Rails, ActiveSupport I believe, adds this to integers.

But I think one of the interesting things about it is the open nature of classes in ruby.

The thing that makes it possible is that you can open classes in user space and just add stuff to them. It’s a neat feature that few languages have.

The feature, like most features, has pros and cons. On the pro side it makes making DSLs and helpers like this pretty trivial. You can make really expressive ideas and apis because you can change how things you didn’t write work.

On the con side, it’s harder to discover and the methods of an object being the result of runtime mixins can make things hard to reason about.

Having worked in both python and ruby and now elixir for the past couple of years, it’s interesting to see how the languages are similar and different.

There’s an elegant beauty to ruby’s everything is an object and all method calls are messages concept. Python has always struck me as less elegant but the upside is that it can model different ideas in different ways and doesn’t have to try to make them all look like the one central idea.

Even though I find the model behind ruby more pleasing to think about, I tend to enjoy python more due to it being more explicit and easier to reason about. Although that’s pretty subjective.

In any case I think the language feature of open classes is a fascinating one and one of the really different parts of ruby that really distinguishes it from python, for better or worse.

America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.

Harlan Coben, The Boy from the Woods (Wilde, #1)

Sometimes I’ll get an ad for something like a “tactical windbreaker” or “tactical cargo pants” and I panic and think “what have I done that the surveillance state thinks I want this?!”

Until I saw some of these ads I never considered a windbreaker could even be tactical or whatever the alternative is, strategic? Am I wearing strategic pants because they aren’t tactical?

Dude imagine living here your entire life, advocating for improvements, voting for the best politicians you can in the primaries, voting for the uninspiring Dems in the general.

I don’t have any faith in my fellow countrymen either. I just live here.

The only thing I’d push back on is that this dumb fuck could have gotten into office and not squandered the soft power of the US. If he were a bombastic boorish idiot that kept the global order running as normal do people give as much of a shit in other countries.

I hate that 75M Americans are cheering right now, and I also hate that almost 100M Americans are just sitting on the sideline in every election going “nah, doesn’t matter enough to vote”

Boy it sure would be scary if there was some part of the Bible that told you that how you treated the least amongst us, the hungry, the immigrant, the homeless, was how you treated god.

I’m sure trump has nothing to worry about, he’s always been real nice to the vulnerable among us right?

Matthew 25:40-45 New International Version

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

It only took a century of work to build up all that trust and goodwill. We could spend it down in a few months, make a ton of money, certainly there will be no negative long term effects.

I remember when I first saw them, the cyberpunk aesthetic was interesting.

Having seen them in real life though, the fog machines and laser light show were definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting.

In real life they look out of place and instead of looking cyberpunk they end up looking more retro-futurism.

To me, at least, as someone that likes the cyberpunk aesthetic, I was kinda excited for the cybertruck too. If not for it specifically, than for it opening the door for other people to adopt more sci-fi designs.

Sadly every time I see one in person I think it may have set things back instead of moving them forward.

The most amazing thing about vibe coding is that in my 20 odd years of professional programming the thing I’ve had to beg and plead for the most was code reviews.

Everyone loves writing code, no one it seems much enjoyed reading other people’s code.

Somehow though vibe coding (and the other LLM guided coding) has made people go “I’ll skip the part where I write code, let an LLM generate a bunch of code that I’ll review”

Either people have fundamentally changed, unlikely, or there’s just a lot more people that are willing to skim over a pile of autogenerated code and go “yea, I’m sure it’s fine” and open a PR

The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.

It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”

Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.

Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.

Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.

There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.

The Dems though paint this like it’s a “necessary evil” they just have to accept all these donations from the ultra wealthy because you can’t win any other way

So the position starts off cynically pragmatic, and cynical pragmatism makes for a shitty rallying cry.

But then it doesn’t even work. They sell out to get the big money donations and then lose.

Ineffective cynical pragmatism is an even worse rallying cry.

And any time you get a Sanders or a Mamdani that shows a different path to success they go “oh sure that worked for them but it wouldn’t work anywhere else, only our cynical pragmatism works everywhere as long as you ignore all these electoral defeats”

The Dems though paint this like it’s a “necessary evil” they just have to accept all these donations from the ultra wealthy because you can’t win any other way

So the position starts off cynically pragmatic, and cynical pragmatism makes for a shitty rallying cry.

But then it doesn’t even work. They sell out to get the big money donations and then lose.

Ineffective cynical pragmatism is an even worse rallying cry.

And any time you get a Sanders or a Mamdani that shows a different path to success they go “oh sure that worked for them but it wouldn’t work anywhere else, only our cynical pragmatism works everywhere as long as you ignore all these donations from electoral defeats”

But maybe this time if we cozy up to the wealthy and get a shit ton of money like 11 gojillion dollars the voters won’t mind that we aren’t advancing policies they like.

Harris only got over a billion but I think if we sell out a little bit harder, shift a little further to the right to make our positions more attractive to the uber wealthy, this time it’ll work.

Wealthy consultants: I know you’ve tried running as republicans-lite. We suggest that you move further to the right.

DNC: brilliant