Fair enough, that’d explain it. I did expect air conditioning to be a big part of it, kind of makes a lot of sense that you do run servers as well.

Still, that’s a huge bill to eat each month.

Yeah pretty sure all evil deeds start with good intentions. So, no. I would very likely mess up my own head by thinking I’m doing the right thing, and if I’m secure in my position as the leader, I’d have a big load of yes men hovering around enforcing and enabling my every thought and idea, be it good or not. Most likely it’ll tend towards the “not good” side over time, and at some point everything just gets distorted and convoluted and by that point, there’ll be no return. And if I’m not secure in my position, then I’ll be dead and replaced before I can spell out my first decree as the ruler. If I’m to be good, I’ll not be ready for the bad coming my way. If I’m ready for the bad shit, I have to be ready to dispense my own bad shit. And that, then, wraps into my first point.

There’s no way that would work if I was truly benevolent. I don’t believe it’s sustainable or even possible to lead as a dictator that is good or benevolent.

Edit: that’s in practical terms. Let’s not even begin with the ideals — can one really ever be both benevolent or just generally good, and a dictator? I believe not. Sharing the burden and the authority would almost always be the more moral choice, not to mention more plausible in terms of lasting.

I have personally never seen a bill of more than 60€ per month. I have some friends living in bigger houses, not apartments, and they tell they can get over 100 fairly frequently, the bigger ones more in the North can get over 200 in the winters, but even still, I’ve never even heard of anything reaching 300.

But I’m in my thirties and don’t really know anyone from beyond upper middle class. That might help explain my experience if it happens to be the outlier, but just reading the responses to this, I might not be the outlier here.

Anything four figures is just crazy surreal to me. I can not even imagine what it takes to reach that kind of electric usage. Or maybe it’s just extremely expensive, not the usage itself being crazy? I would think living in a place where sustaining one’s existence requires that kind of resource usage would be very hostile against settling and building in general?

But if it’s just personal usage rather than the regional climate or whatever, and an insane price of electricity isn’t the main reason, then I don’t even know what to say. That’s crazy.

They probably couldn’t be happier, with a deep sigh of relief, seeing as how most of the others would look.

Indeed, I would be extremely skeptical of myself if I ever felt 100% about anything, let alone a decision as big as this. That alone would make me force myself to ask for second opinions from as many different people as possible.

I get the sentiment, and of course one needs to be fairly sure about a thing like this, but nobody should ever feel 100% about anything. Only way that happens is if you either willingly ignore or are ignorant of a lot of things on the other sides of the metaphorical coins. Everything in life is a chaotic mess with so many layers and dimensions that it’d be impossible to navigate it with any certainty nearing 100%.

But the sentiment I do agree with. You have to be sure to a great extent, even if it ought not, or ever really even can, be 100%. It’s an impossible threshold for anyone to clear, and telling someone they have to be 100% when they never really can, or at least should be able to, is just planting a seed of doubt in their mind that is not necessarily helpful. It can be very destructive.

In general, having impossible ideals for people to aspire to is a bad exercise. We know this by heart with body ideals and acceptance for example, we ought to understand this applies to everything else too.

Yeah, I would argue that expanding one’s perspective on matters as important as a decision like this, should almost be mandatory.

Asking for fresh eyes and different points of view on any bigger decision is to be encouraged in my opinion. Making big decisions based on intuition and one’s own limited perspective and feelings is bound to be less well informed and as such, more likely to backfire or turn out bad.

Ask questions. Ask opinions. There will always be people telling you to be your own self and not just follow what others say, but broadening perspectives is not following others or lacking own agency/will, it’s the very opposite. It is what helps one have a healthy starting point to make their own decisions.

I’m not sure why some people just feel the urge to assume anyone asking for second opinions or just thoughts on a matter in general is doing it because they lack their own opinion or free will, but here in the internet, they are depressingly many.

People are complex. Life is chaotic. Everything is riddled with unique situational details and it’s impossible for anyone to navigate that alone. It’s only natural to want a better understanding and perspective on any important issues. It’s to be wholeheartedly encouraged. Not reduced to a stereotype of a puppet with no own free will or agency. That’s just a sad, self-important and vain need for some people to appear somehow more independent and intelligent than the rest of us. Don’t pay no mind to them. Thirst for the knowledge and understanding and the expansion of your perspective.

