our turkey person said the biggest this year was 30 pounds, she tried to stop feeding them so much but they're apparently great foragers

Otherwise the "embedded DSLs" are always going to be impoverished exercises

If you're to do this sort of thing decently the language has got to have some manner of reflection on source code so that source files and lines and stuff can surface in program values

take e.g. Cypress which does its damn best despite no language support for overriding monadic bind to implement what they call the "command pattern" I think? loves to spit out a native stack trace that doesn't point to your test code at all

tldr you're gonna kill some birds

You don't have to personally hold the axe or raze the rainforest to plant soybeans, but I do think you personally owe domestic and wild animals a more full and less abstract understanding of the cost of your eating

The "doesn't eat meat, does eat eggs" kind of vegetarian is sort of amusing, because you understand what happens to the 50% of birds that don't lay, right?

also we have a few more roosters than we thought

I have killed so many birds

And the infrastructure is disappearing. Sheep farmers have to shear but they just toss the stuff because there aren't processors around

The story of how cars made life worse is at least complicated. People were excited to get a car. Textiles on the other hand, they simply got shittier for no apparent reason.

It's a great example of how technology has regressed in the past hundred years

It's just embarrassing how obviously this movie wanted to cast Sandra Bullock for the scientist

a new hammer to use in bikeshedding discussions against adding useless features

Nothing here is novel but I like to repeat stuff in terms of brain as a computer only because I think it puts into clear relief one of the few parts of that metaphor that actually work, which is that you only get so many thoughts in your life, they each have a cost, there's a meta-thought […]

To be either an optimist or a pessimist - by which I mean to cease considering either the possibility that a task may be achievable or not - is generally a bad idea

The thing is, when the outcome is binary, pursuing both - thus avoiding the two fatal failure modes - incurs a cost of at most a factor of two.

It's maybe slightly harder to see why skewing hard to optimism can be bad; only because you may be seeking something impossible, so the optimist may get stuck on problems without solutions