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Friday Fun Thread for November 22, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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hugbox incoming

I just want to say: I appreciate you guys. I spend so much time in this place that I sometimes forget what an aberration it is compared to the rest of the internet, by virtue of being a space which encourages honest good-faith discussion and penalises juvenile name-calling and consensus-building. Occasionally I'll step out into the wider world and be reminded of how unusual the Motte is in this regard. I got into an argument about JK Rowling on Facebook this evening with some dude I don't know, and after a couple of backs-and-forth he announced that, from that point on, any additional comment I posted would result in his estimation of my IQ decreasing by 5 points. I made a few additional points, and to each one he responded with the same comment - just "-5", over and over again.

"-5"

"-5"

"-5"

Such a bizarre way to behave. The NPC/Soyjak meme didn't come out of nowhere - people like that really exist. As good a reason as any to redouble my efforts not to get into arguments with strangers on the Internet, or at least not with strangers incapable of comporting themselves like adults. As bad as some people might find this place (particularly people whose opinions go against the local norms), I find it impossible to imagine someone here refusing to engage and simply taunting their opponent by robotically posting "-5" ad nauseum. And not even because the mods would put a stop to such immature conduct pretty quickly - I just think it wouldn't happen, full stop.

Fun fact. The first Youtube video is 19 seconds long and is basically a dick joke.

It has been watched 341 million times and will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2025.

I got myself an air fryer. Now that the share of low-fat oven-baked fries in my diet is going to rise, I need some kind of sauce to enjoy them with. What are your go-to homemade low-calorie dipping sauces?

Coat your fries in some kind of spice rub. They are much lower calorie but can be very flavorful

Thanks, that's an interesting idea. Any specific rubs you had in mind?

Take a leaf from the book of the barbarians on the southern border.

Fries with garlic salt + fresh chopped parsley don't really need anything else to dip in, IMHO. Add black pepper and/or ground chili pepper too to taste.

The parsley might not stick well to air-fried less-oily fries, though. That could take some experimentation. Maybe just a little vinegar first?

Some riff on Tzatziki is the best - semi-strained yoghurt, plenty of lemon juice, garlic and dill, salt to taste. You look for naturally lactofermented yoghurts, with nothing added, on the tangier side.

That's my go-to burger sauce! I haven't tried it on fries yet.

Low-calorie does limit your options. Not necessarily for dipping and in no particular order:

  • Malt Vinegar, possibly with some amount of "brown sauce." If it works for fish and chips, it probably works with just chips
  • Tomato Chutney or salsa, especially with larger home fries
  • Mustard, stone ground or whole grain. According to the totally unbiased National Mustard Museum, superior in every way to using ketchup. Particularly for the calorie conscious.
  • Nutritional yeast. I guess a topping not a sauce, but still another option to complement fries. IMO, needs salt too. Low calorie and low sodium sounds very miserable. Kind of a funky cheesy flavor with way fewer calories than cheese sauce.
  • Hot sauce. Frank's RedHot reminds me the most of using ketchup. Melinda's is available pretty broadly, and has a bunch of flavors of varying spiciness.
  • Gochujang. Depending on what you're having the fries with, but surprisingly versatile as a sauce for something so strongly associated with Korian food.
  • Crema. Can be lower calorie if made with yogurt or fat free sour cream, less tasty that way of course.

Personally, I don't worry too much about the calories from a table spoon of sauce. I typically go for Ketchup, BBQ, or 1:1 fry sauce (as apposed to 2:1 of Mayochup, as a concession that mayo does have appreciable calories, even at the table spoon level). If squeezed from a fine tip condiment food service bottle, you can "cover" a pretty large area with relatively little sauce.

I got myself an air fryer.

Welcome to the club. Which one?

Xiaomi something something, 6 liters, mechanical controls (Alec Watson convinced me I didn't need a fancier one).

I played a boardgame called Dune: Imperium for the first time recently. It's a worker placement game. And it vastly surpassed my expectations. I could see myself getting obsessed with it and sinking a lot of time into it.

The mobile app is also decent. I've been playing it a bit with friends.

The mobile app costs half what the game costs on steam. Hmmmm...

