I’ve read all of them, and I really enjoyed them. It’s true that it’s basically “Royal Navy in space”, and it might be a little cheezy, but it’s a pretty relaxing read.

The space combat stuff gets much better in the later books, Weber managed to build satisfying mechanics for it. There’s some good political intrigue too. The one thing that pulled me “out” of the books a couple times were some character names, some of them are pretty ridiculous (Queen Elizabeth III for example).

I’m one of these, my name is definitely male but when you read it it’s really easy to confuse with the female version. It doesn’t help that it’s really rare in my generation while the female version is much more popular. All this resulted in me getting misgendered on a regular basis. A few examples:

• as a teenager, I won a prize with a monetary award. The check was for the female version of my name.
• when I got my first house, I signed up ONLINE for the electric utility. The invoice ended up being addressed to the female version of my name. I sure as heck didn’t make a mistake in my own name when signing up, so someone over there must have “corrected” my name
• I once went to a week-long course, where we each were assigned an individual room, but bathrooms and showers were shared across all rooms on that floor. I was assigned a room on the ladies’ floor, which took me a while to realize as I thought it was just mixed-gendered.
• and that’s without counting the hundreds of times teachers took attendance. I’d say at least half of them got it wrong.

Anyway, I thought pronouns were a bit of a weird thing for trans and non-binary people, but as a very cis man who’s had issues with people reading my name wrong, I put my pronouns in my signature now.

It’s true that you can easily fall into analysis paralysis when you start learning JS, but honestly things have somewhat stabilized in recent years. 10 years ago everybody was switching frameworks every 6 months, but these days we’re going on 8+ years of absolute React dominance. So I guess that’s it for the view layer.

The data layer has seen some movement in more recent years with Flux then GraphQL / Relay, but I think most people have settled on either Apollo or react-query now (depending on your backend).

On the backend there was basically only express.js, and I think it’s still the king if you only want to write a backend.

Static websites came back in fashion with Jekyll and Github Pages so Gatsby solved that problem in js-land for a while, but nowadays Next also fulfills that niche, along with the more fullstack-oriented apps.

Svelte, Vue, Aurelia and Mithril are mostly niche frameworks. They have a dedicated, vocal fanbase (see the Svelte guy as sibling to your comment) but most of the industry has settled along the lines I’ve mentioned.

Honestly I think the main thing that the JS ecosystem does well is dependency / package management (npm). The standard library is very small so everything has to be added as a dependency in package.json, but it mostly works without any of the issues you often see in other languages.

Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else I’ve tried:

• Python’s approach is pretty terrible (pip, easy_install, etc.) and global vs local packages
• Ruby has its own hell with bundler and where stuff goes
• PHP has had a few phases like python (composer and whatnot) and left everyone confused
• Java needs things somewhere in its $PATH but it’s never clear where (altough it’s better with Gradle and Maven)
• C needs root access because the only form of dependency management is apt-get

In contrast, NPM is pretty simple: it creates a node_modules and puts everything there. No conflicts because project A uses left-pad 1.5 and project B uses left-pad 2.1. They can both have their own versions, thank you very much.

The only people who managed to mess this up are Linux distributions, who insist on putting things in folders owned by root.

Yes, they do. I think the Swiss partly do a as well.

C is crazy. While you are learning it you are learning Make and gcc without your consent.

Java is crazy. While you are learning Spring you are learning Maven or Gradle even without your consent.

To any non-js dev taking this too seriously: A good half of the technologies mentioned in this meme are redundant, you only need to learn one of them (in addition to the language). It’s like complaining that there are too many Linux distributions to learn: you don’t, you just pick one and go with it.

I just stumbled upon the article, and apparently it was this one. From a quick glance at the listing, I’d say this particular one is a ~$400k-$700k boat.

EDIT: I was wrong, it’s more like $200k-$300k

It’s more of a “thousandaire” thing honestly

Sailboats like this are routinely called “yacht”. Yacht is a very non descriptive term for boats that just means a pleasure boat. A lot of very different boats fit that description.

Just be aware that there’s a huge difference between coastal sailing and bluewater sailing. You can sail “on the ocean” but stay relatively near shore in a lot of boats. All the ones I’ve mentioned would be good for coastal sailing, where you’re never more than a few hours away from shore.

