Asking questions is obviously fine. "Just asking questions" is a specific bad-faith rhetorical tactic: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Yes, but I think this is what they meant by

> Making watch logic for that sometimes is too complicated or changes the outcome (race conditions especially).

> we're going to need much more difficult driving tests.

Sounds good to me. Let's require regular re-testing while we're at it.

While we are at it, mandatory breathalyzers in all cars, and all cell phones should be locked while traveling over 10 MPH. Let’s do this!

> The Alcubierre drive “beats” the speed of light

The Alcubierre drive is only a thought experiment that requires "exotic matter" (aka fairy dust) to work.

Papers have been published that have found ways to create warp drives without the need for exotic matter: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.07125.pdf

I know, I was making reference to this

> They are only theoretically possible if you allow for negative mass and energy--not an engineering problem so much as a "need to find exotic matter"

Basically people ran the EFE "backwards" to see what matter distribution makes the wanted curvature. You get either negative mass-energy or the bubble doesn't travel ftl iirc.

> In my book, it's wrong to pay if original authors don't get that payment.

Wait, are you under the impression that the authors don't get paid?

It is my understanding that Medium will nag visitors to sign up and/or restrict access to your Medium articles even if you're not enrolled into its partner program.

Is this incorrect?

> > How often do people really plan trips? ... probably once or twice a year if you're lucky.

> Many many people use travel planning software as escapism

Heh yeah I caught that too. My wife plans many, many trips per year - but we certainly don't go on all of them, hah. The planning is a hobby in itself.

> the real outcome is simply delaying those deaths, spreading them out more over time.

Which is still a good outcome, because you don't want to overwhelm the healthcare system to the point that it can't handle anything that isn't COVID.

That was the whole point of the early-pandemic "flatten the curve" campaigns.

An old joke: any sufficiently advanced Sinatra app is indistinguishable from Rails.

> Mutable strings by default was a huge mistake in Ruby

This was changed in 3.0. String literals are now frozen/immutable by default.

I don't believe this is correct.

There was a plan to do that at some point, but it was pulled back from for backwards compat reasons.

You can opt-in to string literals being frozen by default on a per-source-file basis with a magic pragma comment, and this has existed for several ruby 2.x versions and is unchanged in the released ruby 3.0.

Oh, huh. Yeah, you're right. Really showed my whole still-on-2.7 ass here haha

> I'm genuinely curious to know why you feel the need to point it out.

I haven't seen it in this thread either, but it's been a very common [false] talking point in the conspiracy/anti-vax circles.