I have noticed that with a lot of games with publishers, I assume it's a lack of communication. Square Enix are particularly odd about it - a game like actraiser renaissance or trials of mana you can get on android for $15 cheaper than steam, but the ff pixel remasters cost the same on both platforms and then you get paranormasight, which is more expensive on android than steam.

I grabbed a copy of dune on android, it seems like a straight port so why not?

Wait, I thought you were talking about a physical boardgame.

It's a physical boardgame that has digital releases.

So there's both a physical and a digital release? Or Steam sells physical objects now?

Dune: Imperium was originally released in physical format at brick-and-mortar stores in year 2020. A digital version entered Steam Early Access in 2023, and was fully released on Steam, Xbox, Android, and iOS in 2024.

(Note that Steam has sold first-party physical objects for quite some time.)

Thanks.

I hate it. (digital boardgames. It's such a lazy stupid thing to make. You've got a computer that at present can ran entire digital brainlets. Why not use said computing power to have an interesting game)

It vastly opens up the amount of the game you can play when you dont have to herd cats to your house!

I've even payed this one solo twice and it was enjoyable. I think the deck building is a bit underfocused for my preference but the worker placement aspect, which I officially don't like, is fun.

For deck building I just love the designers other big game: Clank catacombs.

Have played this game several times and quite enjoyed it. Feels like the different components of worker placement, deck building and (very) light combat work together nicely to create tension.

Have any very good new history podcasts popped up in the last couple of years?

I used to enjoy stuff like History of Rome, history of byzantium, norman centuries.

Do they have to be podcasts or can they also be visual? The Great Courses series is torrentable on 4chan’s /t/ board, just look for TTC:

https://boards.4chan.org/t/thread/1275522

I'm familiar with TGC. They can sometimes serve the same purpose.

In general I recommend The Rest is History.

Someone here recommended history of the Germans and I've liked it well enough.

I like the narrator. He has a very German sense of humor, it's goofy and endearing.

I remember there was a Motte survey a few years back (when on the subreddit), but I haven't seen one since unless I missed it. Do you think there would be any interest in a new one? Any questions you would like asked?

Maybe see if you can find out from Trace what the old questions were?

I'd be interested in knowing religious composition, and whether the person is a convert to that tradition.

If someone would consider themselves a rationalist, rat-adjacent, rat-adjacent-adjacent, etc.—how many degrees people are out.

Whether/how many people on here they've met.

What other social media people use.

What their social security and credit card numbers are.

Find a list of questions, and then instruct people to answer a bunch of questions in a section with the answer they think most likely to be the most popular option (so, a Keynesian beauty contest), or, if you prefer, choose a prolific user, and have people try to answer what that person would answer. But people would want to see their results for that one, might be tricky.

What's one old user they wish were began frequenting this place again or were unbanned.

Number of siblings (and where in order). Number of children.

Number of children.

Better start at relationship status, % of adulthood spent in a relationship ? That'd be interesting to know.

Body count

I don't get to play as much as I'd like these days, but I got a spaceship sorted out after three iterations of redesign, and sailed easily to Vulcanus. I came down with a pretty good selection of material to work with, and the last few nights have been figuring out the basics of the new environment in the landing zone. I made the annoying mistake of building my first dozen smelters using an assembler rather than the first smelting machine, but it's a minor hiccup and I'm getting my bootstrap base built now. Coal liquefaction is going, but I'm handicapping myself by trying to run the oil system off orbital ice rather than acid neutralization; this makes everything slower until I can get launch capacity back up and build a serious orbital ice farm. If worst comes to worst, I can always cannibalize my ship for the purpose, but pushing through the production chain the normal way seems doable at the moment.

I've unlocked orange science, and the obvious next step is to start worm hunting to expand my buildable territory. My current plan is to build a tank and a bunch of piercing shells; even with the constricted environment, it seems like it should be pretty easy to kite the worm while the cannon grinds it down. I really appreciate how they've added and expanded more "breakthrough" moments in the game's design, where you can see a goal that will significantly change what you're doing, plan how to achieve it and execute the plan; right now, that's securing minable tungsten so I can stop relying on the bits and bobs from harvested surface rocks.