To go truly offshore and cross an ocean you really want something more substantial. Why? It’s mostly because you’re much more likely to get caught in bad weather or to get something that breaks, so you need a lot more redundancy (spare parts, etc) and the boat needs to be built to withstand a lot more forces. Offshore you’re also constantly moving because of waves; something that flexes a little when you hit a large-ish wave will maybe flex 3-4 times during an outing in coastal or protected waters, but will flex every ~4 seconds for 20 days during an Atlantic crossing which adds up to about a half-million times. This can break a lot of stainless parts on your boat.

Anyway, still achievable, I just wanted to add some perspective

Licensing isn’t really a thing in North America (except maybe the $50 card we have to get here in Canada), insurance can get complicated / pricey but you only really need liability which is much cheaper, and all the fire & safety stuff usually comes with the boat and isn’t that expensive anyway.

You can obviously go crazy on electronics, and boy are these expensive indeed, but you can also just use any old tablet* with Aquamaps or Navionics installed. Try to get one that’s waterproof or get a waterproof case.

The most expensive part, honestly, is where you park it.

So yeah, it’s a money-pit, but it’s possible to keep costs under control.

(*) You need a tablet with a GPS receiver. iPads used to only have it on cellular models (no need for a plan), but most Android tablets have it.

Going from this random 2016 Harley for ~$18k, there are a lot of good boats that are cheaper and would qualify as a yacht per your definition (sleeping cabin, 33+ feet)

• This one for 9k, altough listing says it needs repairs
• This one for 500$ more might be a better option
• This one even has air conditioning but needs to finish some repairs (materials provided)
• Of course, Craigslist has some options. This one is slightly more expensive than the Harley but it looks in very good condition with a lot of recent upgrades.

Overall, there are ~3 price ranges for used sailboats: Under $10k, you’ll have small-ish boats (under 27 ft) in pretty good condition or medium-ish boats (25-35 ft) that need a little work. Around $50k you’ll get older (1980’s), medium-large boats (35-45ft) in good condition, or smaller ones in very good condition. And at $100k-$200k you’ll get much newer medium-large boats (2005+).

For reference, my first sailboat cost me $2k.

seventeen is said as ten-seven in French.

Belgium’s got it, though: soixante, septante, huitante, nonante, cent

Sorry I mistook you for a Canadian. There were just a couple clues pointing in that direction. I totally get you though, loving or hating a language isn’t something rational; I used to have a strong dislike for Spanish for pretty irrational reasons.

If you like rougher languages, you should listen to some Québec French, then. There’s actually a song about how it sounds really different from France’s French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgiNoNqYXMA

Most Québécois would pronounce it just like Anglophones. I don’t see how that’s a trick question.

Pour un apprenant anglophone, par exemple:

• Les objets inanimés genrés
• Les lettres muettes en fin de mot (s au pluriel, e final, etc)
• Les différentes façons d’écrire un même son (é, er, et, ai)
• Les différentes façons de prononcer une même lettre (c, s)
• L’énorme quantité de conjugaisons de verbes possibles

I guess I have my answer ;) I don’t know Russian but I know enough Ukrainian to know you’re talking about French and Italian, lol. And I know barely enough German to know you’re talking about learning languages (Sprachen).

Not quite sure what you hate accoustically about French, though… The “r” sounds? I guess they’re very different from most other languages, but you seem to like German… If you’re comparing to Spanish (among others), I guess the overall stressing of sounds in a sentence is pretty different, too.

Also, what kind of French did you have to learn? France has a very different sound from Québec for example… Altough if I look closely I see you’re on the sh.itjust.works instance and you mention having to learn it in school, which tends to indicate you’re Canadian. I guess hating on French is par for the course, then…

Tu détestes le français spécifiquement, ou juste le fait d’avoir eu à apprendre une autre langue?

Le français, je peux comprendre un peu, il y a quant même plusieurs spécificités étranges à cette langue. Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’on passe plusieurs années à l’apprendre avant d’éventuellement passer à la littérature. Je crois que les cours d’anglais langue première font cette transition beaucoup plus tôt.

Détester le fait d’avoir eu à apprendre une autre langue, là je ne comprends pas du tout!

Man, you’re in a politics community, left and right is like basic knowledge. I’m happy to educate, but did you even google it? If not, do that first and then I’ll be happy to help clear stuff up, but please put in at least a little bit of effort.