Spyke

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This is painfully true

  1. Those apps are simple
  2. Those apps target a wide audience, hence have more budget as a result
  3. Those apps are made by large, well oiled (you'd hope at least) companies. You don't want my honest opinion on most small software development boxes. This industry grew faster than mentors became available for the newbies, so many devs including seniors still don't know what they are doing.

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True

People who appear intelligent to the average person, are either slightly more intelligent than their audience, or charismatic.

Really smart people can be hard to follow unless they put efforts in communication skills or are charismatic (but that might be the same thing?)

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The Party of Christian Values

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OP's argument has to be made. You want to shave off as many of the fools following that twisted ideology as you can, via any argument that rings true. Which means your argument also needs to be made, but I don't think it's going to convince a lot of conservatives or undecided voters. Hell I think pointing out the hypocrisy as OP is doing is more likely to convince them to become atheist, than your argument is.

Removing religion altogether is a long term goal that sounds nice. Not having the world's superpower go fascist is a short-term one that is essential. Turning a fundamentalist christian into a compassionate christian makes the danger go down significantly. And you can get decent traditions of charity and even activism from the compassionate side of christianity.

And on a final note, I've been in atheist circles long enough to see some of them go bad. Like racism, mysogyny, etc. Atheism does not cure all. Religion makes things worse but is not the source of our problems.

What I'm trying to get at, is society's problem run deeper than religion vs atheism, it's just one dimension, and not the most important.

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What is spying?

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Except that instead of an authoritarian government using it to totally control the learned populace, they are showing you ads.

We've still got a way to go before 1984. If it did happen, you wouldn't be able to discuss it.

memes

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It's all downhill from here

Where I'm from, they know. The news have done a good job of reporting on it, and they see the cost of houses, and whatnot be worse than before. It's kind of new from the last 5 or so years, before that they didn't get it. But now it's pretty obvious so long as they watch the news or pay attention to their kids and grandkid's lives.

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Infinite Loop

Learning to deal with "unmaintanable" codebases is a pretty good skill. It taught me good documentation and refactoring manners. It's only a problem for you if management does not accept that their velocity has gone down as a result of tech debt pilling up.

Code should scream it's intent (business-wise) so as to be self-documenting as much as possible As much as possible is not 100%, so add comments when needed. Comments should be assumed to be relevant when written, at best. Git comment should be linked to your work ticket so that we can figure out why the hell you would do that, when looking at the code file itself. I swear some people seem to think we only read them in PRs (we don't). Overall concepts used everyday, if they need to be reexplained, should probably be written down (at least today's version). Tests are documentation. Often the only up to date one?

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New Study: 54% of American Adults Read Below 6th Grade-Levels

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No, but think about how we structure society.

We give people shit education, and they wind up not being able to read at a 6th grade level.

Then you basically have to navigate an entire world where you are required to pick how to sign away some of your rights/enter deals written beyond their comprehension.

This is a system that breeds suckers as sets them up as suckers, to screw them later.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Generally, you can replace some comments with variable names or comment names. Which means you must already be in the habbit of extracting methods, setting new variables to use appropriate names, and limit context to reduce the name (Smaller classes and methods means shorter names can be just as expressive, because the context is clearer). It lowers the number of wtfs per minute you get reading code before you even need whole sentences to explain why things are done in a certain way, because the names can be a powerful hint.

But realistically, you end up needing comments for some things anyways.

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Programming Languages

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It has a rocky start, and a lot of cruft from that era sticked around.

There are also a lot of horrible legacy projects from the pre-ES5 era which are a pain to work with. Often older projects were coded either before people knew how to do javascript right, or before the devs who wrote it knew how to write javascript right.

news

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Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

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My personal hate is the word “settler”, which invokes an image of somebody taking previously useless land and making it fit for human habitation, but apparently has been redefined within the borders of Palestine to mean “armed invader”.

North American Natives probably resent that sentence....

It is very rare for no humans to make use of land at all. Whenever someone "settles" it, they are taking it away from someone else. Usually force gets involved at some point, even for nomadic tribes. It's why colonialism has a bad rep these days.

memes

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As Someone Learning German, I Know This Pain

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It works like that in French until you use a different word for the machine.

"Mon ordinateur est une bonne machine". In a single sentence my computer was described with words both male and female.

It's just vocabulary and grammar, not the deep essence or identity of things or people.