Well, yeah. It’s sometimes referred to as ‘tact’.

I’ve seen some beautiful visual metaphors in my time (including the original), but this immediately made my personal top-ten. Well done.

I usually hit the bottle, but I’m not about to criticize whatever works for you. If rubber duck debugging has been scientifically proven to work, I don’t see any valid argument against coding socks or smooth legs. Besides, those two things go together like insurance companies and arson or AI server farms and power supply cable cutting.

A match made in heaven, in other words.

Wow, framing the debate much?

Ah, common issue. When that happens, you just start using your toes.

Pah, mathematicians and their generally applicable pure approach to solutions and fancy modulus operations, who needs 'em? Computing is applied and we always work with well-defined finite precision. Granted, writing the boilerplate for all possible 64 bit integers is a bit laborious, but we’re programmers! That’s what code generation is for.

Does he love his wife? I can’t recall a single sign of actual affection. A wife is just one more thing to check off the “list of things to have”, along with a house, a job and a son to carry on… Well, I don’t think Vernon knows what exactly. Probably some ill-defined set of Proper British Traditions. To be fair Petunia is using him in the exact same way for for precisely the same reason. And the money, of course.

Ah yes, the printing press: Likely the most cumulatively subversive memetic infection vector ever conceived.

Define ‘mind-control’. Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation has been perfectly capable of changing people’s broad moods since 1985 and is being actively used to treat depression right now. The underlying technology is only going to get more precise, especially as more research on spintronics is done for other purposes. Sure, right now our understanding of how what goes on in a given brain translates to ‘thoughts’ is insufficient to change those thoughts in any reliable way, but there’s little doubt that when we do, the technology to make it happen will almost certainly be around.