I started messing with quality on nauvis, but that's on hold while I deal with the million things that need to be built-out on Vulcanus. I'm salivating over the launch capacity available there once I get a proper factory set up.

Vulcanus will always be somewhat limited with launch capacity. The gravity is higher on the planet, so more rocket parts are needed (4x if I remember right). Then two of the launch components require oil products, which you have to get through coal liquefaction. And you'll be amazed at how much coal you can go through for liquefaction.

Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?

I tried leading the demolisher around by the nose, but I couldn't pull it off. Their lava geysers always got me eventually. In the end I just put down turret pods in their territory and let nature take it's course. I've heard other people have great luck with mines.

I basically completely abandoned the original planet for Vulcanus. The only thing it's missing is Uranium, and I'm not really missing it with 400% solar efficiency. I even got everything so automated I can completely manage it remotely to keep that factory growing while I bootstrap Gleba.

In the end I just put down turret pods in their territory and let nature take it's course.

Did it take a lot of turrets? I just made it to Vulcanus tonight and did some science shooting the first demolisher I found using my submachine gun, and it went as poorly as I expected. I wasn't even scratching its health regen. Obviously turrets would increase my DPS, but I have no idea how many it would take to get through the regen.

I threw down probably 30 to 40 turrets snd they make quick work of them.

I killed my first demolisher tonight. Built a tank, built a bunch of shells, drove forward and opened fire.

...I hadn't really accounted for the demolisher's abilities. My tank got severely damaged and I lost a couple bots, but managed to kill it despite the lava bomb spam. Then I made the mistake of reloading to try for a cleaner kill, and it massacred my tank in the next ten or so tries. Finally managed to kill it again, and I think I'll be holding off on expanding my territory until I can figure out a better method. maybe artillery, maybe mines. The lava bombs are extremely difficult to dodge and slow the tank, and it's astonishing how fast "kiting" turns into "getting eaten by a huge worm monster."

If you're going to do turrets, get red ammo; there's no tradeoff since the resources are effectively free, so get several dozen turrets and an entire inventory of ammo. With enough turrets, you should be able to penetrate the regen and armor. Maybe lure it in with a tank, retreat, let the turrets draw its attention, then swing back around to chunk it down with the cannon when it goes for the turrets?

For small ones, easiest way is to walk to their back, then quickly place a 7x7 patch of gun turrets with construction drones, and then manually loading them up with red ammo by quickly ctrl-dragging around (you need to have lots of ammo in your inventory). They die before they have a chance to drop one lava bomb.

Artillery is highly effective for medium and small demolishers. When I tried to kill a large one with artillery I got my position overrun. That health Regen is insane. I think the big ones need quality nukes.

You can make the tank faster with exoskeletons.

Man, you're importing water on Vulcanus? I think you should get acid neutralization soon. Maybe when you start harvesting calcite?

The ship I arrived in is still in orbit, and its eight asteroid collectors pull in a fairly large amount of ice while it's just sitting up there idling. It's pretty easy to periodically drop the collected ice from orbit and load it into the cracking plant. I'm a sucker for free resources, and it seems like acid neutralization is intended as a significant sink for both acid and calcite; if I can work around that step, it looks to be a free and very large productivity bonus right off the bat, with the bonus of giving me an excuse to lean into orbital infrastructure. It'll be a bottleneck until I get launches going again, but with the launch capacity Vulcanus offers I'm looking forward to building the mother of all space stations.

Acid neutralization is the best way to build a power grid on Vulcanus - a single plant generates a huge amount of steam, enough to run dozens of turbines and power the entire planet. Acid vents always produce a minimum amount, like oil patches on Nauvis, and the calcite patch at your landing zone will probably last you for the entire game, so there's no reason to be shy with the resources.

Although dropping free resources from space is indeed a useful strategy, especially once you hit advanced asteroid processing. The simplest is to harvest calcite from orbit and save the trouble of shipping it from Vulcanus.

My Factorio: Space Age playthrough hit a brick wall at Gleba. This will not become an industrial hub. It took forever but I finally got some iron and copper production going that doesn't stall out constantly. Now I'm just trying to get the bare minimum going to build a launch pad and start shipping out research. I'm importing all my belts, drones, solar panels, etc from Vulcanus, and I give zero fucks about that. I haven't really had to build any defenses yet, but I can see pentapods creeping closer on my radar. Big ones even. I got some turrets and ammo automated, but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats.

