Some of you are reblogging because you think its funny that programmers would talk to ducks. I’m reblogging because I think its funny picturing a programmer explaining their code, realizing what they did when they explain the bad code, then grabbing the strangling the duck while yelling “WHY WAS THE FIX THAT SIMPLE!? AM I GOING BLIND!”
AS A PROGRAMMER I CAN TELL YOU THAT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU FUCKING DO WE HAD TO BAN THE DUCKS FROM MY CLASSES BECAUSE EVERYONE WOULD FLIP THE DUCK OR THROW IT AT A WALL OR SOMETHING WHEN THEY FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM IN THEIR CODE
so that’s the function of a rubber duck
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I work at a startup and part of the onboarding package you get when you first start working here now includes a rubber duck. We also have a bigger version of the duck for the extra hard problems. Sometimes one duck doesn’t cut it and you need to borrow your neighbors to get more ducks on the problem. One time we couldn’t figure out why something wasn’t working right so we assembled the counsel of ducks and by the grace of the Duck Gods were we able to finally come to a solution. These ducks have saved many lives and should be respected for the heroes they are.
When I was a teenager on the internet looking at adult content, the fear was that some “concerned” parent would stumble across any of the relatively small fan communities and raise hell with the ISP until it was shut down.
Now I’m a grown-ass adult, and the fear is that the teenagers themselves will threaten, doxx, bully, and harass content creators off of large social media sites who have entire legal teams dedicated to covering their asses because their parents have done such a shit job teaching them internet saftey that they operate under the delusion that the entirety of the worldwide web was created as some “safe space” for minors rather than the godamned seedy back alley it has always been.
I don’t like overgeneralizing teenagers, I mean many anti-antis are teenagers, many of my followers are teenagers. But when talking about broad generational differences I believe Roach Patrol or one of their friends once said something kinda potent about how being born after the world trade center attack could shape the beliefs of some people into thinking it’s normal for any freedoms or potential dangers to be squashed in the name of public safety.
The rational here being that they were kinda born into a world where that is widely the response to danger.
But I think many people now are aware that a lot of the extra security we’ve put in place since 9/11 is mostly for show so that people feel safe, ie; security theater.
So sometimes what antis are asking for amounts to security theater for the Internet. Where they think that if we can squash these fan fictions, fan arts and pairings the world will have less rapists, domestic abusers and child molesters.
I may have been responsible for the ur-post of the 9/11 Generational Hypothesis. Or one iteration of it, anyway; I assume it’s been suggested independently multiple times. I’ve seen some of the critiques that have emerged since, many of them sensible, others not so much, but the one that’s stuck with me is: the people who are old enough to remember 9/11 are just as susceptible to the black-and-white fear mentality; hell, we’re the ones who inflicted it on the next generation. The difference is that we have an alternate mental model available. If a bunch of the kids who are just starting to graduate college have trouble conceptualizing it as anything but Bad People Danger World, well, they’re not the ones whose choices brought that about.
I’ve grown fond of that description of the problem because I like problems that suggest their own solutions.
In any case, “security theater for the internet” is a fucking brilliant summation of this particular instance of the problem.
As promised, here is my post of things that surprised me when I went from zero to sixty in terms of hockey knowledge.
Holy shit how does anybody ever score, ever? I used to wonder why hockey games are typically low-scoring. I do not wonder anymore. There’s no other major sport where the goal is so well-defended. In football and basketball (and baseball, if you think of it like that), there are defending players, but the goal itself is undefended. In soccer, there is a goalie, but the goal is way bigger than them. In hockey, the goal is a tiny 4 x 6 net defended by a large man wearing enormous pads who basically takes up all the space and spends his life practicing intercepting pucks. The current NHL average goalie save percentage is 91.4%. The current NHL leader is sitting on a 95% save percentage. If you score on him, you’re probably more lucky than good. Also, teams looooooove their goalies. That’s their boy. He’s the only one who’s out there the whole game (unless he gets hurt) and he’s the last line of defense. Immediately after the game is over, the whole team files by the goalie to give him a little pat or helmet bump. If the other team messes with the goalie, prepare for WRATH.
There is no such thing as “sitting on the bench” like there is in other sports. Oh, there are guys on the bench, but they ain’t staying there. Cause you see, hockey players swap out all the freaking time. It’s insane. If you’re used to other sports, and you’re not paying attention to the players’ numbers, it’s easy to miss the fact that the guys on the ice change constantly. Hockey is so strenuous that you can’t do it for full-on game speed for more than a couple of minutes at a time, a little more for defensemen. And they don’t stop play to make substitutions! They just sort of fling themselves over the boards and switch out while the puck is in play. I have not yet stopped being impressed by this. A team typically has four sets of forwards (they go out in “lines” of three, a center and two wingers) and three sets of defenseman pairs. Usually the only guy out there the whole time is the goalie. Most of the time, all 12 of the forwards are going to get comparable amounts of ice time, especially in teams that have lots of deep bench strength. If the game is a blowout, the winning coach may choose to rest his top two lines (usually his best players) and give the lower-tier guys more ice time.
