groucho

Why do they all look so angry?

Wow. I had no idea. That's amazing.

Oh same, and we need more dems like her in general, but I'm not going to be too disappointed when she chases Pelosi's job instead.

AOC wants to be Speaker, not President.

Source: how it went the first time

I've been a dev for 20+ years and yeah, learning a new repo is hard. Here's some stuff I've learned:

Before digging into the code:

• get the thing running and get familiar with exercising it: test happy path, edge cases, and corner cases. We're not even looking at code yet; we're just getting a feel for how it behaves.
• next up, see if there's existing documentation. That's not an end-all solution, but it's good to see what the people that wrote the thing say about it.

Digging into the code:

• grep is your very best friend. Pick a behavior or feature you want to try and search for it in the codebase. User-facing strings and log statements are a good place to start. If you're very lucky, you can trace it down to a line of code and search up and down from there. If you're unlucky, they'll take you to a localization package and you'll have to search based on that ID.
• git blame is also your very best friend. Once you've got an idea where you're working, use the blame feature on github to tie commits to PRs. This will give you a good idea of what contributing to the PR looks like, and what changes you'll have to make for an acceptable PR.
• unit tests are also a good method of stealth documentation. You can see what different areas of the code look like in isolation, what they require, and how they behave.
• keep your own documentation file with your findings. The act of writing things down reinforces those things in your mind. They'll be easier to recall and work with.
• if there's an official channel for questions / support, make use of it. Try to strike a balance here: you don't want to blow them up every five minutes, but you also don't want to churn on a thing for days if there's an easy answer. This is a good skill to develop in general: knowing when to ask for help, knowing when an answer will actually be helpful, and knowing when to dig for a few minutes first.

There's no silver bullet. Just keep acquiring information until you're comfortable.

That would be pretty easy.

return "Why are you even trying to do it this way?\n$link_to_language_spec\nThis should be closed.;

The final project in my instrumentation class was to tune a PID controller for a hot/cold mixing valve. I (CS/ENG) was paired up with an engineering student and a lot of it was throwing parameters in, seeing if weird shit happened, and then turning down or up based on the result. I had a programming final and something else I was supposed to be studying for, so I just started doing a binary search with the knobs. We got the thing tuned relatively fast and my partner acted like I was a wizard.

Molyneux's great sin is the inability to shut the fuck up while he's ahead. lt's hard to explain how much weight this guy carried in the 90s/very early 00s but he was the guy that did Populus, Dungeon Keeper, and Syndicate. And then he just kept over-promising and fucking up for a whole decade.

If he'd kept it reasonable he might still carry some of that weight but he cannot stop promising the moon and then delivering mediocre shit. It would be like Miyamoto releasing flappy bird with NFTs instead of the next Zelda game. God he's so frustrating.

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it's like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn't work. I still don't understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they'll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they're running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we'll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that's been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they've read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I'll think we'll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That's not to say we're not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don't think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn't as on board with

Trump becoming president and having MUCH worse policies for the Palestinians becomes much greater.

Oh you mean Donald "Let's try to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because appearing neutral in the Israel/Palestine mess is hurting my chances of re-election" Trump? That guy? People actually think he's going to be better for Palestinians? Really?

Nah this is still corpo bullshit. It's also one of the tamer specimens of that era. The only difference is, the corpos in charge of advertising at that time were all sentient hardons who heard stories about how drugs are and peaked at 14. None of them lived in the real world and they just churned out knee-jerk sexist bullshit because they wanted to appeal to boys going through puberty and men that never left that headspace.

A lot of the ads from that era are uncomfortable. Hell, a lot of the games were. It was rare to see a female character that wasn't ditzy and helpless, a thinly-veiled copy of the writer's mom, or exactly like a dude but hot. Those were the options. I'm not saying I needed every game to be a work of great literature with complex and tormented characters and copious backstory; I just wanted female characters in games that didn't like someone doing a ventriloquism act with their fleshlight.

I ended up chasing gameplay and trying to ignore how fucking awkward and immature most of the shooters were in that era and I don't think I was alone. I think a lot of gamers grew up and drove the market in a slightly more mature direction. Some people blame woke bullshit, but for me it was just being utterly sick of how fucking juvenile everything was and voting with my money. There's still a vocal minority out there that wants the good old days back, but I'd stop playing if the industry went back to exclusively 3xtr33m l33t 4ct10n d00d bullshit.

Sidenote: I played the demo for some Cliffy B game a decade ago on my XBox and hard-quit and deleted when the guy on my comms told me to "fire a rocket directly up the bad guy's poop chute." I was in my 30s and Cliff was probably pushing 40 at the time. What the hell? Are we nine years old again? Then again, he was the guy that threw his cat into his scanner and posted a picture of it every day until the internet told him to stop. Ugh. Let's never go back there.

The snowblower froze up (specifically the mechanism that turns the spout) so I had to drag it into the house to warm it up. The plug cap on my headbolt heater also froze solid. I couldn't bring the car into the house to warm it up because, among other things, I already had the snowblower in there. I spent 20 minutes with a heat gun prying it off instead.

Aside from that it was a normal weekend.

"I'm a specialized clerk interested in mathematics" if you don't wanna get burned.

"I totally did my report but Rudy ate it."

Two ways to find out!

A tuna sandwich?

Yep. This is the way. Also, you'd be surprised how many devs don't run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.

Oh fuck that. My parents had that book too. Also -- you probably already know this -- but her "white-washed tomb" analogy is a misquote from Jesus. He used it against religious hypocrites, who appeared good on the outside but were vile and gross on the inside.

