sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

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⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Yup. The annual visitors to Yellowstone and Glacier is like 4x higher than the total populations of their respective states. I would be surprised if even 5% of yearly visitors come from the state they’re in, and I bet more than half are from outside the country.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Well, they do. They leave litter, destroy trails, vandalize formations, etc. Keeping things nice takes a lot of work, especially with how much foot traffic these parks get. Yellowstone gets over 4 million visitors every year, and that’s with the park fees, quotas, etc. Glacier is a bit less popular and still gets around 3 million visitors every year.

National and State parks are funded with both income taxes and park fees. Park fees keep the number of visitors down to a manageable level to preserve the natural beauty.

And walk-ins generally don’t need to pay, though some of the larger parks also have walk-in rates.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
There’s no profit here, it’s just a different form of taxation where the users of a service pay more for its upkeep than those who don’t use it. The only time a private org gets involved is if you make a reservation (and even then, many sites use a government agency) or arrange for a guided tour or something.

Everything here is publicly owned, except maybe the handful of hotels that are operated inside Yellowstone (not sure how those work). So whether you’re paying with income tax or park fees isn’t particularly relevant since it’s all federal or state land.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
There are areas like that here too. I live next to a few mountains where there see dozens of interconnected trails all largely accessible from an intercity arterial bike path, with free parking near the more popular entrances to the trail network. Much of it is federal land (part of a national forest), but none of it is designated as a national park.

Maybe there’s a two terminology difference here. Here’s the terms we use:
- national park - has ranger stations and infrastructure, and usually an entrance fee
- state park - same as national park, but at the state level, and lower fees (often free)
- regional park - owned either by the state, county, or city, but isn’t designated as a “state park”; may or may not have parking fees, depending on popularity and how developed it is (esp near urban areas)
- national forest - designated area, but generally little infrastructure outside of some campgrounds (paid) and semi-curated trails; no entrance/parking fees
- BLM land - federally owned, but virtually no infrastructure and no fees; avoid hiking during hunting season so you don’t get mistaken for game
- undeveloped state land - like BLM land, but owned by the state
Most of the trails I’m talking about are in the last 3 groups, and they’re all free. Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Glacier are all in the first group and all have entrance fees. If you’re “going hiking,” you’ll go on the last four, and the first two are for vacations unless you happen to live right next to one.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Yup, for Yellowstone, that’s 3 entrances, so three sets of booths. It’s largely to cut down on traffic (traffic gets really bad as-is) and maintain the infrastructure.

The only reason you’d go to any of the entrances is to visit the park, there are no through roads or anything, and it’s like an hour or two from the major highways, and several hours from a city larger than 10k people (aside from the tourism towns just outside the park). And the traffic to get into the park is backed up for an hour in the morning for people looking to get lucky with extra passes (there’s a maximum capacity).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Why not? I’d return, apologize for the misunderstanding, and then laugh about it. Maybe bring a small gift, like cookies or something to share, and make it clear that you’re looking for friendship.

But completely bailing is kind of weird IMO, which tells me there’s more to the story.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
Why not ask? If a guy asks a girl (or vice versa) to go somewhere and it’s not abundantly clear it’s not a date (e.g. you’ve done similar things together before, they’re openly gay, or they explicitly said it’s not a date), then it should be assumed to be a date unless clarified otherwise. So if they don’t specify and you’re unsure, then ask.

That said, her leaving is also odd. A misunderstanding shouldn’t be a big deal. Show up the next day and laugh about it, and you’re golden. I wouldn’t be mad if that happened to me, nor should either anon or the girl. It’s just a misunderstanding, it’s really no big deal.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
We have plenty of places like that here as well. The places where you have to pay to park are generally very popular and the fee is largely used to reduce how many go (i.e. reduce destruction) and fund maintenance and cleanup efforts.

In my area, the only places that charge are state and national parks, and not even all of them. I have dozens of hiking trails within a few miles of me without any parking fees, and there’s a massive federally owned swath of land nearby also with no parking fees.

If you go to the handful of extremely popular parks, you’ll pay a fee (and you can get an inexpensive yearly pass if you want), but if you go to literally anywhere else (dozens if not hundreds within 50 miles or so), there’s no fee. So Grand Canyon or Yellowstone = fee, local falls or BLM land (federally owned, but not a “national park”) are free.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries to understand his coworker⁩ ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:
His coworkers allegedly agree she was flirting, so there’s that.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon falls through the cracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Eh, they can’t touch anything that’s not on their equipment, and they would have to prove that you did it while on their clock. It could be that you took your “breaks” from that job (legally allowed) to get all the work done for the other company, and you are just really productive in those 15-min breaks or whatever (or you pre-work outside of work hours and submit your work in those “break” periods). If it’s not on their hardware, they’d have a rough time proving it.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon falls through the cracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
If you get fired, you can sue for wrongful termination and file for unemployment. But then you still need to find a new job.

Instead, take on extra work that’s incredibly easy but also has a paper trail that you can point to. You might even get a raise. :)
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon falls through the cracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Eh, I have kids, so I already have enough mental drain w/o my full-time job, so I think I’d end up catching up on things I’ve been putting off, like exercise, repairs around the house, etc.

In fact, I lost my job at the start of COVID and didn’t start looking for a few months because nobody was hiring. I got so much stuff done around the house, and I was able to essentially home-school my kids at the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. I really enjoyed that, and I would totally homeschool my kids if I didn’t need to work every day to pay the bills.

So yeah, I’d absolutely appreciate a 30-ish hour work week, especially if I got one whole day off instead of it being spread across 5-days.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon falls through the cracks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:
Or find a new job so you can save the entire salary, and then send in your 2-weeks just before yearly reviews. That way you can get ahead so you have less stress when you inevitably get cut off.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

The latest java releases have finally given us the ability to pass through a function, and work more functional.

