A minute thirty-five times is thirty-five minutes.

You know that thing you do, where you write some code and then realize you need a main function to execute it? And then you write your main function, but it’s not really your main function, it’s a bunch of half commented test code to make sure that the important code works?

Do that in a unit test, and when you’re done testing that particular piece, add some assertions and move on to the next piece of functionality. Boom, test driven development.

Microsoft Windows

I hate to throw out this old chestnut, but “correlation does not equal causation.” Just because religion existed in one form or another in almost every single culture, does not mean it’s necessary for morality. As I mentioned previously, lots of social structures existed in early societies that had things to say about morality. That doesn’t mean they were necessary precursors.

Rubber band in the middle is trying to contract, pulling the top of the table up, and the chains keep it level?

“Without the precursor of gender roles, there can be no morality.”

“Without the precursor of tradition there can be no morality.”

“Without the precursor of >insert social structure< there can be no morality.”

Some of our social structures have things to say about morality. Sometimes they’re saying"love your neighbor as yourself," and sometimes they’re saying “burn that city to the ground and keep all of the preteen girls as sex slaves.” Just because religion and spirituality have things to say about morality doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re worth listening too, and it doesn’t mean we couldn’t have developed a system of morality in their absence.

Without religion and spirituality, we may have developed a better, more universal system of morality, rather than the patchwork of haphazard and contradictory traditions we currently enjoy. We’ll never know, because religion was created early in our history, and for the rest of eternity, we get to listen to asinine armchair theologians tell us “without religion, there would be no real morality.”

I knew this one, but way too many times, I don’t. People like you are awesome, and I appreciate the service.

Media targeted at a large audience tends to dumb moral and philosophical conundrums down to the simplest possible gesture instead of taking the ideas seriously.

Second that. I Am A Strange Loop is a fantastic book on consciousness.

Once upon a time I was installing Linux on a tiny little laptop, whose brand name I’ve forgotten. It was probably a Lenovo. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to install anything on it, and they went to great lengths to make sure no one would be able to install Linux on it. I spent an entire day messing around with the grub terminal, and began to suspect that it had a built-in cut off for the USB port during boot. I think I saw some log output to that effect, but I couldn’t find any way to disable it. After some thought, I got back in grub, unplugged the USB stick that I was installing Linux from, and plugged it back in. The laptop detected and mounted the external drive and I tried to install again.

Worked perfectly.

Not how I wanted to see Trump at The Hague, honestly.

Trump as Oedipus, immigrants as his father, and the abstract concept of freedom as his mother.

Immigrants and freedom made Trump possible, and managed to avoid him for a bit. Then he comes back, kills immigrants and fucks freedom, at which point, lady liberty kills herself.

Where is Ben Garrison when you need him.

Holy shit, me too. Yeah, I probably should have put and asterisk next to that.

I have very rarely had a bad outcome from speaking honestly and straightforwardly to people that I care about.

I recently wrote a little library that adds some neat little features to enums in Rust. It’s tiny, does one thing, and does it pretty well, I think.

The diagnostic criteria and the culture that determines that criteria are both subject to change. lots of things that people consider perfectly normal now would be classified as a disease or disorder in the past.

We have reached the limits of what I know on the subject. So, no idea. If forced to make an uneducated guess, I’d say it was probably some combination of environmental factors, a preexisting culture that fit particularly well with horses, and natural variation in adoption of new tech among different groups of people.

I know. I’ve read them all. I just thought “potentially” was slightly understating the probability of a NSFW Oglaf comic, and it made me chuckle.

I got here after this post was deleted, but I can guess roughly what it said.

Yes, I was an ignorant, bigoted kid raised by street preachers (the people with the megaphones telling people that they’re going to hell, for non-americans). I lived in a variety of RVs, partially constructed houses, tents, and, for about eight months, with an honest-to-god cult. Mostly without electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. No, I’m no longer a Christian, and now have the standard amount of bigotry (maybe even slightly less, on a good day).

North America didn’t originally have horses. When they were brought in, the Apache, more than any other indigenous group, structured their entire way of life around them. At least, that’s what I learned from Western movies.