• 11 Posts
  • 185 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle

  • I can think of specific instances where I’ve done each of these roles in my software engineering job:

    • Tech support
    • Sysadmin
    • DevOps
    • QA (oh do I have a story about this one)
    • Management
    • Release management
    • Agile coach
    • Security engineer/pen tester
    • Compliance
    • Custodian

    As well as customer relations. I don’t know that I’ve ever done much product management, though.






  • Reddit’s about to get shittier. Again. Either they’ll kowtow to Musk and make it against the rules to ban X links or they’ll give some bland, noncommital, centrist statement about how they respect the hard work their mods put in to keep Reddit going or whatever. I really doubt they’ll make any unequivocal statement condemning Musk as the neo-Nazi shitbag he is.


  • I have a vivid memory of staying home sick from school and watching daytime educational programming on PBS. There was a (dry, low-budget, old) math show for kids on. They had a “skit” where a couple of teenagers went and got replacement tires for their car. They came in with a set of numbers that I assume had to do with the tire measurements. (Maybe hub diameter, hub thickness, and tire outer diameter.) They found tires that matched on two of those numbers, but the guy was impatient and said it had to be basically the same because it matched on two parameters. Then in the next scene, the same teens were driving the car with brand new tires and they got pulled over for speeding. The driver was sure the speedometer said he wasn’t speeding, but the new outer tire diameter changed the calculation, meaning the speedometer read lower than they were actually going.

    This is the first time in my life the memory of that show has ever come in handy.









  • I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying here. Yes, even though the pro-Trump folks don’t comprise a majority of Americans, it’s exceedingly concerning that they’re as close to 50% of the U.S. population as they are. I don’t think I said otherwise, though. I also didn’t say anything about whether the anti-Trump majority (if indeed it is a majority) is/isn’t/was/wasn’t/should be/shouldn’t be “silent.”

    Were the anti-Trump folks really “silent” before the election? Was there something they weren’t saying that they should have? 'Cuz it’s not like there wasn’t anybody campaigning against him.


  • the majority of people voted for him

    Eh… That’s not quite accurate. Current estimates are that 77,301,997 people voted for Trump, which is less than 50% of the 155,211,283 total votes cast. (But Kamala, the second-most-voted-for candidate got less than that at 75,017,626.)

    But only about 64% of those eligible to vote voted.

    So, not even half of those who did vote in the 2024 presidential election voted for Trump, let alone those who were eligible to voted, let alone all “people” in the U.S… But the ones who voted for Trump composed many more than the number of people who voted for any other candidate.

    Sources: one and two.


  • American here.

    First, you’re right. About basically all of what you said above.

    I think you particularly hit the nail on the head with this:

    I’m always thinking “dude, you need to chill” cause literally no one is attacking them and they’re fully secure. But it seems like they’re always searching for a fight or something.

    The media here, funded by the big corporations, manufacture tons of FUD (“fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”) Things to be scared of. “They’re putting chemicals in the water that’s turning the frogs” (and by extension, your kids) “gay.” “The ‘woke mafia’ is trying to convert your kids to atheism.” “The Democrats are going to take your guns so they can install a totalitarian one world government without any resistance.” Most of it’s not true at all. Some has a nugget of truth but it’s not actually any threat.

    I will say the Republicans are worse about this than the Democrats (the Democrats’ concerns are more legitimate than the Republicans’), but the Democrats are far from immune. Both are living in fantasy worlds.

    …until something very bad happens like the second civil war…

    Indeed there’s plenty of rhetoric out there pushing the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war. Between the woke antifa (short for “antifascist”) and the fascist conspiracy theorists.


  • I know the pain. I’ve worked at Windows-only places and places where the options were Windows or Mac but you were strongly encouraged to use Mac. Honestly, when I started at the latter place, I hadn’t touched Windows or Mac in like a decade, so as far as what I was familiar with, Windows and Mac were about the same for my purposes. And since most of the team used Mac, I just went with Mac.

    The graphical system was terrible (to the point I even looked into what it would take to replace the default Mac graphical system (was it called “Aqua” or something? Don’t remember.) with something X11 based, but that’s like 100% impossible), but the thing that I hated the most was the touch bar. The Siri “button”(/“icon?”) on the touch bar was like one millimeter away from the backspace key (which is called “delete” in Mac for some reason, even though it acts like backspace). I’m sure I wasted so much time just closing Siri dialog boxes.

    Image of the Mac keyboard and touchbar zoomed in on the backspace/"delete" key showing how close the Siri button is.

    All that said, I’m not saying Windows would have been better than the Mac I had to use there. I probably would have been just as frustrated with Windows.

    I’m lucky enough now to be working for an employer that lets me use Ubuntu. I disabled all the default desktop environment stuff. I unfortunately can’t get away with Sway because I need to use Zoom and desktop sharing doesn’t work with Sway, but I use i3 which acts virtually identically (and does support desktop sharing).


  • Yeah, Gnome is far to bulky for my taste as well. I use Sway. It’s one single process. And it’s a Wayland compositor, so I don’t have any separate process for the X server. And Sway is currently using less than 90MB of RAM on my computer. With nothing else running but a minimal terminal emulator, htop, SystemD, and various daemons, my whole system is using less than 480MB of RAM.

    And that all makes me happy, of course, but just seeing small numbers isn’t really the point either. Aside from resource usage, I spend less time fixing, fighting with, upgrading, configuring, and otherwise maintaining Sway than I would KDE or Gnome or XFCE, and more time using my computer for the stuff I want to do on it. (As an aside, Sway’s tiling model is absolutely baller. I rarely have to think about where I want my windows, and when I do have to think about that, I don’t have to go to the mouse to position/resize them.)

    KDE and Gnome are two different varieties of seven(-hundred?)-layer bean dips of dependencies atop dependencies. I like that my entire graphical system is one process with comparatively few dependencies that I can wrap my head around pretty easily. (And, honestly, Sway is a step up in bulkiness/heaviness/complexity from dwm, which is what I used previously.)




  • Kindof a hard question to answer. I work remotely in software. If I couldn’t use the Internet, I’d have to change fields and start working in person. But is working remotely and writing code for my day job an expression of “addiction”? How about looking up documentation while I’m writing code on my own time? Definitely something I use the Internet for, but I wouldn’t think it’s an “addiction” thing. What about updating the software on my computer? Is finding recipes online “addiction”?

    Social media is “addictive”. For sure.

    So, I guess if you’re counting everything I use the internet for as “addiction” and asking how well I’d fare (with 100 being extremely poorly), I’d probably have to put it pretty high. Maybe 85 or more?

    If you only disallowed uses of the Internet that qualify as “addictive” such as doomscrolling or four-hour-long YouTube in-depth deep dives on invisible walls in Super Mario 64, then I don’t think I’d be really all that bad off. I might put myself at 20.