Many years ago - many jobs ago, we got a new CEO, and she wanted to make a big splash, so she started firing people. And this is a public, non-profit job, so most people were working in less than stellar conditions simply because they were passionate about public service.

I was two days away from putting in my 2 weeks' notice because I had landed another job, but they fired me and gave me two months' severage. So instead of having to work another 2 weeks, I didn't have to go another day. I said "Sorry it didn't work out." and held my smile till I got out the door.

I ran an UPDATE without a WHERE clause.

Edit: Remember kids, when updating a database, always write your WHERE before your FROM.

I was at an intersection once in a friend's car. This was about 20 years ago: cell phones, esp ones that could take videos and pics, were not there yet.

Anyway, we were on the way home from work, just sitting there not saying anything. Then here comes this jeep, flipping through the intersection. Now, the intersection is big, like 4 lanes intersecting with 4 lanes, but not exactly at a square angle, and it must've been about 3/4 of a football field worth of length this jeep flipped.

The front end would hit the ground and then it would bounce up and roll in the air, then the ass end would hit the ground and so on. All the while it's coming towards us slightly, but seemed to be drifting towards a gas station to our right. Now, this is in the middle of Rush Hour traffic, and somehow no one moved - everyone is just frozen, holding their breath, waiting to see if this jeep was going to careen into a gas pump and cause a huge explosion.

I'm not sure how many times it flipped, but it finally came to rest in a green patch of grass in front of the gas pumps right-side up, like some sort of insane Jeep ad.

The driver emerged - a young lady - she seemed to be ok, besides perhaps a little bewilderment and dizziness. She proceeded to just stand there staring at the jeep for a while. Then she looked around, as if to ask "Does anyone know if this is ok - what just happened?" I shrugged with my mouth agape, as if to respond, "I have no idea, and I'm a little freaked out." Then our light turned green, and we drove away.

I have never seen anything like that in my life, and I still think back about it and try to figure out how the jeep got into that movement, and I just have no idea. It was all over in a blink of an eye. So bizarre.

"protesters"... I'm sure Spez is sadly walking to the bank to cash all of his checks from all the money he made on r/place from the "protesters."

Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.

If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.

They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it's prepared can affect the health of a child.

For instance it's a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it's estrogen, and they don't even know the full effects of this yet.

So think about

• burritos in plastic wrapping,
• cling wrap on a bowl,
• reheating leftovers in Tupperware,
• disposable cutlery

These chemicals are not just in food:

• your car's interior
• your cell phone case
• even the clothes on your back, unless they're 100% pure, untreated, natural fabric, may have been made with these chemicals.

Jesus Christ. One part of me really wants to see some green text rant about this. Another part of me empathizes with the horrible pain and suffering it would wield.

When you think about data it actually gets really scary really quick. I have a Master's in Data Analytics.

First, data is "collected."

• So, a natural question is "Who are they collecting data from?"

• Typically it's a sample of a population - meant to be representative of that population, which is nice and all.

• But if you dig deeper you have to ask "Who is taking time out of their day to answer questions?" "How are they asked?" "Why haven't I ever been asked?" "Would I even want to give up my time to respond to a question from a stranger?"

• So then who is being asked? And perhaps more importantly, who has time to answer?

• Spoiler alert: typically it's people who think their opinions are very important. Do you know people like that? Would you trust the things they claim are facts?

• Do the data collectors know what demographic an answer represents? An important part of data collection is anonymity - knowing certain things about the answerer could skew the data.

• Are you being represented in the "data"? Would you even know if you were or weren't?

• And what happens if respondents lie? Would the data collector have any idea?

And that's just collecting the data, the first step in the process of collecting data, extracting information, and creating knowledge.

Next is "cleaning" the data.

• When data is collected it's messy.

• There are some data points that are just deleted. For instance, something considered an outlier. And they have an equation for this, and this equation as well as the outliers it identifies should be analyzed constantly. Are they?

• How is the data being cleaned? How much will it change the answers?

• Between what systems is the data transferred? Are they state-of-the-art or some legacy system that no one currently alive understands?

• Do the people analyzing the data know how this works?

So then, after the data is put through many unknown processes, you're left with a set of data to analyze.

• How is it being analyzed? Is the analyzer creating the methodology for analysis for every new set of data or are they running it through a system that someone else built eons ago?

