gravitas_deficiency

Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.

American here: hard agree. This is all insane, but it’s predictable, and they told us about it ahead of time, and people still fucking voted for it. We shat the bed, now we must lie in it.

I’m probably gonna try to leave the country and renounce my citizenship at some point, particularly if the next few months are as catastrophic as I think they’ll be.

Yeah… they tried something similar here in MA, and every single service person I talked to about it, at every level, from dishwasher to chest to server to maitre’d to manager to owner was opposed to it. It was a tortuously and deceptively constructed piece of legislature that “guaranteed” a thing that was already actually guaranteed. It did nothing helpful, and it just increased bureaucracy and put another layer in the wages equation unnecessarily. We voted it down, thankfully.

From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.

We are 100% going to be at war with Mexico before the year is out

I would fucking love for the Feds to try this with any blue state that is a net contributor (which is like, basically all of them). And then set up a (federally illegal, but we don’t care about that anymore apparently) interstate commerce and trade pact between blue states for mutual aid and economic assistance, since the federal government is currently busy destroying the federal government.

It’s genuinely one of the most frustrating and stressful and appalling aspects of this for me: it’s like there’s fucking nobody anywhere, at any level of government, who has any balls whatsoever unless they’re a fascist. And that’s a harrowing fucking thing to realize in our current context. I just didn’t expect literally everyone who has power to resist anything fascistic to be such a fucking pushover.

Genuinely, I do think the only way out of this is starting to look like a military coup by some sort of cadre of non-insane officers from across the services. Based on the performance and reactions of every single part of the government - specifically including the alphabet agencies - I don’t think we’re going to snap out of fascism any other way.

It looks like the legislative and judicial branches, and all of the agencies, have simply decided to do nothing and follow the rules while Trump just gives illegal directives that are then enacted by eel-on-musk’s imbecile intern wünderkinds, and everyone just stands around saying “I’m just following orders”. It’s fucking embarrassing.

Earlier: this

Later:

In a shocking development, Trump cancels American federal elections going forward

- NYT headline, 2026-10-19, probably

Oh, so that’s actually a thing I specifically do not care about.

I tolerate MBA types at my job because they’re part of an equation that yields a paycheck to me. I don’t believe those MBA types should be in the discussion at this level at all.

In fact, that sort of insistence on implementation details from product and manager types who can’t ever fucking commit to addressing tech debt issues until the system is falling apart is one of the primary frustrations I have in my career.

That’s one of the things that blows me away here: nobody in the halls of power of any country that professes to care about stopping nuclear proliferation did ANYTHING to backstop the the guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum. That has had the direct result of making it clear to every single country on earth that the deal was bullshit to begin with. Nuclear non-proliferation is dead.

Nuclear weapons are the final word in guaranteeing sovereignty and territorial integrity. Any country concerned about either of those things from anywhere, at any point in the future (Ukraine + anyone non- NATO and non-nuclear on Russia’s border; Japan; Taiwan; South Korea; Jordan; Egypt; Cuba; Canada; Mexico) should absolutely strive for their own nuclear program these days, or at the very least join a pact that pledges mutual defense.

That’s kind the entirety of my point: if Rust is a tool that can make expressing algorithms safer and less prone to error - and it can, in a logically provable sense - then what the fuck ground do you have to push back on?