We managed to get to the victory screen this week. It came sooner than expected. We were sort of expecting to unlock some new secret technologies instead of the victory screen. We still have yet to do anything with promethean science packs.

I think in order to really do end game stuff I'm going to need to need to focus heavily on quality builds for a new ship. Or retrofit my existing massive ship. The sheer volume of asteroids in the outer system was overwhelming a blue belts ability to transport missiles. The flat front of the ship also had some vulnerability to asteroids clipping the sides.

But in order for the sheer quantity of stuff I'd want for quality builds, I'm gonna need to clear up more of the production on other planets.

Including plastic on Gleba, which is becoming a real limiter in getting enough quality red circuits. @No_one was brave in being the one to start our Gleba builds. But I think I need to make some of my own attempts, because I've seen the Gleba builds clogg up enough, and I have my own ideas about how to build a Gleba mega factory and it's different than his approach.

I think I want to build self contained mini factories. They take in the raw inputs, make their own necessary intermediate products and output final products. The benefit of this approach over sharing around intermediate products is that the intermediates tend to spoil the fastest of everything, and they tend to require the most in terms of bulk, so they fill up belts and then quickly spoil on those belts. The other benefit of this approach is I can just shut the whole mini factory down if there is enough end product on the logistics network. Rather than sending in a constant set of inputs that proceed to spoil and clogg up once the end storage or spoilage handlers are full.

I think I want to build self contained mini factories.

Take a look at this: https://www.themotte.org/images/17324829035101736.webp

I'm making red/green research from ore, coal, and water. It's moderately impractical, but still cool.

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Ya have a bunch of setups like this on aquilo, and now maybe starting to do them on gleba

Gleba was by far the hardest planet for me, I got brain-burnt enough that I had to take a break for a couple of days. Works ok now though. Aquilo was somewhat simpler, and much less frantic.

Gleba got us (me & cjet) pretty stumped for the first 3-4 hrs. Eventually I figured out the cursed mechanics and got something going. And yeah, we imported everything to start, power generation, tesla turrets etc.

I deleted everything I built on Gleba that researched the basic tree Ag-tech using stuff, and built a better base that's almost hands off. Took a good look at what I was doing, scaled it up, plugged every inserter into a combinator so resetting the filters on inserters is more convenient, because that's simply a must.

One mistake I made was running nutrients around the base. That's dumb - you run bioflux around and generate nutrients in each module. I feel ideally it should all be run around the base on a loop, I think I'll try that next time I'm rebuilding it.

Apart from that, one needs a really robust spoilage removal system. My second build usually gets clogged on spoilage removal. The nice thing is all the junk or unspent jelly or mash produces enough energy that my nuclear reactor is mostly just backup. The Heating tower has something like 400% efficiency for some bizarre reason. vastly better than boilers.

The one unsolved issue is how to avoid wastage and export only the choicest unspoiled flux. I'm thinking maybe running bioflux in a loop is the way to go so no more than needed gets generated.

As to defenses, we are at evolution 1.0 and spamming 4 rocket 16 normal turret firing positions, spaced 2 pylons apart works fine and stops every attack but gets half-stomped. If you add in a tesla turret that prevents the stomping altogether,just damages it. It's key to not taking losses without having vastly more rocket turrets. Don't think mines do anything to the stompers. Didn't try flamer turrets.

We never had really serious issues with the Gleba wildlife bc of early pruning and artillery.

but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats

They really could've made Gleba way messier by increasing the gravity. I'm even harvesting the fruits with drone, still no issues with power.

Distant belt of land mines plus clearing a dead zone before you leave (maintaining it with artillery later, they're slower to re-expand than biters)

You definitely need a checklist of supplies to bring to have an easy time setting up there.

And never never never use solar there: check the stats. Burn trash in heating tower, heat exchanger, turbine. Split in your jelly->rocket fuel production on low prio so it burns trash before fuel.

