Messaging matters. When you tell people hamburgers and bacon and everything they love are bad, they stop listening, give up, or just eat some other junk that wasn’t prohibited. When you tell them some foods are good, they start buying into superfood marketing.

Diet is the only thing that matters. Lots of veggies are extremely useful because they add bulk without adding calories, and along with fresh fruits are great sources of fiber. Cheeseburgers can only come so often because they’re extremely calorie dense and send enormous reward signals to your brain.

Give people the tools they need to thrive, not just “don’t eat these specific bad foods, eat these specific good foods”.

Chesterton’s Fence rears its ugly head again. This is the same thing as vaccine skepticism (those diseases can’t be that bad, I never hear about them killing anyone these days) applied to a different context

Arguing for modern reforms is one thing, but there’s a reason we have the FDA. Statistically, most individuals do not have the medical expertise or the desire or ability to wade through enough clinical data to make these sorts of decisions with any hope of good outcomes, particularly in the face of an entire Internet of people trying to push questionable substances on them.

Individual foods are—with some exceptions—neither bad for you nor good for you. A healthy diet can occasionally include doughnuts, and milkshakes. Your overall diet is what matters.

If you’re referring to Biden, who all but guaranteed that Trump would win a second term by having zero sense of urgency or concern, zero drive to push through popular but sweeping changes, zero real vision, falling back to politics-as-usual, and topping it all off with disastrously running for a second term until pulling out at almost the last possible second, then yes, him too, and I will personally never forgive him for stepping in when Bernie had momentum.

For anyone else, it’s hard for me to get as worked up over them. Uninspiring, ineffective, bargain basement levels of corruption is upsetting but not a reason to put fire to everything that has put this country and its residents in a position of economic power, peace and security, and as the diplomatic head of the world. If I could wave a magic wand and strip the right to vote from anyone who thought so and acted upon that belief, I wouldn’t give it a second of hesitation.

In this specific case I am retired and I have done this based on financial projections assuming the game continues to be played the same. So it hits closer to home for me. But it’s a far bigger problem than just me—this is looting the retirement savings of millions of Americans—and it is far from the only thing about this administration and those who have supported it to make me absolutely livid.

I do think that will reach diminishing returns at some point. Kessler syndrome is a real thing for long-term higher orbits.

I don’t tend to let my emotions out this much here, but utterly fuck everything about this administration, and fuck anyone who voted in favor of it.

Most software written at companies is shit. It’s whatever garbage someone slapped together and barely got working, and then they had to move onto the next thing. We end up squashing a never ending list of bugs because in a time-limited world, new features come first.

But that only really applies when the cost of good software dwarfs that of barely-functioning software. And when the marginal cost of polishing something is barely longer than it took to write it in the first place? There’s no reason not to take a few passes, get all the bugs out, and polish things up. Right now, AI can (and will) write an absolutely exhaustive set of test cases that handles far more than a human would ever have the motivation to write. And it will get better.

If a company can ship quality software in essentially the same time as it can ship garbage, the incentives will change rapidly. At least I hope so.

You might consider that scientists advanced enough in their field to be launching missions to retrieve dust from asteroids are actually aware of basic facts relevant to their field of study.

But if someone is actually relying on literal true/false instead of truthiness, you now have a bug.

I say this as a Ruby evangelist and apologist, who deeply loves the language and who’s used it professionally and still uses it for virtually all of my personal projects.