Most recently? My wife was wfh and out of the kindness of my heart I brought her a coke. She was on a zoom call with her entire team. I was pantsless.

I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

Several years ago, I went under the knife and the whole day from the point they put me under is a total blank. It’s unsettling because I am told I carried on conversations with the doctor, family members, etc. after initially coming to from anaesthesia, but it’s only starting the following morning when I woke up in a regular hospital bed that I could start remembering again.

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

I had to sleep on this before coming up with a reply. As an individual who is not what you would call religiously devout, you can take it with a grain of salt. But whatever the case, here goes…

I grew up without religion for the most part but married a Catholic, and as musicians, we wound up playing at the local church.

As it stands, I would not say that I have bought into the whole religious faith thing at the deepest levels. That does not come easily for me. But I think it is fair to say that certain aspects of the religious experience have rubbed off?

In particular, I am more invested in the welfare of others ranging from my immediate family and friends (many of whom I met indirectly through church connections) to the community at large. As such, I am in no hurry to shuffle off at this point, as I feel there are people who depend on me and so I guess I still have unfinished business?

I don’t know what happens in any afterlife. Does anyone, really? Frankly, if we all just fade away into oblivion, I’d be satisfied to simply have a peaceful release from worldy concerns, but I don’t have any expectations beyond that.

Do you mean in the sense of say missing a concert because you got sick? Or is it something more contorted like feeling sympathy for someone and then regretting it?

I had a few comedy albums. Some of them like Monty Python had a mix of music and skits. I wasn’t super into audiobooks. Probably the longest thing I ever listened to was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in its (original?) BBC Radio rendition.

Oh yeah, that is the best! They have one at the conservation area near me. You go there around March and slap on some cross-country skis to get to the shack. Then just as the cold is starting to set in a bit, you walk in there where they’re boiling the sap and take in the aroma. Then you sit down at a long table and gorge yourself on pancakes with the syrup still hot and mixing with the butter. And then on the way back, if you have any bird seed in your pocket, you can just hold it out and chickadees will land on your hand. It’s magical!

You have to understand that religion was banned by the communist regime of the day. Admitting to it could get you locked up.

But my dad, as a tourist making this casual observation about flagrant rule-breaking going on in plain sight even as he spoke, broke the tension completely and made the locals admit there is a lot of rule-breaking going on everywhere.

Yeah that was my read of it. I remember actually seeing people hopping onto the train even as it was starting to move out. It took those locomotives a long time to build up any significant speed, so I don’t think anyone was freaking out about getting cut in half or anything.

Never lived in the USSR but travelled through the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway with my dad years ago when just a kid. He spoke fluent Russian and struck up conversations with locals wherever we stopped. At one point, they broke out into gales of laughter before we reboarded the train. I asked him what that was all about.

He said he had asked if anyone practiced religion in the USSR? At first, they were reluctant to answer. Who wants to know? Why do you ask? And he said well, I notice there are signs all over the train station that it is forbidden to walk over the tracks. Yet I see people going so far as to crawl under one train to reach another. After a moment of awkward silence, that’s when the laughter broke out. “Ah shit man, you got us. Religion is alive and well here!”

This was a struggle for me going from hobbyist programmer to working at a company. I tried to tone it down. Really. But eventually I got “promoted” to having my own office with a suspiciously thick door. Hmm…

True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…

Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It’s obnoxious.

Some good suggestions here. But if you’ve been battling this for ages, it might be time for a sleep study? You may need a referral from your family doctor for this, but it’s generally not hard to get, and the sleep lab will be able to tell you if you have any bio-mechanical issues like sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, etc. There are all sorts of things that can mess up sleeping. Also, it’s a rapidly evolving field of medicine, so even if you had one done years ago, it might be worth a revisit?

I guess if you’re talking math, there’s Fermat’s Last Theorem whose proof (assuming it was legit) was lost for centuries.

I don’t doubt it. It’s a bit like natural selection. A good idea has better odds of taking hold and becoming a part of the next generation’s knowledge base, but there are no guarantees. There are all sorts of circumstances that can affect whether this actually happens, and sometimes it’s just down to dumb luck.

Ouch that is insane! I did learn from friends that online ticket purchases here do involve a service fee which seems not right for something that’s completely automated, but my membership waives it so sometime I buy tickets for them and they pay me back.

Food is not worth it here also. I could buy dinner at a restaurant for less than the price of a couple of popcorn and drinks, and that’s what my wife and I wind up doing before a movie. Last time, we went to a restaurant near the cinema and I mentioned to the waitress we were seeing Dune next. She said “Oh, we have a points thing we do towards free tickets! Let me set you up.” So now we have even less incentive to do the popcorn thing.

My first ebike was a used tourist rental. As such, it was a bare bones model feature-wise. It only had one button you push to turn on pedal assist and that’s it. But the ebike shop owner was kind enough to put a fresh battery on it at no extra charge, and because it was designed for rentals, the thing was built like a tank and looked no worse for wear.

I rode that thing for about 3 years before upgrading to a more tricked out fat tire bike that suits my usage patterns better. Then I gave the old one to my daughter’s roommate and it’s still getting good use afaik?

Plus, the last thing I want to do after a 12-hour shift at a physical job is to bike several miles uphill to get home.

That’s a fair point. My job is sedentary and cycling is my primary form of exercise. (That said, I do have an ebike so the workout is not mandatory. Don’t tell my dietician that…)

I guess what got me into the cycling option was having a good hard look at the map. I work in an industrial park with a railway running next to it, but that railway was decommissioned years ago, and it turns out that it had been converted into a public trail. Much of the time I was driving to work, I was not even aware of this. But I tried out the trail. Not only does it knock about a mile off the street route, but it replaces slow-rolling trucks with tree tunnels and, because it had been a railway, the grades are gentle and bike-friendly.

I no doubt lucked out there but what I’m trying to say is it’s worth checking where bikes can go and cars cannot, as it can be a better experience to take those routes if they exist?

This. I have calculated that the ebike I bought will pay itself off in about 2 years from all that not-driving I’m doing. That’s just from fuel/maintenance savings alone. If I factor in that my car is getting quite old and I would probably need to have replaced it by now, it has already paid for itself. (I still need a car for bad weather and certain hauling needs, but I drive it only sporadically these days so it’s lasting forever.)