I feel like the modern name for it would be just “Script”.

Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there’s literally no way you can write pure Python that’s 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there.

Completely agreed, but it can be surprising just how often C++ really is written that inefficiently; I have had multiple successes in my career of rewriting C++ code in Python and making it faster in the process, but never because Python is inherently faster than C++.

Sure, but if you are not regularly expressing code that has the potential of summoning elder gods that will swallow your soul into a dimension of ceaseless screaming then are you really living?

I don’t always use regular expressions, but when I do, I use it to parse XML,

Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.

Huh; I don’t believe that it is really him.

If this is the real Slim Shady, would you please stand up?

The difference is that aether unraveled pretty quickly when we started seriously looking for it because experiments kept being outright inconsistent with what it was predicted we would see if it were there, whereas there are lots of independent lines of evidence that all point to the dark matter existing in the same page, so it really is not the same situation at all. The only problem with dark matter is that it doesn’t show up in our particle detectors (so far, at least), but there is no law of the universe that says that everything that exists has to.

It helps to realize that mass is just a bookkeeping label that we assign to the “internal” energy of a system, where the choice of what counts as being “internal” is somewhat arbitrary and depends on the level we are studying.

For example, if you measure the mass of the nucleus of some atom, and then compare your measurement to the sums of the masses of the protons and neutrons inside of it, then you will see that the numbers do not agree. The reason for this is that much of the mass of a nucleus is actually the energy of the strong force bonds holding the nucleons together.

But you can actually drop down another level. It turns out that the vast (~ 99%) majority of the mass in the proton in turn does not come from the quarks but from the energy of the gluon field holding them together.

And if you drop down yet another level, the quarks get their mass through their interactions with the Highs field.

So in short, it is energy all the way down.

Sometimes this can help, but lately I’ve been running into the opposite problem where people have been following this advice to such a degree that one cannot ever figure out what is going on without having to constantly jump around to find the actual code involved in doing something.

Because it looks like that functionality uses special compiler functionality only available on GCC and clang?

“This isn’t us encouraging you to gamble-it is us asking you to think about how bad you would feel years from now if you learned that you could have made a ton of money if you had only placed a bet right now! It’s completely different!”

I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?

Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.

The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.

Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.

I’m not sure why anyone would think I meant ‘restrain’, but oh well.

The Bhagavad Gita spends a lot of time extolling the importance to spiritual life of controlling the senses with the goal of restraining them, and in particular this is a precept of the Krishna Consciousness cult.

Try reading before you down vote.

Speaking only for myself, what really threw me off was the following:

Apologies if you’ve already tried this or something similar, it doesn’t work for everyone, but I got mine back by using essential oils to restrain [emphasis mine] my olfactory system.

I think that if I’d realized that you meant to say “retrain” here instead of “restrain”, I would not have been so quick to initially dismiss it as obviously nonsense.

I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.

What I like to tell people is that I am as good a programmer as I am for the simple reason that I began when I was about 8, which gave me a very early start on making all of the mistakes one can possibly make when learning how to code.

(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

And if it doesn’t have objects, then it has no class!

That is conceptually how dynamic programming works, but in practice the way you build the cache is from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It’s a bit like how you can implement computation of the Fibonacci sequence in a top-down manner using a recursive function with caching, but it is a lot more efficient to instead build it in a bottom-up manner.

Sure, but shouldn’t you want your generated markup to adhere to the complete standards so that you know it will be interpreted correctly, rather than hoping that the browser will make the correct guess about what you really meant?