Which AFAIK is still a class under the hood. That doesn’t particularly matter for developers, but it’s still odd.

But honestly, if I’m going to use anything on the JVM, I’ll just use Kotlin. Java is kind of catching up, but Kotlin is just so much cleaner IMO. But if I’m not stuck w/ the JVM, I’ll use one of the others I mentioned.

The memory allocation from C

Eh, it’s honestly not so bad, provided you’re using it for the type of work where C is suited. For most embedded work, I just pass on the stack, so no need to malloc() or free() most of the time. If I’m building a larger program, I’ll probably not use C, because it just doesn’t have the features I want for larger-scale development work, and I definitely won’t use C++ because that’s a nightmare of conflicting legacy features.

Rust is my go-to if I know it’ll be large-ish and I don’t have any particular restraints on where it’s going to run (i.e. not on a microcontroller or something). The compiler catches a lot of my bugs, the result is fast, and now that I’m comfortable with it, I’m pretty productive with it. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but it’s way better than when I started with it (around the 1.0 launch).
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reliable bank account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I’m similar, but I’m with Fidelity instead of Schwab. Using a brokerage as a bank account is an awesome cheat code to getting awesome interest w/o any extra effort. My “checking” is a brokerage account and the cash sits in a money market fund making ~4.5%, which is awesome.

The main downside w/ an online bank/brokerage is lack of access to branch services, like depositing cash or withdrawing specific denominations. I maintain a local bank that doesn’t entirely suck to get access to branch services and leave like $50 in there so they don’t close it, and then just transfer money to/from as needed. All of my regular expenses go through my brokerage “checking.”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reliable bank account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yeah, when I look into a new bank for whatever reason, the first place I go is the fee schedule and I look for BS. Most big banks have a ton of BS in there, so avoiding them is usually sufficient if you don’t want to read a table of fees.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reliable bank account⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
In fact, overdraft protection is typically opt-in, so just don’t sign up for it and you’re golden.

The only overdraft I use is self-funded overdraft where it pulls from savings instead of a tiny bank loan. I have it send me a notification when that happens so I can tell when my cash flow is wonky.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon remembers 7th grade⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Well, it’s fake either way, might as well chuckle at some black humor.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon remembers 7th grade⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
After school programs anyone?
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Python2 is only one character longer:

print “Hello world!”
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
C# is nicer Java, but I think it’s still fundamentally a poor language.

Rust master race:
```
fn main() {
    println!("Hello world!");
}
```
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
And most IDEs will autogenerate it for you.

That said, I think it highlights everything I hate about Java:

public class MyClass {

Why does it need to be a class? I’m not constructing anything?

public static void main(String[] args) {

Why is this a method? It should be a top-level function. Also, in most cases, I don’t care about the arguments, so those should be left out.

System.out.println(“Hello world!”);

Excuse me, what? Where did System come from, and why does it have an “out” static member? Also, how would I format it if I felt so inclined? So many questions.

And here are examples from languages I prefer:

C:

#include “stdio.h”

Ok, makes sense, I start with nothing.

int main() {

Makes sense that we’d have an entrypoint.

printf(“Hello world”);

Again, pretty simple.

Python:

print(“Hello world”)

Ok, Python cheats.

Rust:

void main() {

Ooh, entrypoint.

println!(“Hello world”);

I have to understand macros enough to realize this is special, but that’s it.

In C, Python, and Rust, complexity starts later, whereas Java shoves it down your throat.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yup, I swore off Android dev almost entirely because of Java, and then Kotlin came out and Android programming was tolerable again. Not fun, tolerable, lipstick can only make a pig so appealing…
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Honestly, I prefer C to Java, it’s incredibly simple without all the BS that Java throws at you:
- interfaces - compiler will fail if you provide the wrong types; w/ Java, figuring out what types to pass is an effort unto itself
- functions - everything needs to be in a class; even callback functions are wrapped in a class (behind the scenes if you use modern Java); in C, you just pass a function
- performance - Java uses a stop the world GC, which can cause issues if you have enough data churn; in C, you decide when/if you want to allocate or free memory, no surprises
There are certainly some bad parts, but all in all, when I run into an issue in C, I know it’s my fault, whereas in Java, there are a million reasons why my assumptions could be considered valid, and I have to dig around the docs to find that one sentence that tells me where I went wrong w/ the stuff I chose.

That said, I prefer Rust to both because:
- get fancy stack traces like I do in Java (I really miss stack traces in C)
- compiler catches most of my stupid mistakes, Java will just throw exceptions
- still no stupid interface hell, I just satisfy a specific trait and we’re good
- generally pretty concise for what it is; I can rarely point to a piece of syntax and say it’s unnecessary
I use:
- Python - scripting and small projects
- Rust - serious projects or things that need to be fast
- Go - relatively simple IO-heavy projects that need to be pretty fast
Java has been absent from my toolbox for well over a decade, and I actively avoid it to this day because it causes me to break out in hives.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon tries programming in Java⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Python:
```
print("Hello world")
```
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the horsepill⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I’ll take that as a compliment.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the horsepill⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Oh, I absolutely would be. But you can bet I’m framing that ticket the moment I get home.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the horsepill⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
I hadn’t heard it, so thank you and @GBU_28@lemm.ee.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the horsepill⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Yup, and sometimes they talk back.
⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the horsepill⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:
Right, but where are the enemy likely to be? Along major roads and highways. Armies need to move their military equipment somehow, so that’s where you’re likely to see the bombs being used the most. That, and in cities to control the movements of your enemy.