And then you have the Trump administration's war on competence.

The Reason Foundation has a series of Youtube videos about things that were done with good intentions but ended up making things worse.

So glad I am retired.

For some reason I read this as

Making Referential Stupidity a Type

For math.stackexchange.com which uses MathJax, I use MacDown, a markdown editor with parallel windows, one showing the MathJax and the other (in real time) the rendered math. I find it essential.

I enter my math directly into the editor without writing anything on paper. Works for me. The ability to copy and paste is invaluable.

The ternary operator is easy to nest if you put each clause on a separate line. Then it looks just like nested if-then-else.

I love the ternary operator as much as anyone. But dang if it doesn't get hard to read when there is are a few, nested even.

Does that operator compile to faster assembly that if I make the same logic with verbose `if` logic? Is that a language specific outcome?

    cond1 ? res1 :
    cond2 ? res2 :
    cond3 ? res3 :
    or_else_res

If they are truly nested, then that is confusing. But if you have an if-else chain, then it can be quite readable.

Or they could just ask granddaddy for advice:

  (cond (cond1 res1)
        (cond2 res2)
        (cond3 res3)
        (t     else_res))

=)

An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age...

I find that so much harder to read compared to if/else or case/when in ruby.

The ? is basically an attempt to use fewer if/else, at the cost of condensed if-else like structure. I always need to look at both parts after the ? whereas in a single if or elsif I don't. case/when in ruby is even better here e. g. regex check:

   def foo(i)
     case i
     when /^cat/
       handle_cats
     when /^dog/
       handle_dogs

(I ommitted the "end"s here to just focus on the conditional logic.)

or

  if cond1 then res1
  else if cond2 then res2
  else if cond3 then res3
  else or_else_res

or

  if cond1 then res1
  elif cond2 then res2
  elif cond3 then res3
  else or_else_res

what is most lua-like?

Unless you mess up its associativity, like PHP until 7.4.

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/ternary_associativity

http://phpsadness.com/sad/30

Years ago, I used Acrobat to extract tables from a PDF. Had to do it manually, but it pasted nicely into Excel.

As usual, anything Trump and his minions touch turns to garbage.

Working as intended. Their goal is to degrade government

Good - the less government, the better

This isn't less. This is the same amount, but much worse.

Meantime, government spending has gone from $6.8 trillion in 2024 to $7.4 trillion in 2026. We've gotten considerably more government.

not really, but the point is to get ppl to think like you do.

I believe that I got the first external cassette drive for the PET on the west coast. Only used it a very few times. The big boost was when I got the floppy disk drive. I could do anything!

That must have been a expensive piece of gear at the time.

In the mid-to-late 80s, my school still had a lab of 10 or so PETs. All connected to the same dual floppy unit. I remember the teacher would tell half the class to save their work, then flip the floppy over for the rest of the class.

For a nice introduction to relativity, look at The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension by Lillian R. Lieber. $15 on Amazon. Written in 1945 and still quite good.