Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

If it works, make sure you understand why.

If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

Keep going until you have a working new feature.

Then try a more complicated feature.

After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.

The war on Christmas CANNOT END until Christmas ceases its illegal occupation of November.

We are once again calling on the Claus regime to return to their side of the borders outlined in the Black Friday agreement.

What’s the thing Elon does where he keeps his head lower, but looks up at the most extreme angle-of-eyeballs he can?

Wait, what?

Like, at the time? Or still?

I respectfully disagree on the TSA, anecdotally.

I know a few people who applied there simply because it WAS a job in their area that paid more than minimum wage and, at least until recently, by virtue of being a government job, it was more likely to actually care about federal protections for employees with disabilities than, say, retail work, which only gives the minimum required number of fucks, and only then when someone is watching or has a lawyer handy.

Also, a significantly larger amount of the population has unfortunately accepted the questionable stipulations of the patriot act than have decided due process is simply too much work, so I feel that’s a distance of an order or three of legal magnitude, comparison-wise.

I’m not saying everyone who works for the TSA is there due to lack of other options, but given it’s ubiquity and level of employee turnover in airport towns, at least SOME them are.

Alambre

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.

or lost to the changing tastes of a new generation of media consumers

This is the part that just baffles me.

I rarely see anything but vitriol for anything anymore and it usually seems almost wholly unwarranted at the levels it’s offered at.

I’m beginning to think it’s not that people actually dislike the stuff that comes out, they’re just so programmed to nitpick EVERYTHING that they don’t remember how to enjoy something without finding fault. Or they don’t want to risk saying they liked something only to have someone call their very right to an opinion in question. Or… I don’t know. It well and truly confuses me.

People have been trying to make it a thing for a while. I don’t know whether or not it started at a news outlet, but multiple news outlets have picked it up, so…

This is the first complaint I’ve seen about any of the new Star Trek shows that didn’t use the word “Woke” as a pejorative term. I’m impressed and appreciative of your well-thought-out take on it.

You actually do have some decent points, but I’m still an unabashed fan of the new stuff, especially Discovery/SNW.

It IS different, in all of the ways you describe, but every new trek has been a stylistic departure from the previous ones in some way, shape , or form, and I’ve been taking the plot armor Mary sue-ing as one piece of that. (Something DS9 also has to a degree, but they definitely held to the “difficult moral choices” aspect in spite of it).

Thanks for your opinion and insight.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

Basically, the rocking back and forth she’s doing as a coping behavior.

Yeah, it TOTALLY doesn’t have anything to do with him getting caught tripping balls on camera right next to his lady friend at the White House table who was so disassociated that the poor girl couldn’t stop stimming.

I would be doubled over laughing for a good ten minutes if I accidentally smacked some NPC and got “randi ke beej” yelled at me.

Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

the brutal trolling in Ultima Online made me quit

I’m sitting here thinking “I don’t remember it being TOO bad…”

and 4 or 5 guys on horseback come and fuck your shit up for an hour or two

Oh. Yeah.

There’s a reason someone (Midas?) once parodied the entire steppenwolf song…

Well

You don’t know what

We can find

Why don’t you die for me little n00b

On a magic Corp Por ride

For gaming and everything else I couldn’t easily do on Linux back when mandriva and Gentoo were still considered fairly new distros? And because I didn’t know Linux well yet?

Linux has come a LONG way, but back as much as 20 years ago, doing something as simple as installing suse8 could see you with a fat string of error -3’s just because you had a slightly less common model of hard drive. Forget trying to play one of the few MMOs that existed back then.

Production mac’s were still running os8 back then.

It was a different world and gaming meant windows for almost all major titles because there were only so many WINE contributors.