@ChrisMayLA6 As a pensioner what I see from the Tories is
* triple lock suspended whenever they feel like it
* tax cuts spun as going to "everyone in work" actually go to everyone in work except pensioners
* fiscal drag and thus increased income tax.
OK, so they're promising to maybe not do the last one again, but they're not going to get elected so they can promise what the fuck they like in the full knowledge that they're not going to have to deliver.
@FlashMobOfOne Plus, I think you can even set your screen resolution to match your monitor these days without having to edit config files as root like you used to!
@FlashMobOfOne Installing Linux has got *lots* easier over the decades - it mostly no longer starts by asking you lots of questions in which you don't even know what most of the words mean.
On a bad day, though, it'll still scroll reams of frightening-looking error messages past you on the screen too fast to read, depending on which of the 487,201 different flavours of installer you're using, of which you probably have to really worry about exactly none.
@ShadowJonathan My favourite is the second-order compiler bug.
The compiler has a bug in how it compiles feature A. But the compiler itself uses feature A to compile feature B. So if you take a compiler with the bug in feature A, and compile it with itself, it now also has a bug in how it compiles feature B.
Which is real fun to debug if the bug in feature A arose in the first place from a read error from a magnetic medium which the parity and/or error detection didn't detect. So you can look at the source code as much as you like, and not only does it not have a bug in how it handles feature B, but it also doesn't have a bug in how it handles feature A.
(The lesson? A naรฏve eight bit checksum per block isn't enough. The witchcraft? It was a long time ago, but I *think* it only took about three of us less than two days to get to the bottom of this.)
@kagan The police I've dealt with (quite a few, I was a councillor for a number of years) were mostly pretty pragmatic. No point in doing something that costs money and doesn't actually work.
@kagan One version of that is the observation by the police that some young men can be a right bloody nuisance from the ages of about 16 to 26 after which they settle down and become at least tolerably well behaved citizens.
"So, at the first sign of trouble, how's about we lock them up and release them at age 26 when their brains have matured?"
No, that won't work, say the police. Because what turns these lads into decent citizens is that they get involved with a woman who says "sort yourself out or I'm off", and there's no opportunity to meet such a woman in prison.
@carnage4life Car manufacturers can stop supporting cars without going bust. There's bits for my VW which have been unobtainable for many years now and the car is only 20 years old.
@thehill They don't. Anyone who claims to be both right wing and Christian is lying, as the two are fundamentally incompatible. They're probably lying about being Christian, and they're probably lying to themselves as much as to the rest of us, but one way or another they're lying.
@clacke In real life the answer is "you don't write calculations like that because they might confuse people".
Similarly for coding standards. "Do not write code that depends in subtle ways on the priority and association rules of your particular language, because not everybody will know that particular niche flavour of rules. If in even the slightest doubt PUT THE FUCKING BRACKETS IN. And if you're not in doubt, put them in anyway."
(And then turn off any utterly insane linting rules that whine about superfluous brackets. And if you aren't allowed to turn off those rules ... find another job.)
@frameworkcomputer I'm almost never excited about a new version of anything. Almost always a new version of something is just work. Plus it's usually got bigger, so there's the cost of the extra resource to run it.
@goatsarah Doesn't Portugal have a non-standard gauge or something, I think I remember from long ago? On purpose, designed to make it hard to be invaded?
@hyc@tweedge A wifi washing machine can be turned on automatically when your home automation system spots a period of cheap electricity.
I use free electricity for doing the laundry when available, as that's always (so far) been during the daytime, but on non-free days I don't stay up to put the machine on at 2am when the price drops.
Cambridge Liberal Democrat. Techie. One time pilot.Profile picture: street furniture - I take pictures of interesting street furniture when travelling. In this context it is appropriate for the street lighting columns to be gold plated.