Yeah, I dropped off with near everything I needed, plus a landing pad, and a ship to automatically ferry additional supplies. Basically the only thing I'm fabricating locally at the moment is repair packs, turrets and ammo. Valcunus has so much automated, and so much launch capacity, that it's simply not worth the frustration to do it all again with infinitely worse logistics thanks to things perishing, seeds needing to be sent back, spoilage getting sucked out of all the loops, etc.

The worst part starting out was I was constantly running out of seeds because I was processing the fruit and nuts with assemblers instead of biolabs. Oops. I didn't want to have to deal with even more loops for nutrition and spoilage, but it turns out you only are seed positive if you process in biolabs. With that problem sorted I'm finally growing the factory to my satisfaction and getting into the pre-requisites for launching rockets. Still going to need a lot more harvest spots though.

TapWaterSommelier translates some Russian gallows-humor jokes from the start of the current war / special operations. The original source of the collection is great but it's in Russian, and jokes are some of the hardest writing to translate.

My favorite:

“Good morning, here is your conscription notice.”

“Who are we fighting with?”

“Fascists, of course!”

“Ok, and against whom?”

The original source is an anthropologist who studies jokes-as-coping-mechanism in Russian-speaking world. TapWaterSommelier gives a good summary of the trends. The joke I quoted is an example of a "common-man" character who obstinately and deliberately remains clueless about anything political.

Did the guy collect some recent Ukrainian jokes ? They ought to be pretty similar given the common cultural descent.

Diablo 4 players, how likely do you think it is that Elon Musk is bullshitting about his global ranking? What time investment would you need to get into the top 20?

Elon is very intelligent, so he likely learns way faster than other people.

The most elite speed runners are probably similar to the most elite board game players; very intelligent, but probably not the most intelligent. And even when they are, it still requires time Musk doesn’t have because there’s a huge amount of unavoidable pattern learning even if you’re great at extrapolation.

He has said it's most of his free time though. And he's not claiming he's best in all of it, just has best performance in some subset of it. I don't think it's that implausible tbh.

The game has cca 80k daily players. War Thunder has 800k. Counterstrike about the same order of magnitude as WT . It's not one of the very popular games, though still fairly big.

Do you think he has a ghostwriter, er, ghostplayer? Because the run itself looks legit: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859304361547182451

Do you think he has a ghostwriter, er, ghostplayer?

Knowing nothing about Diablo...yes, I'm very suspicious of a man who is already busy (and also shit posts half the day) also finding time to become the best in the world at any competitive video game.

At least a lot of the games I'm familiar with would need a lot of grinding and not just raw skill to climb up the rankings. Maybe Diablo is different.

I don't belong in this thread because I don't play Diablo 4, but my experience with speedrunners is that they spend a shit ton of time getting the techniques down. Like, an absolutely massive amount of time, probably talking thousands of hours. So either he's not as busy as he claims, or it's a ghostplayer. Also, it's a very rare busy person that uses his limited amount of time for gaming to play the exact same game that much for that long.

If he doesn't have a ghostplayer maybe he has a ghostposter. It can't take much effort to just repost all of the DR stuff he's signal boosting with a "!!"

That'd free up a couple of hours.

Nah, I think if anything the shitposting is most likely to be really him.

.. and given how dumb his shitposting it, I really doubt he spends much time on it.

Or he's multi-tasking, as in that wonderful leaked SpaceX call where we learned the Starship was one second from abort on the tower catch, while Musk was streaming his diablo run the whole time.

SBF also famously did this with league of legends, but was also notoriously bad at LoL, whereas Musk appears to be actually good at Diablo. Maybe we should start judging business leaders by their gaming chops.

Not a Diablo player in the least, but John Carmack publicly stated on X that Elon actually does that, and that even his wife plays Diablo with him so as to be carried through tougher dungeons.

The other night I rewatched a movie I liked when I was younger, Heartbreakers. If you want a light comedy featuring a funny performance from Ray Liotta and a hysterical one from Bob Hoskins (and also a leading turn from Jennifer Love Hewitt in her prime, displaying acres of leg and cleavage), check it out.

