Why shouldn’t the payment processors get a say in the payments they process? Illegal or not, why should they be forced to process payments that facilitate things against their beliefs?

Because they hold an effective monopoly over the payment process.

Thank you, my human language parser is not fully operational at the moment so I actually appreciated this summary!

Is it worse than Clojure?

I’m confused… was that wall of text supposed to have sold me on something?

You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context?

If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is “clear, readable and concise” anyway.

Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range?

I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?

(Also, by now you should be especially good at skipping past it, given that you have apparently “read [it] hundreds of times” instead of skipping past it, for some reason.)

This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.

It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.

It’s not immediately obvious to me where the examples are.

Maybe this is finally a good use for depleted uranium?

Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!

To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

“Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?

ENDELAYIFICATION IS STILL BAD!!!

Yeah, massive amounts of completely preventable suffering and death due to people no longer using vaccines thanks to the spreading of these conspiracy theories is totally not a big deal compared to someone having a bad attitude.

This could mean that it’s the year of thy Linux desktop 🤔

And thine as well!

The lowest end hardware you ever ran Linux on, so far!

Confusingly, no, they are completely unrelated things, despite how similar the names look. (This confused me as well until somewhat recently.)

Agreed; I was only arguing against the proposition that increased market share would not eventually make a difference.

I think that if Linux had a 50% market share then it would be considered a very valid alternative, even though that is obviously not very realistic (at this point, at least). My comment was more about why a high market share would be desirable than about how realistic it would be to get there.

Having said that: I think that if Linux were to get to a 10% or 15% valid market share, it would be a sign that a lot of things had changed that would have made it a more valid alternative in the process.

That’s completely fair!

Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.

Incorrect. You did not just say that some things were “suboptimal” about Linux; your thrust was that Linux offers a “frustrating experience” overall compared to Windows as a result of all of these supposed “paper cuts”:

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

No, bad for you for asserting that your experience was universal, and then getting grumpy when someone disagreed and cited their own experience as being different.

You may be lucky enough to use Linux for your fault work, but some of are forced to use Windows because it is the industry standard. If Linux were widely enough used that I could use it at work then that would be a huge benefit to me.