This particular cheque should work, if processed by a person.

Cheques have two fields for the amount; numbers and written out. The numerical field is the most important and required part, while the written is to deter fraud, for example the bearer may attempt to alter £100 to £1000, or £300 to £800, and having the sum also in writing makes this a lot harder.

So as long as this cheque has $650 in the number field, it should be valid.

I'm also still in some IRC channels from way back, and I can't deny I hate what discord did to the IRC community. ("Look how they massacred my boy...")

Of course, Discord pulled it off for a good reason - the experience was seamless, featureful, rich, and modern - none of which IRC can claim. And it's only cantankerous sticks in the mud such as I who care about ideological concerns like interoperability and open standards.

And another thing that Discord did is to absolutely explode the channel count. In the IRC days, a particular community or friend group would make do with one single channel. But that group moves to Discord, and suddenly creates a general channel, announcements channel, music channel, games channel, cooking channel - all for one single friend group, and multiply that by the number of groups you are in - because the Discord model permitted it and made it frictionless.

And I think that's why for some people who use Discord at the moment, it wouldn't be enough to simply have a channel on a public Matrix instance. People are used to having a whole 'server' to themselves (of course discord 'servers' aren't servers, but let's set that aside) and so they'd need at least a 'space' in Matrix, being the more reasonably named analogue.

This isn't that, though.

OP's link is to a list of companies you can pay to host a matrix instance for you, so you don't have to deal with any of the hosting yourself.

But I agree most people would be sufficiently served by an account on a public instance.

Exactly why corporations love it so much.

Make all the accusations you like, no evidence required, and no consequences at all for making false claims.

This is exactly how I feel too. A little bit of repetition is totally worth it, versus having inappropriate coupling, or code that jumps in and out of parent/child classes everywhere so you can hardly keep it in your head what's going on.

I freely accept that I AM a mediocre dev, but if that lends me to prefer code that is comprehensible and maintainable then I think being mediocre is doing my team a favour, honestly.

I'll say this now.

Inheritance is the most misused capability of OOP which programmers think makes their code look smart, but most of the time just makes a giant fucking mess.

I backed the original Oculus Rift, and felt massively betrayed when they sold to Meta. :(

For years since I've been waiting for A VR solution that plays nice with Linux and is at least somewhat privacy-respecting, and I have been absolutely unwilling to buy a Quest device or anything else. I want to play VR but I'm not willing to sell my soul for it. So it's been an unhappy but conscious boycott from me.

I too then am super looking forward to the Steam Frame because it's the device I need to get back into VR and feel happy and excited about it, rather than disgusted.

Here you go fam

Isn't this The Entire Point?

That there is value in truth, even if the truth is painful?

That we should believe in and fight for a cause, even if fighting is hard?

A previous (huge) company of mine sent out a lot of phishing test emails, some of which were pretty convincing.

As developers, we quickly discovered that all the emails had a metadata header in them which identified them as a phishing test, so we set up a filter for it so every email since is clearly coded with a bright red "Phishing test!" label.

That's pretty damn cool, to be fair.

These categories of geometric problem are ridiculously difficult to find the definitive perfect solution for, which is exactly why people have been grinding on them for decades, and mathematicians can't say any more than "it's the best one found so far"

For this particular problem the diagram isn't answering "the most efficient way to pack some particular square" but "what is the smallest square that can fit 17 unit-sized (1x1) squares inside it" - with the answer here being 4.675 unit length per side.

Trivially for 16 squares they would fit inside a grid of 4x4 perfectly, with four squares on each row, nice and tidy. To fit just one more square we could size the container up to 5x5, and it would remain nice and tidy, but there is then obviously a lot of empty space, which suggests the solution must be in-between. But if the solution is in between, then some squares must start going slanted to enable the outer square to reduce in size, as it is only by doing this we can utilise unfilled gaps to save space by poking the corners of other squares into them.

So, we can't answer what the optimal solution exactly is, or prove none is better than this, but we can certainly demonstrate that the solution is going to be very ugly and messy.

Another similar (but less ugly) geometric problem is the moving sofa problem which has again seen small iterations over a long period of time.