• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Personally, I’d look very closely at any records this returns and verify that they are normal. A previous developer could have left some sort of backdoor or other nasty surprise in the code/database such could only be tripped with a very specific condition.

    Alternatively, consider the context around this code. What is done with those records? Maybe there is a very specific bug elsewhere in the code or in a front end tied to this database. Sure, the right solution was to fix that other bug. But, that may not have been an option. So, this strange bit of code “solved” the problem and was then promptly forgotten.


  • Also never been a fan of Biden (but voted for him, and will again, if I have to). You’re falling into a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Yes, anyone chosen to replace Biden would be a gamble. But, Biden is a losing horse. The right time to replace him was last year. But, just because we missed that opportunity doesn’t mean we should throw good time after bad. He should be replaced before things get so late it literally cannot be done.

    This wasn’t some otherwise strong candidate, who just had a bad day. Biden is already struggling in polling. While the economy hasn’t been fantastic, it’s good enough that he should be crushing Trump. Even in 2016, Clinton was polling ahead of Trump and still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Biden isn’t winning. He’s maybe tied and maybe losing in current polling. Trump had already proven that he can be convicted in court and not lose support. There’s just not much left to hurt Trump. And Biden doesn’t seem to have anything left to gain support. Things are not going to get better for Biden.

    Biden is losing this race. It’s time to follow the rats off the ship, before we’re trying to escape a ship on the bottom of the ocean.










    1. It’s never going to happen. Turkiye would give us another (probably US backed) genocide in the Middle East before they let that happen.
    2. Even with proven oil reserves in those regions, the lack of access to the world’s oceans is going to hurt that country. For all of the modern advancements in the world, trade still goes by boat. Land locked countries face issues with moving goods into and out of the country, which usually adds costs and makes goods from that country less competitive. With almost certain poor relations with Turkiye, Iraq and Syria, this new country would be trying to move goods though Iran, which is just a bad plan. Or, some combination of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia. Again, if none of that sounds promising, it’s because it isn’t. They would be far better off to give up some land further north and try to get connected to the Mediterranean Sea.

  • Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
    Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.

    It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.

    This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.


  • I may be wrong but I figure if it’s on Fox

    Oddly enough, polling is the one area where Fox News isn’t a complete shit show. 538 has consistently rated them highly throughout the years. In this case, the poll was run by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. 538’s pollster ratings have them at #15, with a 2.8 rating out of 3.0. While it’s proper to be skeptical of anything with the Fox name attached, this is one of those areas where you can accept the poll at face value. That said, it’s still June and polls this far out are wildly bad at predicting the final outcome. They are better as a barometer of current sentiment and may help candidates to calibrate their messaging and campaigns as we get closer to the election. Also, a 1-2 point “lead” is almost certainly within the margin of error. So, this poll is really saying “it’s a dead heat” and drawing anything more of a conclusion is more of a rorschach test than anything.





  • While Chism may be a worthless leech, he isn’t completely wrong. Valve’s ownership of Steam does put it in a privileged position, which could be abused in a lot of anti-competitive ways. The fact that it isn’t doing that is really only because GabeN isn’t the same type of leech which Chism is. He’s what a lot of people seem to want, a benevolent dictator. That said, when he finally kicks the bucket, or gets tired and sells the company, the future direction of Steam would be an open question. There may be a very good argument for Valve to be put under the microscope of the FTC for possible anti-trust breakup.


  • Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

    That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.


  • It’s down to the expected use case.
    If you have some reason to want portability, like you travel for work or expect to want to game at a place other than you home, then a laptop is likely the right choice.
    If you only expect to game at home and don’t have a need to constantly move your system around, a desktop is usually a better “bang for the buck”.

    Personally, I don’t travel and don’t have a need to move my gaming rig around. I also like having the ability to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. So, I have a desktop. This particular PC of Theseus has been going for a decade and a half now and shows no sign of stopping.