Well, the government just passed "gender adjustment surgery" legislation last week around here. So, now my taxes are going to be used to pay to sexually mutilate the mentally ill. I'm kind of pissed off about it, frankly. So, I come to Slashdot looking for technical news, there's an article about how rotten I am because I don't build databases to cater to the sensibilities of these mentally ill people.

Why can't you freaks just quietly live out your strange little existence without making such an annoyance of yourselves? A decade ago, I used to say "they're not causing trouble, just leave them alone". Now, all I think to myself is "they're perverting our entire society, and driving me crazy with their constant drama, will someone please just shut them the fuck up".

Vanity is the only thing it has to do with. Most people just don't want to fucking hear about it one way or the other. We've got our own shit to deal with. It's just toweringly arrogant to think that other people are meant to give a shit.

Maybe we should have 3 sexes... Man, Woman, and Uman. Him, Her, Hum.

Men have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to impregnate women.

Women have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to be impregnated by men.

Umen have mental or physical conditions that make them reproductively unviable.

Gender, as distinct from Sex, can just go the fuck away. How vain do you have to be to think other people are supposed to care about what you've "declared" your gender to be?

The latter is a more accurate description. There was a good Futurama episode that illustrated it well. But you and I and all mankind will be dead long enough before to make it rather academic.

I prefer to think that time is a spatial dimension, and that we all abide eternally as 4 dimensional objects, experiencing our own creation. No heaven, no hell, except inasmuch as the eternal form that I create each day is painful or joyful... but, no ending, either.

I think of the universe as an object of finite mass/energy whose least complex state is the singularity, the thing that banged big, and our universe is one of many possible permutations. There are some that erupt out briefly, simple, not formed to sustain much complexity, and others as complex as this, and more.

There are natural forces pushing us out, and others drawing us in, and their tension makes form possible.

We're alive. We're part of the natural forces creating complexity, and were not alone, life is in fact spontaneously created by the laws of the multiverse.

Thats where morality comes from, and beauty, and everything decent. Our push to make this universe as complex as we can, because its beautiful.

And people, in their teeming masses of billions, their 4d shapes spiraling around this stone like ribbons, are more beautiful than a sparsely populated stone.

Anyone who wants to cut that short is on the winning side in the end, but I want to try and set the stage for trillions someday, and fuck the opposed.

Selfishness is not having kids but expecting that you're going to be cared for by other peoples kids. It's selfishness when it's done by the individual, and it's selfish when it's done as an "immigration" policy. Face it. We, as a culture, transformed sex into a sport, and now we survive by stealing other peoples children. It's worst in North America... this continent is where genetic material comes to die.

That's not going to happen.

Also, technological advances are a CONSEQUENCE of large populations. Small populations huddle around fires. Large populations are in everyone's best interest.

Personally, I like games that are entirely abstracted down to strategic considerations. Art makes games worse. Chess doesn't need art. Go doesn't need art. Crap games need art.

Irrelevant. This is a VERY common use case. THIS use case, and other COMMON use cases, do not need to be so hard. Different choices would make them easier. That is all.

I taught myself to program on a VIC-20 when I was 7 years old by reading the manual. First program was a recipe database for my mom that saved its data on cassette tapes. She found 3x5 index cards more practical, so I switched to writing games. Taught myself assembler by reading Byte and Compute! and the like. Taught myself LOGO while visiting family one weekend when I was 8. Learned Pascal in computer camp as a pre-teen.

My parents had a system for hardware upgrades... if I got straight A's in school with no exceptions, they would pay for half of the next piece of hardware, as long as I worked my paper route and earned enough to pay for the other half myself. That's how I got my floppy drive, and man, did I ever appreciate that thing.

Take 1 cake. Divide it evenly amongst 3 people. Represent the amount of cake each person gets in decimal. Sorry, you can't. It's impossible.

Get the idea?

Can you honestly say you, alone or with a team, can write a 3000-page specifications or requirements document and still be sure there are no contradictions, omissions, or any defect?

Yes. I'm entirely capable of that. That is indeed what I'm saying.

I just want to add...

Try writing a project that meets ISO specifications for medical use using the waterfall method.

People will die.

Well, I've written them, and I've never had a project fail.

One example involved interviewing

i) the owners of the company

ii) an executive from each department

iii) a "regular joe" representative from each department

This became a 40+ page project specification, which was signed off by all stakeholders and became the contract.
 
Then this document was fed into a series of code generation engines, which created hundreds of thousands of lines of code. This was all done with an eye towards allowing various professionals to go away and do what they do best without getting held up waiting on each other or tripping over each other, filling in the missing functionality in the generated code.
 
That system is still in operation close to a decade later, organizing the working lives of thousands and serving the needs of millions.

Now I work in Agile. I hate it. I'm always having to check with other people constantly to move forward, I never get in the zone, there's a lack of clarity and vision, and I feel like I'm getting stupider each day and I'm not producing my best work.

Frankly, decimal is kind of a cruddy system. It was a bad call in the first place to use base 10. Yeah, it's good for counting on your fingers, but it's only cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 5 and 10. Base 12 would have been a much better choice, it's cleanly divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12.

I say we ditch metric, imperial and the decimal system as well.

Wanted attention.