The premise of the film (this is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie so it's hardly a spoiler, but the movie would probably be more entertaining if you go into it blind) is this: Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt play a mother-and-daughter pair of con artists, Max and Page Connors, who play a long con on unsuspecting marks, the first of whom we see in the movie is Dean Cummano (Ray Liotta). Max meets Dean and gets him to fall madly in love with her, but tells him that she doesn't believe in pre-marital sex. Dean marries Max, but Max pretends to fall asleep on their wedding night, preventing him from consummating the marriage and leaving him even more sexually frustrated. The following morning, Page seduces Dean, and Max catches him in the act. Max divorces Dean and demands a massive one-off settlement; because Dean runs a quasi-legitimate business, he agrees, because dragging him through the courts would open up his business to legal scrutiny.

What I was thinking during this rewatch is, while this long con is obviously dishonest and shady - is it actually illegal? It's not a crime for a woman to ask her daughter to attempt the seduce the woman's husband to see how he'll react. As Page subsequently argues in the movie, "we can't make a scumbag do anything a scumbag wouldn't do anyway". The con hinges on Dean voluntarily choosing to be unfaithful to Max with Page - if he succeeds in keeping his dick in his pants, it's game over.

I actually recall watching this film back when I was a teenager, under the belief that it would feature Jennifer Love Hewitt running on a treadmill with just a bra on top (I learned an important lesson at that point that movie studios lie in their marketing). Was a decently funny comedy with its share of laughs, otherwise.

But your question about the fraud reminds me of the real-life fraud conviction in Japan earlier this year of a "sugar baby" who baited lonely men into giving her money. I recall learning of the details of her scam and also wondering why that was illegal, since there was no business transaction, not even implicitly. There was no contract, no sales, no storefront, no promises, nothing of the sort. It seemed akin to a college student asking his parents for money to buy books with the plan to spend it on beer (obviously parent-child relationship is different from this, but also, I don't know why the law would treat it differently). IANAL so I have no idea if I'm just not well versed enough at fraud law, or if Japanese law is different from American.

Not a lawyer, but criminal fraud laws are loose enough for them to be charged if the prosecutor really wanted to.

They might if multiple men came forward with the same pattern. It'd look a lot worse for the girls if they ran it multiple times and one guy didn't take the bait and Max annulled the marriage since it was never consummated.

As a one off it's hard to imagine them getting charged with anything. Dean could probably sue if he found out, but he wanted to avoid court in the first place.

But what would he sue them for? Fraud? What exactly is fraudulent about the scam?

I listen to music more nowadays since I am on concerta so some recommendations. A lot of it is farily mainstream electronic music wise but many may not have heard these

  • For about 4 years (2012-2015) Inspected Records got some artists to collab and make music, the proceeds of which would go to movember charities, the tracks being Beyond the shadows, Cascade, Mosaic and the very last If you hadn't. These are mostly Koan Sound and friends from in or around biristol

  • Polychrome is a great mix of what many just call bass music, unlike deadmau5 their stuff is not 4 to the floor so the variation in drums is a nice contrast. Koan Sound's first album, their music just sounds polished audio wise, far more than a lot of other music I have heard. Their remix of Halo 4s green and blue is pretty nice too.

  • Random Album Title by deadmau5 (pronounced deadmouse) turned 16 this year and it is my favorite album of his, electro and progresive house was fairly good during the late 2000s and it caputres a good bit of that vibe. Tracks I recommend are Alone with you which is my favorite track from the album, Faxing Berlin was one of his breakout hits at the time, I remember was another breakout hit where he collaborated with kaskade and Jaded.

  • New Energy by Four Tet is pretty nice. It is not as strict genre wise as either of the two entries before, the standout track here is two thousand and seventeen which samples classical Indian music in the best way possible.

  • Immersion, is Pendulums most popular album due to having thier most iconic tracks like watercolor,witchcraft,crush and The island. They make rock-heavy drum and bass, with the island being their non dnb mega-hit.

I should catch up on new music though so any suggestions are welcome.

Fights

Petr Yan fights Figeuridoin at UFC Macau. Finally, a UFC card that I can watch in the evening; otherwise, it's a pretty thin card. Some time ago I pointed how MMA did not feel as fun as it once was, 309 was just terrible. two 40 year olds fought where the older, less active one lost because he was older, less active and did not care. Bo Nickal threw the kind of strikes you dont expect from anyone not a heavyweight and Michael Chandler looked terrible too.

have a fun weekend folks.

