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We once had a rather angry Irish customer calling our support complaining that we called him a pikey (slur for gypsy). After some back and forth it turns out we just gave him an apikey.

We never had a similar issue with our random numbers/letters/reset passwords or anything like that which don't have any kind of "dont return profanity" protections. Though I agree, someone getting a randomly generated customer portal url or something containing fuck or similar would look bad. Our cloudfront or something (or was it main public facing s3 bucket? can't remember) starts with "gay" and was never picked up on.


Totally off topic, but "gypsy" is itself a slur for Romani people in much of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people


I'd say those articles show Wikipedia's political bias and a tendency to overly politically correct instead of portraying reality.

Many in real life do refer to themselves as gitano or Gypsy and would ask for others to refer to them as such.

Of course it's very easy to find an article saying otherwise and then using that as the end of discussion for Wikipedia editors.


By ‘find an article’ you mean find ~10 real citations including the resolution of an authority a long time ago and to tell the reader it is not clear or definitive?

Better to be careful and let any individuals or communities tell you what they want. I have Roma connections in my family and at one point the word we’d use is ‘gypsy’. But, because I’m not Roma myself, if I came across some other group I wouldn’t assume I’m just allowed to say it to them.


I don't care what they want. A lot of people are tired of playing these language games.


Also, "do what people want" is fine for your interactions with an individual. But it's not a viable general rule for language, where we need one single approach. I think saying gypsy unless someone personally tells you they would rather you don't call them a gypsy is perfectly reasonable.


Everybody, in fact, takes innumerable social parameters into consideration when you say anything, especially with strangers.

For the sake of mass communication where you can’t really know your receiver, you have to do your best to just communicate whatever you need to (i.e. ‘a single approach’). Choosing to use a word that is ambiguous as to whether it is a slur is a bit unwise. I think it is probably unwise to do the same in personal interactions.


Then “a lot of people” (lol) shouldn’t complain when they piss someone off when someone already warned them


What you're saying very well seems like a threat. A threat of violence for speech.

That attitude defaults to better at violence in a particular context gets to impose their will. Or whoever has the security forces to back them out of an inferiority situation.

You miss the part when I can arbitrarily warn you about a lot of things myself and then use any interpretation of rule breaking on your part to attack you.

I know it may sound harsh but this is where many end up going so let's make it explicit.


Your first paragraph missed the point. Your second is how you deal with it. I've just told you I had a different experience. Your experience doesn't supersede mine. Your "be careful" (or else) doesn't sit well with people who don't like to be threatened.


It's in the annoying category where it can be used as a slur but also gets used as not-a-slur, including but not limited to by the people it describes.

Locally (north west england) people generally use "traveller" as a description ... but there are definitely people who use that as a slur.

Language be like that sometimes.


That is a very weird take to me. That big slam presumably is the spring breaking, a lot of energy released at once in a rather uncontrolled fashion. The same energy will be released if you make a mistake installing it or the spring is faulty for whatever reason while you are standing right next to it.

My take away is that it's to dangerous to do.


If you take the weight off the spring so it is limp, and you secure the door, this removes the danger.


Without knowing details, I can only assume you are misunderstanding something. I and everyone I worked with have bugs prevented by FK constraints. They prevent getting data to be in bad state, instead of it piling up and expensively fixing it afterwards. Not once have I thought "I wouldn't have had this problem without FKs" and every time I thought "oh yeah, I forgot this path, that would have been a problem".

Having to write code that can handle foreign key violations because the DB doesn't check it is a major pain. (we use Cassandra for example, so there is a "foreign key" usually from a PG row to a Cassandra row, obviously that can't be enforced on DB level so application code has to do the work)

As for deleting/updating data, FKs can be a bit annoying, but postgresql for example has two (possibly more) options.

1) The (possibly dangerous) cascade delete, which will traverse the FKs basically for you and deletes them 2) The check FKs (and other constraints) on commit. I.e. instead of checking every delete/update statement causes FKs violations, it'll check at the end, after having done all the delete/update statements if there are any FK violations. (or update statements). Called deferrable constraints.


I make mistakes all the time as a developer, I would hate to be fired for them and if I would, I would never claim responsibility.

And that's why I don't get how people expect directors/managers to be infallible.

Taking responsibility isn't about walking away from the job, but learning from it and making it right.

Whether that is done well in this case, I don't know, but that wasn't your point. As far as I can tell they got pretty decent severance packages.


Slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

A thermonuclear test yielded much, much higher energy, due to unexpected lithium 7 reactions.


Don't know, seems like a good explanation. We have a number of machines that can take CO2 out, the "enough machines" is the problem.

- they either require space (forests or whatever)

- are hard to produce in sufficient numbers (materials, production capabilities)

- are expensive to run (like energy input, maintenance), in particular don't generate new red balls while removing them.

- disposal cost (where the machine becomes the carbon, like trees, cutting them down and doing something with that)

Once we got it out, on a "pile of carbon", the problem becomes much easier.


From what I can tell you can choose where your donations go, so you can focus on poverty and let skynet exterminate us humans if you'd want.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate/organizations


Stumbled over a (German speaking) youtuber, "Held der Steine" (Hero of the stones) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVtbNWH_9So

Who reviews "Bricks" of all kinds including Lego. He consistently is annoyed by how expensive Lego is compared to everything else, with usual worse quality (in terms of design, fun to assemble, etc). If you can bear google translate or even speak German, he may be worth listening to.

Anyway, got sucked into that and got my first "brick" set since around 25 years ago and it felt like Lego (as far as I could remember). Instructions, presentation, the stones, everything.

I believe "Cobi" and "Bluebrixx" are often mentioned as good, affordable (seems about half price for similar set) and lego compatible. From what I understand the patent for the particular form factor of the bricks ran out, which is why there are a bunch of alternative now.

I got that one: https://cobitoys.de/small-army-ww2/panzer-und-fahrzeuge/panz...

I live in the UK, think I got it via amazon, so maybe more difficult for you Americans.


Well, depends, fundamentally it's a paradox.

Either US company get's the data from the Italian one, making the Italian operation illegal in Italy

Or

The US company doesn't get the data from the Italian one (despite ownership), making the US company illegal in the US.

I don't think anyone is under the illusion that the latter option is chosen when push comes to shove.


Apparently it's thought that meteorites hitting the ground freeze water around them after a bit. They get heated up, but it's pretty short, so the bulk of it is "space temperature" only the surface is heating. And a lot of the stuff that heats up is ablated. (depending on size)

Unless the stuff is on the surface of the meteorite it's probably fine.


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