(In the U.S. at least) freedom of speech does not nor was intended to protect you from being offended.

Exactly. Harmful content will always exist, but the way it gets promoted is through feeds. Feed algorithms are created by companies, and those companies should be responsible for what they do. It promotes junk content that optimizes the engagement of the user and ad revenue.

Many companies have gone through cutbacks over the past couple years, and Big Tech is not immune. Since COVID, the manufacturer I work for cut almost 35% of its workforce. Hell, our IT department went from 7 to 3, and I've been expected to pick up the slack. Yes, it sucks that so many are gone, but I continued to work hard, I showed consistent commitment, and since then, I received a promotion.

You aren't entitled to a job. You have to prove your worth. Do companies take advantage? Absolutely. But your position and worth, at least in part, come from how you conduct yourself.

...this is about control over consumers and making more money at the top level.

Stone?

[Nixon's head]... thus solving the problem once and for all!

[tiny girl] ... but ...

[Nixon's head] ONCE AND FOR ALL!

This is so ludicrous and obviously flawed in so many ways that there is only one conclusion: investment scam. Besides the reasons you mentioned, there is also: clouds, extra energy being pumped into the planet's atmosphere (it will cause extra heating), diffraction, animals like to sleep sometimes, etc.

Are you calling it slanted because of a technicality in the article?

Here's an idea: just go and create a language that does everything right. Then release it, and you'll be worshiped until long after you die. Oh wait, no you won't, you will be flabbergasted by the sheer amount of rotten tomatoes thrown at you for doing things wrong. No matter what you do, other people have different needs and preferences, and they will tear your work to pieces.

Yes, Python has a legacy. It's slow. But it's really fast to write a python program that can do something you'll need much more time to write in another language. It's an extremely powerful language. For me the most annoying part is packaging/distribution. That's a real mess at the moment.

I have played a bit with real-time programming in Python, and in my experience there is no sane way to do it in Windows (I expect you were running it in that OS since you start from VB6). If anyone has any tips & tricks to add here, please feel free. I have a feeling that the problem was in the Windows scheduler. Possibly there are Windows specific API's to have more fine-grained control over execution, but by default if you e.g. sleep for 1 ms you return 15+ms later.

Under Linux, the performance was much more predictable, and things really work very well if you start running with the SCHED_FIFO scheduler. You can also take control of (disable) your garbage collection if you know what you're doing.

Exactly. I don't believe for a second that the wording is accidental. Oh yeah, we forgot to mention the word "temporary", let's add that towards the end. It's just a small detail, not important. Articles these days always need to cause outrage.

I'm getting a lot of code smells from what you describe as your problems. About commenting out big blocks of code: How often do you realistically have to do that? Also, if that's a common pattern, or how you like to work, try looking into advanced IDE's like PyCharm and don't do stupid grunt work that a computer can do for you. Invest some time into learning how to use the debugger, and just skip blocks of code at runtime without having to comment it out (jump to cursor will skip intermediate statements). You will definitely benefit from it if what you describe is a common issue for you. With that skill you can also re-run statements etc, so your productivity in figuring out how thing work will increase a lot.

Mercedes was also a girl name. It was even the name of the designer's daughter if I remember correctly.

You can't be depressed when you're dead...

And assuming you can just pop out the battery. I remember those days :).