There are eight million awards in hockey. There are like dozens of variations on “The [Somebody’s Name] Trophy” or “The [Somebody’s Name] Award.” They’re all for specific stuff. There’s one for the top-scoring player, one for the goalies, one for the playoff MVP, one for the best overall player voted by the players…it’s kind of intimidating. They have an awards show and everything. Like the Oscars.
Hockey rosters are not big. I was used to teams of 60-70 dudes in football. Hockey teams typically have 23ish guys on the roster, but by rules can only “dress” 20 guys per game (as in, get them in gear and ready to play). That’s four lines of forwards, three D-man pairs and two goalies. That’s not a lot of dudes.
Fifty percent of the players in the NHL are Canadian. I mean, I knew there were a lot of Canadians but I didn’t know it was THAT many. Only one-quarter are American. The other quarter are mostly Russian, Swedish, Finnish and Czech players.
There are more hockey teams than I thought there were. Currently 30, although it’s soon to be 31 with the new Las Vegas expansion team. Seven of those teams are in Canada.
The NHL All-Star Game is not just a game, it’s a whole days-long extravaganza. The players don’t just play a game. They also engage in the Skills Competition, which is like a fancy pro-athlete game show and it’s amazing. The two team captains select players to compete in stuff like Fastest Skater, Hardest Shot (that’s hardest as in force, not hardest as in most difficult), shootout, and accuracy. There’s also an anything-goes breakaway competition that’s purely judged on fan votes, so the players can do whatever they want – wear costumes, do fancy trick puck shots. There’s lot of stuff from the skills competition on YouTube, it’s fun.
Hockey is grueling. There are 82 games in the regular season. That’s a lot considering how physically demanding the game is and how much of a pounding these guys give each other (checking is harsh, even without a fight breaking out). Sometimes they have to play two days in a row. I don’t even know, man.
All these players know each other. I mean, I know that’s true in many pro sports, but it just seems more true in hockey. The hockey world is small, and everybody played together either in the junior leagues, the minors, the Olympics or Worlds, or on various teams.
Being a captain actually means something. When you start learning about hockey teams and players, within 0.5 seconds you’ll start knowing who the team captains and alternates are. The captain is the only player who’s empowered to discuss rulings on the ice with the officials. A good captain is equal parts leader, cheerleader, counselor, and on-ice coach.
Hockey is invisible. There are not a lot of players in hockey who break out into fame just in the general sports world, and even fewer who get name-recognition in general pop culture. Wayne Gretzky is probably the last one, Mario Lemieux, perhaps, and Sidney Crosby definitely has it in the sports world but even he’s not general pop-culture famous (except in Pittsburgh and Canada). That’s…kinda fun, in a way. Like being part of a little secret club who know who Alexander Ovechkin is.
Anyway, that’s all I got for now. Shoot me a message if you have Hockey Questions. I get intense when I pick up a new interest.
BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE
The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.
Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.
This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
But Republicans are the “fiscally responsible ones”, amirite.
Holy shit that’s the exact system that the USSR had for budgeting factories, how did Reagan copy the worst thing about the USSR’s economy?
Good to know I live in a non-capitalist country, I guess?
yeah, basically government funding in the us is designed to be a cow the oligarchs can milk regularly. nothing to do with whether anything gets done.
as for republicans claiming to be fiscally responsible, don’t even bother trying to compare what they say they do; what they say is whatever marketing studies tell them will get them elected, and what they do is what makes them richer. there’s no causal relationship between those items.
Hollow trees are often more stable than before their cores rotted! “The removal of the tree’s dead heart brings yet another advantage. The change of form from solid pillar to hollow cylinder alters the way in which the trunk reacts to mechanical stress. It is much more resilient and stable. The removal of many tons of timber also reduces the strain on the tree’s elderly and doubtless somewhat decayed root system. The result is that an old hollow tree is often able to withstand a gale better than a younger undecayed one. In the ancient hunting parks of England such as Windsor, where trees stand out in the open, unprotected by others from the wind, it is by no means rare after a storm to discover that hollow oaks, four or five hundred years old, remain upright when younger ones, a quarter their age, have been blown over.” https://asknature.org/strategy/relationship-provides-nutrients-stability/
I cannot tell you how often I discuss weather with strangers. It is inoffensive, and everyone has an opinion about it! Is it too hot? What about that rain the other day? Oh man, this sunshine is so gorgeous. Ugh, look at this slush. I hear it’s supposed to snow tomorrow.
(Traffic and construction are also a good place to start. Mutual complaining about the construction project that has been going on since February is a great way to bond.)
Has there been a recent holiday, weekend or cultural event near you? WHAT DID THEY DO. Did they go? Did they stay home? How do they feel about it?
What about the stuff on their person? Obviously you have to be careful with this, but no one has ever been offended by you asking where they got their coffee/lunch/snack because that looks so good. Complimenting shoes, jewelry, and phones is also good, because you can have a playful bantering conversation about the Galaxy versus the iPhone or what style of necklace you like.
And if nothing else, lame observational comments work like a charm. It is is the least offensive, least funny thing ever, but if you make a lame, joking comment they are socially obligated to give a polite laugh and respond in kind. This is Dilbert cartoon nonsense: “I can’t believe the weekend went by so quickly!” “It’s too early for this, I need coffee.” “Wednesday, hump day!” etc.
just moving along like everyone else 