• How often are these models audited? You'd need a group of people that understand the code as well as the data as well as the model as well as the transitional nature of the data.

Then you have outside forces, and this might be scariest of all.

• The best way to describe this is to tell a story: In the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the top candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties. There was a lot of tension, but basically everyone on the left could not fathom people voting for Trump. (In 2023 this seems outrageous, but it was a real blind spot at the time).

• All media outlets were predicting a landslide victory for Clinton. But then, as we all know I'm sure, the unbelievable happened: Trump won the electoral college. Why didn't the data predict that?

• It turns out one big element was purposeful skewing of the results. There was such a media outrage about Trump that no one wanted to be the source that predicted a Trump victory for fear of being labeled a Trump supporter or Q-Anon fear-monger, so a lot of them just changed the results.

• Let me say that again, they changed their own findings on purpose for fear of what would happen to them. And because of this lack of reporting real results, a lot of people that probably would've voted for Clinton, didn't go to the polls.

• And then, if you can believe it, the same thing happened in 2020. Even though Biden ultimately won, the predicted stats were way wrong. Again, according to the data Biden should have been comfortably able to defeat Trump, but it was one of the closest presidential races in history. In fact, many believe, if not for Covid, Trump would have won. And this, at least a little, contributed to the capital riots.

I use a bar of soap that is exclusive to me. I lather somewhere hairy, like my stomach, to build up some suds.Then, I soap everything with the suds and soap.

It wastes a ton of soap compared to a washcloth. And when I'm done I wash the bar off and wash my hands one last time. It's the quickest way I have found to shower. I am usually out in about 15 minutes.

AutoHotKey AHK for short. Allows automation of nearly anything in Windows, and is better than most alternatives. The downside is it's VBScript, which I believe is going he way of the dodo, and it has quite a few gotchyas.

However, on day one you can start assigning keys and combos to do common tasks.

Don't like Caps Lock? Reassign it to open Chrome. Hate that you can't lock the screen with your left hand? Make Win+S a command that locks the screen.

It's free, has a huge community, and is truly amazing.

I've heard it's as addictive as sugar. Be careful.

I really want to like DuckDuckGo, but the results are never right. I always end up going back to Google. But I'm a professional programmer, so it might be different for me.

In my experience, there's two ends of the developer spectrum.

At one end is uptight. They have all their shit on lockdown and the confidence that comes with that.

The other end is creative. They are developers because they enjoy creating, and development is a rare high-paying but creative outlet. They stumble through everything and get bored with reading too much documentation.

I have seen many cases of both of these, and another, underlying metric is their perception of their own intelligence.

It's unfortunate, but a lot of them grew up in an environment where they were the smartest person in the room and were rarely challenged. Now, being in an environment with many other smart people, they only feel smart by making others feel less than.

They purposely show off their knowledge and when you give an idea they shit on it and make you feel stupid.

There's also this thing where if you know a system really well, it's hard to imagine someone not having the knowledge you have. This is just how memory works because our brains abstract things away and then we can't recognize when others don't have that abstraction yet.

This is all normal. Humanity has a lot of work to do to change this, but it's embedded into how everything works, so it's not going to happen in our lifetime. You can change you, but you can't change anything else.

With that being said, here are some things I have learned, being from a similar background as you:

1. Recognize that you are smart or you wouldn't be there.

2. Accept that others will make you feel stupid. The best response is to act like it doesn't phase you.

3. Don't make others feel stupid if you can help it.

4. Be enthusiastic. Any shortcomings you may have, will be forgiven if you show up with a big smile on your face.

5. Talk to your managers. Ask them what would make you better at your job, and ruthlessly pursue bettering yourself. This will give you a lot of confidence.

6. You will lose touch with your old party friends. They will die young, and you will feel sad. When you do get a chance to catch up, talk to them a lot and consider journaling it. This will help a lot when you lose them.

7. You will feel guilty because you are doing so much better than them. Accept it and move on and try not to brag about your new life.

8. You will feel out of place because your new friends don't have the same background as you. Accept it and move on. Nobody else is worried about it.

9. Your new friends will probably not be as interesting as your old friends, and you will feel yourself becoming less interesting. This is the price we pay for our new life. If you want to stay interesting find a way to be in touch with other creative people: musicians, teachers, English majors.

Bro, trying to give padding in Ms word, when you know... YOU KNOOOOW... they can convert to html. It drives me up the wall.

