You don’t kill zombies; a zombie is already dead. You wait for or reap zombies. (A zombie process is just a process table entry with its exit status; it goes away once the parent process has read that exit status.)

Odd?

Some homophobes don’t believe in the existence of straight people.

🍕 I only have pepperoni.

By the way, his sister does cool math art. https://bathsheba.com

C++ programmers always let their friends access their private members, so …

There is a word for country X trying to operate a government function inside country Y’s territory, without country Y’s permission. That word is “invasion”.

Orange you glad …

How many 1700s drinking songs does anyone know the tune of today? Well, there’s “To Anacreon in Heaven”, better known as “The Star Spangled Banner”.

“Aura Lee” is from the 1860s, but the tune is better known today as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.

Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?

Being targeted by Nazis doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And thus, there’s nothing you can avoid doing, that will protect you from Nazis.

Anti-science, misogyny, etc. are bad independently of whether they are done in the name of religion, or pseudoscience, or political ideology. Doing bad things in the name of religion is exactly as bad as doing them in the name of communism, or capitalism, or racial ideology, etc.

Sure. Voting for religious genocide is just as bad as voting for non-religious genocide: e.g. on the basis of nationalism, pseudoscience, or the like.

Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of “religion” being attached.

Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don’t sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you’re good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.

Prayer? Okay, take “religion” off of it and they’re meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That’s good. Unless they’re thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.

Going to worship services? Okay, they’ve got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about “everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever” and the speeches are about hate politics. If they’re about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of “religion” on it, great!

Dietary rules? It’s okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn’t Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)

Anxiety stopped having nearly so much of a hold on me when I realized that there usually wasn’t a “why”, that it was just anxiety chasing its own ass and only pretending to have anything to do with the stimuli.

I’m confused. To me, “building a tree” and “parsing” are the same thing. If you end up with a tree representation of the structure of your document, the thing you did to get there is parsing.

A war crime occurred when Hamas put a military installation in a civilian hospital.

Once that happened, attacking the hospital to get at the military base is not itself a war crime.

You might wish it was, but that’s not what the law says.

If you can’t tar to a pipe into ssh to a remote host and untar into an arbitrary location there, are you really using Unix?

I’m reminded of the character names that show up in MIT CS textbooks, like Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”) and Eva Lu Ator.

Rust does memory-safety in the most manual way possible, by requiring the programmer prove to the compiler that the code is memory-safe. This allows memory-safety with no runtime overhead, but makes the language comparatively difficult to learn and use.

Garbage-collected compiled languages — including Java, Go, Kotlin, Haskell, or Common Lisp — can provide memory-safety while putting the extra work on the runtime rather than on the programmer. This can impose a small performance penalty but typically makes for a language that’s much easier on the programmer.

And, of course, in many cases the raw performance of a native-code compiled language is not necessary, and a bytecode interpreter like Python is just fine.