I share much of your music taste, although over the past year I've been going down some weird musical rabbit holes that I'll spare you from. Some more "normal" stuff you might enjoy but haven't heard:

I see a Halo remix you enjoyed, and definitely recommend exploring all the video game songs you enjoyed. Gamechops will do whole albums of a game+genre, like Zelda and Chill. I often find that I like other work by artists I discovered from games, like C418 from Minecraft. And sometimes you find weird stuff that hits you right, like a Mariachi cover of F-Zero Mute City.

Which indentation style do you prefer?

IMO, Ratliff makes the most sense, because it's the only style that reduces the number of tabs after typing the closing brace, rather than before.

if(this){
	that();
	if(nothing){
		something();
		}
	}else{
	other();
	}

Indentation style is a problem for the IDE. The user should never think about it.

I find it disconcerting and nonsensical for the IDE to automatically delete a tab before the cursor when the user types a closing brace in non-Ratliff styles. Also, I'm not much of a programmer, but I imagine that writing a program to pretty-print code in non-Ratliff styles must be a major hassle, because it would force you to move the cursor backward and then forward again after finding every closing brace.

Lack of spaces makes it harder to read for me, but otherwise for work code, it's coded into the IDE and whatever it is it is, I usually don't spend any mental energy dwelling on that. For my own code, I usually have everything set up for K&R.

Rust's default indentation that cargo fmt forces on everyone is pretty solid and I am super happy that literally everyone uses the same style everywhere.

Not everyone uses rustfmt, and it's configurable anyway. So I wouldn't say that everyone uses the same style.

I don’t understand why more people don’t recognize that Allman is clearly superior.

Certainly I prefer Allman, because it delineates blocks better.

If you get paid by the line, then it certainly is.

K&R, accept no substitutes.

It's logically consistent, space-efficient, orderly and readable. The others don't even come close.

While Visual Studio and C# are my drugs of choice, the worst thing about them may be the default linter & style guide's insistence on Allman.

K&R has always been the best, and as you say, it's not close.

I prefer K&R with mandatory braces around single-statement blocks.

Whatever the linter thinks is ok

There's a saying "code should be written to be understood by humans first an only incidentally executed by a machine".

None of them are actually harder or easier to read, it's just a matter of familiarity. You need to train your brain to quickly parse code and tweak that for new indentation styles.

You're going to have a better time if you just learn to read the most common styles quickly. You're inevitably going to be reading a lot of other people's code.

I like otbs. It's K&R without skipping braces on one liners, which can lead to bugs on a messy merge.

This looks very wrong to me. Closing brace being at the same indentation as the start of the block is what makes sense to me.

if (condition) {
    do_it();
}

This is my preference, but I'll work in whatever the code base I'm playing in already has.

Agreed. I also prefer two spaces of indentation to four, four is just such a waste of space for (imo) no readability benefit.

The thing is that indentation should be tabs. Then everyone can set whatever depth they want their tabs to render as.

That's fair. I do wonder why tabs are so widely hated, given the flexibility like you said.

Because there's usually a rule about maximum line length, in order to keep lines fitting inside the screen or window. Variable-length tabs play havoc with that rule, and auto-formatters would be constantly flipping lines back and forth as code was touched by different developers. Which introduces a lot of extra noise into commits.

Not to mention that sometimes we use tabs to deliberately format things into columns, not just indent code. Variable-length tabs throw that off.

All in all, the gains from having the code look the exact same for each developer outweighs the individual aesthetic gain of your preferred tab size.

,>Because there's usually a rule about maximum line length, in order to keep lines fitting inside the screen or window.

There's really no need for this anymore, it would be trivial to have the editor wrap the line in a nice way (go has no line length limits in the official style guide).

Not to mention that sometimes we use tabs to deliberately format things into columns, not just indent code. Variable-length tabs throw that off.

That's just an abuse of notation. Spaces are for alignment.

This article made me laugh probably more than anything I've ever read on Substack: https://suedonym.substack.com/p/the-real-lesbian-master-doc

(Mods, please delete if it's too culture-warry.)

I've never failed a test before :(