did this dude think staying in NY and taking a 9-5 there would have magically given him extra energy?

Fuck outta here with this garbage, Business Insider.

[…] but subscriptions for software-based new car features will continue, according to a BMW board member.

I wonder what they’re going to try to nickel and dime people over next. I mean, if they’re offering internet service/access or other things that are an ongoing service, fine. That’s mostly fair… but if they’re charging you to flip a bit in the car’s internal database (or even worse, a central database somewhere that keeps your car’s data) but the feature is installed in your car and costs BMW nothing to enable it, then ewwwwwww

Took a deeper look at the article…

[…] BMW says it will continue to offer subscription-based services but only for software options, like driver assistance and digital assistant services, which is completely understandable.

Hahahahahaha no. For the most part, absolutely no.

Oh man, the first time I ever ran into the inodes issue I was still a squirrely, eager young admin and not the broken, cynical shell you see before you. That one fucked me up for a solid day and change.

Oof, i can relate to that.

What’s really sad here, though, is that it was so easy and effortless to assume it was the auditor himself lmao

The issue occurred following regular maintenance work on the servers, the company said, adding that it would review its maintenance procedures.

Two people with knowledge of the matter had told Reuters the malfunction occurred during an update of the automaker’s parts ordering system.

Uh-oh. Someone forgot to uncomment include /etc/logrotate.d and bounce the service, didn’t they.

An auditor with this level of scrutiny and attention to detail? Say it ain’t so.

Instant red flag. Double red flag if it seems like they’re getting something out of it

See, that’s a common mistake for novice whittlers. Had he been paying attention, he could have made it into a decorative spoon or even a nice little squirrel.

Pull off request, on the other hand (ha-HA!), approved.

Not like that bitch Stephanie is gonna be helping out with that anymore.

Probably because most of the people at his net worth are pushing for RTO so he’s the exception to the rule.

My background is not on STEM and I was always passed the notion that without roots in hard math I can’t go far in programming.

I swear this is some BS repeated by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I got told pretty much the same when I was younger - don’t believe it. It may have been true to some degree at some point in the distant past, but it’s outdated advice at best.

Your main general skills when it comes to writing code are the ability to think logically and to think about abstract concepts. Creativity and imagination can definitely help. The ability to keep organized in your thoughts can also go a long way. Just about everything else comes in the form of knowing the language you’re working in, exposure to common coding and software design principles, and knowing your coding environment.

Math can figure into a lot of different types of programming careers… Shit like writing video game engines and other complicated things that model physics and stuff come to mind. But it’s not so much that math is intrinsic to programming, but rather that those types of software just require a lot of advanced math.

For example, I’m an automation engineer. It’s just a sysadmin who writes a decent amount of code. Most of my programming work revolves around sending requests over our company’s local network to servers or internal websites to do shit like remotely power up or shutdown machines or trigger a task or open up work orders. There is very little actual math, if any, in the entirety of my work.

At it’s core, programming is just the storing, moving around, manipulating, and keeping track of bits of information. Especially in a language like Python (which is my primary language).

EDIT: I should probably add my background isn’t STEM either. I’m a two time college dropout who got a break 14 years ago and left the restaurant industry to go into the tech sector instead.

This is a very interesting point and I can see it throughout zoomer culture when it comes to the down and dirty technical stuff, but I think there’s a distinction to be made between being technically apt and being able to grok whatever the hot shit consumer-grade tech paradigm is right now.

In the former context, a lot of zoomers have already “failed” but that context is the territory of people who reach out to learn it - in other words, the nitty gritty tech stuff will always be for the technical types. In the latter context, I imagine millennials will probably mostly be fine and zoomers will, too. I say “mostly” because we’re already seeing millennials start to kind of skip the latest trends (TikTok comes to mind immediately). Zoomers are already coming to grips with not being able to understand Alphas sense of humor via memes. Whatever the next social media platform is, I imagine it’ll be primarily a home for Alphas, leaving zoomers and millennials where they are.

Will there be spillover across the board, with members of different generations populating the other platforms? Sure, there are always exceptions.

As far as physical tech goes, like how millennials got the smartphone and zoomers grew up with it? It’s highly dependent on how ingrained it becomes in society. Hard to exist without a smartphone these days, so everybody has to know how to use one. Boomers have more trouble because they got it later, but there are plenty of them who are just fine with current phone tech precisely because they need to be for professional AND personal use.

Big brain thinking right here. Variety is the spice of life.

That’s basically where I’m wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.

It’s almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I’m basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it’s essence.