I’ve used a single Sigg traveler bottle for ages, but I’ve had mold buildup on the cap seal. Luckily Sigg has the caps sold as spare parts, so I’ve only had to replace the cap a couple of times during all this time. But it’s been near 15 years I think now, lining intact and all. It’s got a bunch of dents from falling on hikes, sometimes down from pretty high cliffs, but I feel it only adds to its attitude sort of.

Not sure if I’d go for a Sigg today, I have stainless steel in my sights if this one ever proves ready for retirement, but Id definitely choose one that has either replaceable seals and seals sold as spare parts, or at least sells new caps as spare parts. And I’d for sure go with something similarly robust that can handle drops and getting banged around.

The cap design on the Sigg is pretty unbeatable though. It’s so natural for a finger when opening or closing and keeping the cap while drinking, but it also fits all sizes of carabiners or similar, so it’s just so handy to keep around on house but especially on hikes. I’m spoiled thanks to that, so I think there’s a high standard for whatever I’d choose next.

But I can really recommend the aluminum Sigg traveler. Today it has a lot more actually enticing competition, but it’s a classic choice at least around here in Northern Europe.

Edit: Worth noting; Siggs prior to 2008 had BPA in the lining. Mine has a yellow tint in the lining, which is the telltale sign of the BPA-free, safe one. Today, only the aluminium bottles are manufactured in Switzerland, the others are in China (which I think has been thanks to some brand-leeching Chinese acquisition at some point)

Edit2: I also have a lot of old military surplus water bottles from around Europe (similar form factor) simply because both my few-days-bag and longer hiking rig have MOLLE all over the surface, and the old ALICE (us standard from I think around 1970) and MOLLE (or similar, today almost everything in terms of military surplus has something that fits into it) pouches for the water bottles of that certain shape can be had for extremely cheap, and they are so robust in keeping them in place thanks both to the bottle shape and the MOLLE in general, and it’s so flexible.

I mostly use these to carry extra water as plan B but especially for boiling for food or coffee etc. all of them have a certain funky smell that never disappears, but I’ve tested them all by keeping plain water in them for a week or more, then pouring out and seeing how it looks to naked eye, and how it tastes. The smell on some of them can get into the water a little bit, but all taste normal and so far I’ve not got any problems from using them. I would assume the military of all institutions would take care to make these things valid for long term and active use, since, you know, water is pretty much the main driving force in ensuring troops can keep going. But because of the smell I tend not to go for them as the main bottle, ever.

Then you’d need to do something else.

Precisely my point.

And I’m not advocating for any of that. That’s just weird design, both of them, and as such a good example of something that warrants a bigger redesign in general.

Just advocating for clear, sensible, self-documenting and most importantly, expandable and maintainable code.

What’s idiomatic varies between languages and the conventions aren’t the same even then, when arguing across disciplines. This discussion seems to be more about different educations. I can get your point but from my personal experience in academia and working in the field it sounds undesired. But that’s just it. My, as in extremely limited, perspective. From your pov what you argue here is probably equally correct to what I think from mine is from my pov, it’s just a difference in the segment of the field we work in I suppose. Or plain old cultural differences.

Whichever it is, I bet we both can find better use for our time. I’m thankful for the time and effort though, even if I wasn’t persuaded. Sorry to have prolonged it so.

That is all just external implementation details. Not sure if it was you or someone else, but the main argument in defense of the OP as in it reasonable, was that the name is wrong. That it ought to be idAdmin. None of what you just described should have anything to do with user being or not being an admin. In place of checking “isAdmin” for null, the semantical and resourcewise equivalent would be a third variable for “admin rights having been validated” or whatever. Conflating it in this one variable while renaming it to isAdmin or similar, would be even less sensical… what if somewhere else in the code you have to check whether the initial validations have been made (while the actual role or whether is admin or not is irrelevant), you’d have to check if isAdmin equals null, which in that context would be confusing, ambiguous (i.e someone reading that bit will not know this is what is being checked without additional documentation) and just a code smell in general. You do want to make the important things unambiguous and self-documenting. Even more so the bigger the codebase is and the more contributors there are across its lifetime and in parallel at any given time.

But if we go with the original meaning of roles overall, then the union type is just a code smell that warrants a proper role thing around it.

That all is besides the point. There’s no real advantage to use null instead of defaulting to false there… it’s semantically more accurate and also less wasteful in that other code does not have to worry about nulls which always leads to unnecessary overhead when false is already equivalent in your proposed example.

