I've been plowing through Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu recently and it's been really great. I'm on the home stretch of the last book and so excited to finish it.

All about space exploration, first contact, invasion, advancement and philosophy. A really great thinking book and leaves me with lots of uncomfortable feelings to ponder over. The pacing of the book took a little bit to get used to but it does well to help grapple with the time and space scale it is working with.

That is what this particular type of furnace is called in glassblowing. A glory hole is a specific furnace for reheating glass that has been gathered to keep it at the right temperature.

I needed to learn Go quickly for a small little side project and I was able to run through the fundamentals Go track in about a week and a half doing a few exercises here and there.

I've been exposed to quite a few programming languages so a lot of the common principles are there for me. What I really needed was to learn how Go is different and what the unique things about it are.

For example, I didn't need to learn about why loops are important. What I did like learning is how a for loop in Go was structured and how to use it in different contexts. Utilizing range was a great thing I picked up from their examples.

Exercise is a great hands-on tool to supplement and support learning.

Gorillaz - Stylo is pretty awesome. One of my favorite music videos ever.

Caravan Palace - Lone Digger is really awesome as well. Great song and well animated.

I have at least 4 companies on my banned list, but the ones that come up most often are...

• Starbucks - I like good coffee. They just can't seem to deliver and just focus on mass appeal to overly sweet milk drinks. No thanks. Good coffee doesn't deserve that.
• Blizzard/Activision - They need to clean house. Horrible treatment of people inside. The games they produce aren't good even that good. I refuse to play their stuff as popular as it might be.
• Disney - I don't think they produce anything really valuable. Their marketing is amazing but I don't like what they have given us. I honestly want nothing to do with Marvel or Star Wars and dislike the direction they have gone with those franchises.
• Wizards of the Coast - all their game products are clearly cash grabs. Building in expiration so customers have to buy more is awful. I do not play Magic the Gathering and never will. I have also grown to dislike Dungeons and Dragons. It's not even that great and there are so many better, more interesting games to play.

That's just a few of my old man rants.

insecure people who struggle with social skills

Hi, also me. Nice to meet you.

This is why I run "rules-light" systems and why you won't find me running (or playing, anymore) games like DND. The complexity of rules is just too much for me to remember and memorize. I don't have it in me to argue and debate about applying a rule and would prefer not to interact with someone who is rules lawyering. I find that having those rules there is more intimidating to me than anything else. I feel like I have to work with rules first and then find ways to be an agent of my character within that.

Because of my own insecurities, I tend to lean on systems that require more collaboration, discussion and openness. I can't really be wrong if we have collectively decided on a choice about our story. And even in that, calling it, our story carries so much power and lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders in terms of pressure for both playing and running a game. This is how I can skirt around my own insecurities and work with the kind of social skills that I have and prefer to use. I want collaborators rather than adversaries since that is socially much safer. Consequently, this also leads to very rich storytelling.

As an alternative view, I homebrew and while the cost to get in can be a bit steep, the long term costs are actually pretty good. I looked at the cost to get equipment as a loss and just wrote it off. Electronic kettle and automation was pricey, but luckily I was able to have some costs offset with work benefits. Realistically though, in actual ingredients, between $30-50 USD for 5 gallons of beer and about 8 hours total of time for cleaning, brewing, fermenting and packaging, it's not too bad.

I tend to be very meticulous though with my brew process, so I haven't lost a batch, at least not due to contamination. I've had some beers that weren't great, but when you put it in perspective, a 12 ounce serving probably cost me about $0.50 - 1.00. Comparatively, while not great, it was still drinkable and as good as anything I could get for that price.

Being able to make decent sized quantities of good beer to take to parties, give as gifts, and just have on hand really diminishes the hit of the cost of equipment. I feel like it's been worth it.

I think this looks like a Marigold, but not sure what specific kind. Certain kinds do get quite big and don't do well in pots.

That being said, it looks like there are two or three stems at least there and this pot may be a little small for this plant. I don't know exactly how dead it might be but it may liven up with a bit more room. Marigolds like loamy soil. A combination of dirt, sand and clay that also drains well. Maybe try a bigger pot and see if it perks up.

A lot of great advice in this thread.

Adding a note here about socks. Don't bother with Bombas. They are fine, but no better than other generic socks you will find out there. I was all in to the hype of them too but after using them for a few years i found they don't hold up any better than other socks. I wouldn't consider them an "investment".

Now, if you want to invest in a sock, consider getting Darn Tough. They are more expensive, however their wool and synthetic socks are pretty solid. I find they hold up way better than my Bombas ever did, are much more comfortable, moisture wicking of wool is very good and, best part, if they fall apart, wear down and get holes, Darn Tough will replace them. They will have you send them back and give you a credit to get a new pair. Full credit. It's fantastic. Highly recommend.

Right? That's exactly what I wanted and didn't get. But I did get bombarded with a half dozen ads in my search through the article including one that wanted me to pay them for this stellar reporting.

Do you think this will change over time where one community on a specific instance will gain the market share and all others will evaporate away? And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?

To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.

If you want one platform, that's what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?

This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the "pain points" are made more clear.

One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.

I often see this problem in the testing world, particularly around frontend tests that utilize UI automation tools.

The pattern I see is often to abstract chunks of common steps into individual functions that often live in places very disconnected from the test. While this might reduce the number of lines of code in a test and arguably make it more maintainable it has its problems.

Main problem number one is that readability has been diminished. It is now harder to understand exactly what this test is doing because steps have been abstracted away. Tests that can be clearly understood, read and describe functionality and behaviors are immensely important to getting others to quickly understand code. I hate to put a barrier there to making that happen.

Second, i don't truly believe it ALWAYS improves maintainability. This decision of abstracting carries a risk. When that abstraction needs to change in one place you are faced with a tough choice...

Does this need to change in ALL places? How do you know? How can you get all places it is used and be certain it has to change in all of them? Changing for all usages is RISKY particularly when there are large numbers of uses and you don't know what they all do.

Do i make a new abstraction? This is safer but now starts to create bloat. It will lead down paths of making future implementations trickier because there are now two things to choose from that are possibly slightly different.

For tests I'm not really convinced that these problems are worth dealing with. Keep it simple and understandable. Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay. I'll say it again... Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay!