End To End Principle Puns

https://youtu.be/9MPTg0Q5tfQ

I know this sounds childish, but it is important to me.

BF and I live together. 3 years ago we were at a restaurant and his phone was on the table. It was a big tablet type thing, and it lit up with a message. When he opened the message, I very clearly saw it. Earlier, he had messaged a woman on facebook telling her he loved her new profile picture and wondered if she'd ever be travelling to our country. She replied with a smiley face.

This woman is a friend-of a friend-of a friend of his. So in other words, nobody to him. He's never met her. She doesn't live here. I wasn't fully furious or anything but I was annoyed and let him know. I didn't think he truly was attempting to get together with her, but more just engaging in cheesy flattery and looking for some cheap attention from a stranger. He apologized, and that was that.

Fast forward 3 years. I open facebook and see a message she put on his wall saying: "hey, guess what? I'm moving to the area next month! Maybe we'll finally get a chance to meet after all!" He "liked" her comment.

I freaked out at him and he told me of course he had no intention of meeting her, he was just being polite. He says he's never spoken to her in the past 3 years and he's literally never even met her. I said I was so angry because by liking her comment he made it seem there was a possibility.

We are now at an impasse. I have said he needs to unfriend her. He says he doesn't want to do that because she'll notice and it will be embarrassing and she hasn't done anything wrong (because he's the one who sent her that message 3 years ago). Instead, he says he will not have any contact with her. He doesn't want the friends-of-friends to notice and remark if he unfriends her and for it to be a "thing". He said he's never had any intent of meeting her and never will.

I do believe him. But I don't care. I'm making it into a "thing" now, and I'm not sure if it will end up causing us to end our (5 year long) relationship. Am I crazy for going this far? I know if he does as I say, he will just resent me anyway. But I still don't care-----it is the principle. He disrespected me by texting her in the first place, so now I don't give a fuck how it looks to her or friends etc. I want her gone.

*TLDR: boyfriend "came on" to a woman 3 years ago on facebook while we were together (came on to might be overstating it), and now 3 years later she has resurfaced and I want her blocked. He doesn't want to because it c

This post is inspired 50% by the recent abortion thread on here and 50% by the Pope's recent announcement that the Catholic Church now opposes capital punishment in all cases. I'm really curious about how people's feelings and beliefs about different life-ending scenarios line up with one another and why.

P.S. I know that some people will argue that eating animals does NOT belong on this list and some will argue that abortion doesn't either, and that's totally legitimate. I just felt like either including them OR excluding them was taking a position, so if I was going to have to take a position I might as well that the one that I actually believe.

Centralization is a double-edged sword.

So far, centralization (and intertia, and laziness, and caution) has been favoring Blockstream.

But if and when a congestion crisis comes, then the tide is gonna turn pretty quickly - and Blockstream's monopoly in terms of "code running on the network" is gonna evaporate quicker than anyone expected.

How will this happen?

Like this:

Bitcoin is going to go into a crisis - not just the current agonizing slow-motion swamp of centralized fascist governance, but a real-time honking red alert involving a clogged-up network, with people freaking out screaming from the rooftops that millions of dollars in transactions are in limbo due to some pointless fucked-up 1 MB "blocksize limit".

And at that point, people are going to get rid of the damn piece of broken cripple-code, immediately.

End of story.

Slow to crumble, fast to collapse

Up till now, the Bitcoin governance crisis has been like slowly sinking into a swamp of quicksand.

But once a real-time congestion crisis actually hits (and online forums become dominated by posts screaming "my transaction is stuck in limbo!!!"), then all the previous bullshit and bloviating from economic idiots about "fee markets" and "soft hard forks" or whatever other nonsense will be instantly forgotten.

And at that point, there will be only 2 things that can happen:

• Either Bitcoin dies, and $7 billion dollars in investor wealth evaporates into thin air; or

• The simplest and safest "good enough" on-chain scaling upgrade gets rolled out ASAP - ie, we will get bigger blocks so fast it will make your head spin.

You don't need Blockstream - they need you

When push comes to shove, people are going to remember pretty damn quick that open-source code is easy to patch.

People are going to remember that you don't have to fly to meetings in Hong Kong or on some secret Caribbean island ... or post on Reddit for hours ... or spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on devs ... in order to simply change a constant in your code from 1000000 to 2000000.

Eventually, we are going to remember what vote-with-your-CPU consensus looks like

Remember all those hours you wasted on reddit?

Remember all that time you wasted in some hidden downvoted sub-thread debating

I am working through Stroustrup's Principles and Practice C++ book. A lot of the code in the book produces the warning, Control reaches end of non-void function. It's because there are lots of functions like this:

double foo()  
{
    if (condition)
        return value;
    error("error message here"); //custom function throws runtime error: included in book
}

That is, he has lots of functions that look for a condition, and if it is met, a value is returned, otherwise an error is thrown, which ends the program so there is no need to return anything. The compiler still complains.

One option, to shut up the compiler, is just to add a dummy return value (something like return -99.99;). At IBM Knowledge Center this is one option they suggest in response to this warning: "At the end of the function, add a return statement that returns a suitable return value, even if control never reaches there."

This is what I've been doing, but part of me feels like this hack is worse than the warning itself as I'm using a magic number now, and if the error message is ever removed why is that number there (I actually have defined a constexpr double error_value = -99.99 in my program, to at least make it more readable, and less mysterious in the function itself).

Is this a common thing, or is Stroustrup using an anti-pattern that I should just avoid in my own code?

I am not dissing current philosophies or saying previous ones were right. It's just that our perception changes with every generation and we cannot guarantee that our philosophies will have the same effect later on.

The biggest reasons to pay my car off early is to avoid interest, to get rid of the debt, and to lower my monthly bills.

My initial financed amount was $14,765 and because I was 20 with very little credit history, my interest rate was 11.13%. It is a 4 year loan.

Fast forward 2 years to today, and I have a new job that allows me to make higher payments. I do it for the reasons stated above. I took a closer look at my account today to find out there's a small checkbox when making one-time payments, and it just says "principal only". Turns out, the extra money I have payed (about $3450) first went to pay off the interest that I would have accrued in 4 years (approx $1650) so I only paid $1750 in principal. $1650 went to interest that I technically haven't accrued yet.

Obviously, if in paying early (expect to be paid off 2 years early) this seems like wasted money. Is there anything I can do? Am I SOL because I didn't read the fine print?

Edit: called and they did a payment reallocation of all my extra payments to go towards principal only.

I remember my music teacher back in elementary school made us watch it every year, but I can never recall the name.

Edit: It was a very serious drama about European kids learning like opera-ish classical singing.