Can someone explain this to me?

I thought those were for only when shit is seriously wrong and execution can’t continue in the current state.

That’s how it starts. Nice and simple. Everyone understands.

Until

some resource was in a bad state

and you decide you want to recover from that situation, but you don’t want to refactor all your code.

Suddenly, catching exceptions and rerunning seems like a good idea. With that normalized, you wonder what else you can recover from.

Then you head down the rabbit hole of recovering from different things at different times with different types of exception.

Then it turns into confusing flow control.

The whole Result<ReturnValue,Error> thing from Rust is a nice alternative.

Is there anything left?

Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.

Again. Hate is too strong a word. Just “involuntary and inexplicable dislike”.

tbf, I hated him in the 90s, before it was cool conservative.

I studiously avoid anything with the big T. He’s a good actor, but I’d prefer not to stare at him for 90 minutes.

Reddit for niche communities (my town and the TTRPG I’m playing).

Lemmy for less niche communities (arguing about things, politics in my country) and trying to grow those communities.

I have a weird dislike of Tom Hanks. It isn’t hate, but I find myself inexplicably hostile towards him. No idea why.

Canadian grocery prices have increased something like 20% since 2019. At this point I think we’re all buying less, eating less, and making sure we waste less.

What could be more serious than the future of humanity in the stars? Once we reunite with our glorious reptilian creators, we will ascend to the stars!

The dinosaurs want us to be successful and join them, that’s why they keep helping us!

Be strong for Elwood.

When the dinosaurs send arks to bring us home to glorious Planet 9, I’ll make sure to save you a seat.

It’s going to be glorious.

Now I need to deal with USB-C to micro USB and USB-A for my old devices. Things will be better eventually, I guess, but it’s just shifted the annoyance around for now.

My phone is slightly easier to plug in though.

Wait til we discover the launchpads in the geologic record.

I have it on good authority that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they predicted the Chicxulub collision and escaped the Earth on arks. Of course they realized that their warm blooded servitor species would survive the impact and evolve sentience much like their own (they created our genomes, so it was easy to predict), so they hid the launchpads until we would be ready to see them.

The arks landed on Planet 9 (the big one, not the lil one), since it was less likely to be hit by similar events. They hollowed it out, helping to create Pluto and Ceres, and have been living in there ever since.

Discovering the launchpads will show them that we’ve achieved sufficient technological prowess for them to reveal themselves to us. I can’t wait!

That’s good enough for the AI.

I work for an established US company, but I’m in a foreign country.

I expect my employer will receive tax cuts, so the company should have more cash. I expect this means my job will be more secure in the short term.

However, I believe Trump has talked about international tariffs and lowering the US dollar. So that could remove some certainty.

When an online conversation is getting too heated, stop responding for a while. Give everyone a chance to calm down and get perspective.