People would soon block it out, as they do with other things out of their control. They’d mourn their dead, there’d be poems and ballads and darkly ironic stories about those squashed by the Hand, and figures of speech alluding to this, but people wouldn’t fret about it. And if it kills 365 people a year around the world, that is a fairly low death toll, so it would be classified with improbable but spectacular threats like sharks or volcanoes, rather than car accidents or heart disease.

I’m wondering where the original photo was taken. I’m guessing the Balkans or a former Soviet republic.

The massive gaps which are only mortar are a huge red flag. When push comes to shove, they’d give, and the rest would follow.

The “Voltaire” quote is actually from some neo-Nazi, and there are no prizes for guessing (((who))) he was insinuating the rulers are.

That’s when you just drink

The old-timey comicbook superheroes were modelled on sideshow strongmen, who bent iron rods with their bare hands and such, and all tended to wear capes and tight costumes with shorts on the outside.

Even worse than there being no comments: the code is extensively commented, but its function has drifted from what the comments describe to the point where they are actively misleading.

Elon Musk: “I only date models”

I’ll just wait for the bus to 127.0.0.1

My First Nightmare Fuel

You made it more scalable? Good work

“choose any 2”

A pizza you can make in a toaster oven

Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).

I did something like this once, in the course of a project whose purpose I don’t remember. Realising that 8-bit ASCII was wasted on the constrained alphabet of some kind of identifiers, I packed them into 6 bits, 1⅓ to a byte. I recall naming the code to do this “ShortASC”, pronounced “short-ass”

Or a tuberculosis victim, in either case.

The human mind has limited capacity for things to pay attention to. If your attention is occupied with tiptoeing around the loaded guns scattered all over the floor, sooner or later you’ll slip and trip over one.

Of course, you’re a virtuoso programmer, so you can pirouette balletically around the floorguns as you deliver brilliantly efficient code. Which is great, until you have an off day, or you get bored of coding, run off to join the circus as a professional knife-juggler and your codebase is inherited by someone of more conventional aptitude.

Programming languages offering to keep track of some of the things programmers need to be aware of has been a boon for maintainability of code and, yes, security. Like type systems: there’s a reason we no longer write assembly language, squeezing multiple things into the bits of a register, unless we’re doing party tricks like demo coding or trying to push very limited systems to their limits.

250,000 lines of brand new legacy code nobody has ever thought about or understood? Good luck with that.

They mean Klaus Barbie, of course.

She just wants to tell you your porn star name