I had zero plan beyond "live on my own, away from my parents, and try to sustain that." The churches I went to as a kid emphasized getting married as soon as you're old enough and having a ton of kids, so I did the opposite and was a feral stoner nerd/wook for a decade and a half. One day I was doing a hungover stumble from my apartment back to my car and saw a guy my own age playing with his small daughter at the playground. She'd fallen off the swing and he was hugging her until she stopped crying. I still can't fully describe the feeling I had there, but I shrugged it off immediately as "that ship sailed. I'll just dedicate myself to hobbies and non-serious relationships."

Now I'm married, have a kid, and live in a house. Life's weird.

I actually went and talked to her before I started because I knew that was how it'd end up going.

I have no idea what year it happened, but my parents and I were driving from church (evening service) to a restaurant and a dark shadow appeared on the moon. This would have been late 80s / early 90s in the mountain west, USA, around 8PM. It kind of looked like it was cracking apart at the bottom. It stayed that way for a few minutes, so theoretically longer than something like a branch hanging over the road. It didn't move at all. It was just there suddenly. Everyone in the car saw it, and the people we met at the restaurant saw it too. I've never seen anything like it since.

I'm guessing something in space cast a shadow on it? This was before phone cameras so no evidence exists other than a weird memory.

Yeah, they're pipes / jars / whatever. You have to find a potion, throw it so the pipe is available when you go through the door, and then go down the pipe.

I had kind of a similar experience a while ago. My parents moved a couple times after I went to college but kept a lot of the furniture between moves. I visited one xmas and slept in my childhood bed, next to my childhood dresser in a completely different house, on a completely different side of the country. A lot of the same chairs were there in the living room. For a variety of reasons I don't tell my parents much about my private life. Most of the conversations picked up from around when I was a teenager.

It felt like everyone but me wanted me to feel like I was right back at home and nothing was different. We'd pressed rewind for more than a decade and should be able to pick up right where we left off. I wasn't the weird, deeply depressed and anxious person I'd become; I was supposed to still be the awkward, slightly hopeful teenager. And I could not connect in any way. Being surrounded by just enough of the artifacts from my childhood only made it weirder. Things are better now for all of us, but I still have dreams about it. They're not exactly nightmares, but I'm rarely happy when I wake up.

• extends Object

At some point, they're gonna have to debug it.

Nah. I went to HS to get HS over with. I knew zero people. I doubt anyone even remembers me.

That's the first game I bought for my GBC. I didn't have enough money for a playstation and was jealous of all my friends playing MGS. It's super well done. I just got an analog pocket and I think I'll dig MGS out again after I finish my Castlevania games.

Sex is great but have you ever tried having a captive audience for every awful joke you can think of?

There it is.

It's been ages, but we'd done rough calculations for the three controls so we roughly knew what we needed. Our teacher was big on manually tuning instead of just using formulas since he thought just running numbers "lacked artfulness."

So we grabbed a point and started searching around manually. I think we were just tuning the derivative portion at that point, trying to get a fast response without the system without it going chaotic and noisy.

For some more context, when I was in my 20s I decided I'd never have kids because I didn't want to have to spank them. My dad always said if you truly love your kids you'll spank them to keep them from sinning. His parents beat him, and in his mind he was doing it right and not being abusive.

I have a lot of issues and it took a lot of time to unlearn that mindset. I have a daughter now and she's great! She's also exhausting but we've never spanked her and never will.

Ninja 5-0 for the GBA. I got out my collection recently and had no idea I owned it. It's Elevator Action, but you're a ninja.

If you're trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:

Potential problems with the tasks:

• they're not researched sufficiently
  • is this doable?
  • should we we even be doing this?
  • have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say "well that should be trivial" a bunch?
• there's not enough info on the tickets
  • inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
• they're not broken down into small enough pieces
  • are you working "implement X" tickets while everyone else is working a series of "implement X: step N" tickets?

A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than "Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it." unless you're intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you're doing. If you're not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you're running into, and who you're waiting on for help. If there's a consistent theme to the things you're fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you're doing because other people didn't.

Potential problems with the codebase:

• someone preemptively optimized it
• it's not documented well
• it's spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to

Hey, it works. But it's not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it's optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It's inefficient!)

Potential problems with teammates:

• they're not supporting you
• they're grabbing easy tasks because you're the "code whisperer"
• they didn't know what they were doing either so they're vague when you ask them questions

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word "should": "that should work", "that shouldn't be hard", "you should be able to...."

And, as an aside, I've seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they're creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don't have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it's still frustrating.

Hang in there.

I agree. And even ignoring how abhorrent it is, imagine how much money they've spent trying to kill this guy.

Statue of Motörhead's Lemmy Kilmister to be erected....

He wouldn't have had it any other way.

High five! I find a lot of new music through my local NPR/college radio station too: https://kglt.net/

releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot

I just got so mad.

I can't stop laughing. Did you tell him, or did he just sit there grinding more and more pepper into your lap?

My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Vegas a few years ago. The waiter asked if we wanted Parmesan, pulled the tiniest cube of cheese out and held it up like a magician, and then never broke eye contact while he grated it. It was unnerving.

I've set the gas grill on fire three times now. Once was because I had the dumb idea to put wood chips in a smoker box while I was doing high heat stuff. I pulled the (metal) box off the grill wearing a pair of welding gloves and realized that they only gave me about 3s of protection. Ended up with a cool burn on my finger and steaks that looked like footballs. The other two times were because I said "I'll clean the grill out after this cook."

So far I've set the Kamado on fire zero times.