I don’t really follow you there, wouldn’t it be exactly the opposite and wouldn’t checking for nulls be, as a premise, more wasteful? But doesn’t really matter, time to digress. I’m conventionally educated as an engineer so what I know and find reasonable today might be outdated and too strict for most contemporary stuff.

Yeah obviously with constants for the set roles per value. Some languages call them enums, but the point is that what we pass and use is always still the smallest integer type possible. With the extra bonus that if the roles ever become composable, the same value type would likely suffice for a bitflag and only thing needing refactoring would be bitshifting the constants.

But anyway, this turns out to be the weirdest hill I find myself willing to die on.

Yeah, but if it is about being an admin or not, hence the bool, it’d be idiomatic and reasonable to assume it to be false if we have no data. Unless we want to try and allow admin access based on no data. Having three states for a simple binary state is weird. And if it is not about just being an admin or not, the bool is inherently a too limited choice for representation.

Admin is a role though, was my point. And besides, if you check for three different states, and you decide to go with a boolean to represent that, I really find it hard to believe anyone would think it reasonable. It’s valid and it’s practical, but can you really say it’s reasonable?

I don’t do typescript, but wouldn’t a union of a null and a bool be just more resource intensive than simply using an unsigned byte-sized integer? I struggle to find reasons to ever go for that over something more reasonable and appropriate for what it attempts to represent (3 distinct states as it stands, and likely in future more than just 3 when they have a need for more granularity, as you’d often do with anything you’d need an admin role distinction in the first place), but likely I’m just not familiar with ts conventions. Happy to hear the reasoning for this though.

Yeah let’s use a union of a boolean and null to represent role, something that inherently represents more than two (…or three, I guess) different values, as opposed to something like an integer.

Even if the name is clearly misleading in this specific case, the entire choice of using a bool here is just bad because it’s almost guaranteed you’re going to expand on that in future and then you’ll just have to entirely rewrite the logic because it simply can’t accommodate more than two values (or three with the null union… 🙈), while it gives absolute zero benefits over using something more reasonable like an integer to represent the roles, or in this case, admin, not-admin and guest. Even if you’ll end up with just admin, non-admin and guest, the integer would still work great with no disadvantages in terms of amount of code or whatever. Just increased legibility and semantical accuracy.

Not to mention that there’s zero reason to combine the state of being logged in and the role in which you’re logged in in one variable… those are two different things. They will remain two different things in future too…

I mean they’re already chaining elseifs (basically matching/switching, while doing it in an inefficient way to boot 🥴) as though there were an n amount of possible states. Why not just make it make sense from the start instead of whatever the hell this is?

Yeah, and somehow it just gets worse once you’re just scheduling a full calendar of scrims a week in advance and treat it like work that way. The pugs were at least entertaining in some way, but the rest of it was only ever going to be satisfying if it lead somewhere instead of being a clearly misguided wasted effort from the start

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

Believe it or not, I’ve been a part of it since I was born. I didn’t just come to be in a vacuum. I’ve influenced the society as much as anyone, we work together to make it better, we are a team, we protest. We sign petitions. We vote. We talk and talk and talk and have kids that will, too, become a part of what we’ve worked hard for and against and with.

Being proud of the team, of yourself, or the fact that you with your team are actively succeeding in not becoming a fascist shithole like the US or Russia for example. It’s not nothing. It’s worth being proud of. And takes effort, work, input every single day of every single month of every single year.

Yeah. I’m proud of myself and everyone around me. But I’m also proud of what we’ve worked together to build. This country did not stay this way by itself. It’d be ruined by capitalism and fascism the second we, the people of this country, stopped fighting against it and making this nation something to feel proud belonging to.

I think most people who are sensible but claim pride for some collective achievement or team or whatever, do so outwardly mostly because it’d be tiring to always include a philosophy lecture about distinction and differentiating between one’s own and others’ achievements. When we think about it actively, we can realize the faults and the details and could put them in words, but who the fuck has the patience to go in depth about all that each time they state they are proud of their team, their friends, etc.?

It’s just easier to say I’m proud of team xyz and hope the other party has the mental facilities to understand that it’s not a simple matter when you break it to pieces and start philosophing about it, but it’s just convenient and more prudent not to go into details or full analysis mode on all that every time…

One can be proud despite its shortcomings. Nothing is perfect in this world. But there are things worth being proud of, despite understanding its flaws and being consistently critical of it as a whole.