How are you opening IE? I needed to run an old project of mine that uses Silverlight and discovered that in the years since I ran it last, Microsoft has deliberately and irreversibly broken the ability to launch IE directly in Windows 10. I had to set up a Windows 8 VM.

Ah yes, that explains the dropping quality of life ever since the bronze age.

The advantage of that last approach is that it has side effects and cannot therefore be optimized out by the compiler.

I did a double-take too, but she’s wearing skin-colored shorts with a red stripe on them over tights.

I used to work at a company making a physics engine for scientific applications, and our rule was bitwise replicability. The software running with the same inputs on the same hardware had to produce exactly the same output each time unless we did something that we knew would change the output. (Obviously that’s not possible in a game that has player inputs.) So, for example, someone (and by that I mean me) filtered out some zero terms that were being summed up and didn’t bother to run all the tests because they’re zeroes… But (A + 0) + (B + C) != (A + B) + C.

(In my defense, that didn’t take me long to fix once the nightly build integration tests failed. I would usually know better but I must have been having an off day.)

But the money is actually pretty good.

That’s what I’m saying.

Things that are numbers:

• a memory address
• the letter B
• an error encountered when trying to open a file
• the concept of being false, as opposed to being true

Things that are not numbers:

• this particular floating-point number

The best action movie of the 21st century so far, IMO.

I often watch other people play games and they look like a lot of fun but then I buy them and try playing them myself and don’t like them. For example:

Kerbal Space Program

Baldur’s Gate 3

King of Dragon Pass

Subnautica

This is an interesting prompt. I am fascinated by ancient Rome, both the memes and serious history, and I know for sure that I’m not a member of the alt-right (you might not believe me but that’s irrelevant to my analysis of myself). So why do I find Rome so interesting?

Part of the reason is due to the fact that Rome was powerful. I suppose that I share this with the alt-right but I don’t think that it is an inherently alt-right way of thinking. Ideologies, forms of government, and ways of organizing society must be able to compete in terms of raw power. Ancient Rome was, in these terms, exceptionally successful. It isn’t sufficient for my modern-day values to be in accordance with my moral sense, which is very different from the moral sense of an ancient Roman. My values must also lead to, or at least be consistent with, a society that is able to exert more power (military, economic, and cultural) than other societies organized along different values. Looking at Rome is a way to see what that can look like.

With that said, the western world, organized largely in accord with liberal values which I share, has been not just the best place to live in all of human history but also the most powerful in this sense. I think the alt-right, to the extent that they prefer other values (like ancient Roman ones), are largely fools: the west in general and the USA in particular are far stronger than Rome ever was. This ties into the second part of the reason Rome is interesting: the Republic ended not at a time when it was under threat from external enemies (it was, in many ways, at its strongest when it was the most threatened) but rather at the height of its wealth and power - most of what we think of as the “Empire” was already conquered by then. Then the Empire declined and fell largely because of infighting (although the full explanation for the collapse is a lot more complicated and, frankly, beyond my level of historical expertise). Romans were each other’s worst enemies. And when the Empire fell, it fell far. Things got a lot worse, not just for the Roman elite but for almost everyone, rich and poor. We’re a lot higher up than they ever were so we have a lot further to fall, and yet a lot of people are willing to risk the integrity of our society due to a short-sighted view of history that fails to appreciate how good we do, in fact, have it. The alt-right is among these foolish people - I am lower-case-c conservative because I oppose making large, sudden changes, but the alt-right is not conservative in this sense.

Then the final part of the reason is that Rome is both alien and familiar - Roman ideas and aesthetics were deliberately preserved and spread, so that they are familiar to me in the modern day. Other ancient empires like China are also a source of useful lessons, and I’m sure they’re fascinating to people who know enough to appreciate them, but to me they are far more alien and so I don’t. If I were a professional historian, that wouldn’t be an excuse, but I’m not so I prefer to read and think about Rome.

My problem with the game was that the connection between my choices and their outcomes was very hard for me to see. The mechanics are hidden and the consequences of many actions can be quite delayed, so I would end up losing without understanding why. I did make some progress just by role-playing, which is presumably the intent of the developers, but the game also requires detailed resource management (how many cows exactly do you sacrifice, etc) and I didn’t end up figuring that out before giving up.

So apparently I’m not in the lucky 40% based on my location.

One day we might be able to create operators with three or maybe even four question marks. Imagine the possibilities!

What gets me is when I’m not allowed to remove an external drive. Deleting a file can be delayed until later but here I am with a physical object that I need to detach from my computer and first I need to play hide and seek with the OS.

At least his own therapist has helped him express himself only a little unprofessionally.

I don’t know the details of the case but I expect that almost everyone who works for the city is as opposed to sexual assault as any normal person is. The mistake of the city government as a whole was having so little insurance - just one million dollars. I had 500k in liability for my house and I’m only one guy.

They need $7,500 per resident and, according to the article, they intend to raise that money over three years. I don’t know what their property values are like but if I assume an average house price of $300k, a current tax rate of 2%, and three people per house then they’re currently getting $6,000 in property taxes per person over three years (which they need to spend on other things) and so an enormous tax increase really is necessary.

(I’m neglecting non-residential property tax payers. A tiny town like this probably doesn’t have many.)

I guess so, because what I cook looks like a pancake (when I don’t burn it) and is actually a little gummier than I consider ideal (which is why I need to try cooking them longer with lower heat) rather than crumbling.

It’s this stuff.

INGREDIENTS: Enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), sugar, dextrose, leavening (baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate), salt, food starch-modified, soybean oil, buttermilk.

So i think that’s a no, but I don’t know what the “food starch-modified” does.