tmahle

Bookmarking this comment section in case I ever need a prime example of bikeshedding.

It's a matter of taste, of course, but they make my least favorite scotch I've tried. Not sure exactly which it was, but certainly under that brand.

Second tab: https://www.birdsong.fm/

Pairs well with https://www.birdsong.fm/ :D

That's a shame! I've had the privilege of having and hearing many great discussions with scientists and their answer is almost always quite humble on this, but perhaps requires a bit of lateral thinking to arrive at. The idea is that yes, life could take forms we haven't thought of or forms that are extremely different from the life we see on Earth, but two things stop that from being studied as much as we might hope given how fundamentally interesting the concept is.

First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology

That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.'

I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!

I don't have experience using websockets with React, but right now I handle absolutely everything that comes from the server by putting it into app state. Is there a reason for changing that paradigm in the chat example?

Building software is actually one if the times I've felt least like an impostor (bordering on not at all?). It certainly is much better than science grad school in this respect, which is likely due to fast feedback from the compiler, your tests, and your peers. Seeking out feedback at all levels that you can find it is vital not just for happiness but also for growth, and it doesn't always come in the form of a paycheck.