And don't get me started on excel.

Kill em all, I say.

Perhaps the duck flew into a window on a building thinking it was more sky? Or maybe it flew into your windshield thinking something similar?

How about this weather?

Don't underestimate small talk. It lets people take their wall down.

Good on you for apologizing. Not many people would, but it really is the best form of self-therapy.

Med. I. Cation. Specifically Prozac. It works great for me, but we're all different. Since I've been on it, it's changed my life. So many things were attached to my mental health that I never knew.

How can any Fediverse instance withstand that kind of force? Really the only way is to not save anything, or perhaps some sort of blockchain for all the comments and posts?

Ned?! Ned Ryerson?!

Ouch.

We had to roll back the prod database to the last save. Only amounted to 15 or 20 minutes, and I don't think anything was super affected, but then I was that guy.

I really need hoverZoom+ to work on Lemmy. I will use anything that allows that, and this may be great, but I'll never know because no hoverZoom.

I hope you don't. And I'm sorry.

I lost my best friend in February. It fucking sucks.

He was a big partier. Once he hit his late 30s he ballooned to probably over 300. He took a nap one day and had a heart attack in his little attic room of his friend's house, where he had lived for 10 years. Our big friend group from back in the day is wondering who will go next.

I'm running Docker in Windows and have a mounted drive. I code in VSC using that mounted folder / volume, and the page shows up on localhost. Just a few simple apps to convert fixed width to csv's and back and gives analytics on the data using jStat and tables with dataTables. Nothing fancy, but I like it.

Edit: httpd 2.4 as the Docker container.

Back in the day we used to stuff dryer sheets in an empty toilet paper roll.

I just googled it and it's called a "sploof."

Anyway, you blow your exhale through that, and it smells like dryer sheets.

https://recovery.org/pro/articles/behind-closed-doors-5-methods-teens-use-to-mask-the-smell-of-marijuana/

Talk to a therapist. Not just you, everyone.

We all have trauma, talking about it can help you come to peace with it. Then it won't be this cringe thing (or whatever negative emotion it invokes) in your thought pattern.

Once I coded a module to completion with no errors. I still wake up with night terrors that I missed something.

I have used AHK for this, and it works beautifully.

Yeah reddit's leopardsatemyface in the last few years was just awful.

It seemed like it was just a bunch of kids making stupid complaints and posting pics of severely mentally ill people's Facebook page.

Who needs Facebook pics when you can look in the mirror?

Have you had a steak from walmart recently? Who needs a printer?

There are still things I use reddit for, but only because Google sucks so much now. Like if I'm looking for the best something to buy, I'll add "reddit" at the end so I don't get pages and pages of ads.

Otherwise, all my previously reddit-based entertainment comes from Lemmy, especially since all the activists seemed to have gone back. Lemmy is now fun again!

What about sublemes

The propaganda from King of the Hill has made for sub-prime cookouts for all my life up until a few months ago.

Believing propane was the superior heating element of the cookout, because of Hank Hill, I never tried a charcoal grill. But when I went to other folks cookouts, it tasted so good. A little sweet and smokiness charred into the meat, "How did they do that?!" I contemplated late into many nights.

I switched to Charcoal after a friendly suggestion, and the difference is mind-blowing. If you're cooking with propane, you might as well be cooking on a stove.

Do you have any videos? Can you record tracks and musical production type stuff?

If they piss you off, you will stay on their platform longer, and they make more money.

That is the sad truth of EVERY social network.

Lemmy might not be that advanced yet, but as soon as they get big enough to need ads to pay for bandwidth and storage, soon after they will add algorithms that will show you stuff that pisses you off.

One way to combat this is to take a break from the site. Usually after a week, when you come back it will be better for a while.

That cod piece. What the literal fuck was going on with 80s kids movies?

The totally unnecessary tiddies in neverending story come to mind.

Sauce for the wavy key?

Are we still doing "sauce" in Lemmy? It seems a little passe now.

Microsoft Everything.

Boy, I sure can't wait till VSCode and GitHub become as annoying as excel to use!

Or, ya know, blame poor Andy Dufresne.

Wow, that's crazy, but I believe it. Studios are the worst.

On behalf of Gnorv, yes. I have made sure multiple times that my NSFW filter is off. I have only seen an occasional NSFW - like One per month, and it's never porn - even when I browse by New.

Please Help.