Notes

I don’t hate XML as much as the rest of the world.

one time I was working on a personal text animation library in Godot and I wanted to drive it with text

I needed some way to mark that certain text had different properties, like, some text might move quickly, or slowly, or be bouncy, or have a rainbow effect applied to it

and I was like “I wish there were some way to create a markup language for this”

some kind of markup language that I could extend with my own parts

XML isn’t great as a universal data serialization format, and it’s definitely quite bad as a programming language, but you know, as an extensible markup language it’s got legs

i wonder if the people who designed it knew

(ed: this is a repost of essentially exactly what I wrote the first time I discovered this)

People who elongate the world nice by writing “niceeeeeeee” rather than “niiiiiiiiice” are psychopaths

With an industry leading 4 deaths and 239 injuries, FlavorTech Supplements is operating at an industry leading 65% of Acceptable Accident Threshold, down a stunning 3.5% from last year!

motherfucker you mean to tell me that “panthers vs. senators” is a hockey game? god damn it I paid so much for these tickets I just wanted to see some big cats maul some old men

“being likeable is more important than being good at your job”

jokes on you, I’m neither

I bought an expensive Samsung OLED monitor for my computer and I regret it enormously. “How did they solve the problem of OLED burn in?” you might ask - well, the monitor panics every 12 hours and harasses you to let it take a 10 minute nappy nap, a function that you can not schedule for 4AM or trigger manually before bed

It’s unbelievably irritating

if you ever have a CAPTCHA that asks you to identify traffic lights, do it QUICKLY or some guy in a Waymo somewhere could die

So, the “Ancillary Justice” science fiction series has a futuristic evil empire where gender is meaningless and difficult to discern, and they wear formal uniforms with meaningful pins and always gloves

and somehow my mind IMMEDIATELY summoned this exact mental image for everyone in the empire, and it works So Well, so I guess if you’re ever reading the Hugo-award winning Imperial Radch series, I hope you also imagine these early-90s low-tier Sailor Moon baddies

If you ever leave software developers alone for too long, they’ll attempt things they’ve been dreaming of for years like a “new version” or a “big refactor” and both of these things have an awful tendency to break a shit tonne of features and completely ruin the stability of production code, so if you have a developer who doesn’t have the very tired look in their eyes you need to get them an unrealistic deadline on an incredibly ill-defined feature, and fast

most project management is just about keeping developers from ruining your product with their clever ideas

you hear that? even now they’re whispering about rewriting your entire decade-old legacy codebase in Kotlin even though nobody on the team is familiar with Kotlin or even the JVM, and they think they can do it in less than 6 months because they’re software developers and thus haven’t developed any ability to comprehend the passage of time

“Jolene” is a much funnier song if you consider the possibility that Jolene has never met either the lead singer or her man before and is utterly confused by this entire interaction.

“Jolene, you’re so hot, you could easily take my man, but please don’t, it would destroy me”

Jolene: “Uh, hi, who even is your man?”

“Oh, he is watching this interaction from behind those bushes over there.”

Jolene: (concern)

I’ve been on the internet for… the entirety of it, actually, and two unchanging constants are posts complaining that “kids these days are worse” and “computer programs are too bloated”.

Posts going all the way back to Usenet complain that programmers these days are using too many resources, including too many features, wasting processor cycles and RAM and disk space that could have been used more efficiently by the kinds of trim, svelte programs that existed in the years prior when developers could deliver twice as many features on three transistors held together by a twig and some gum.

Why, they finally proved that a computer could beat a human at chess in 1997 on a computer that’s a thousand times less powerful than a modern iPhone, and they got us to the moon with a bunch of computers that would’ve been put to shame by a TI-86+, and yet I still can’t have more than 38 youtube tabs open before my computer starts to get a little slow? I’m pretty sure the reason for this is exclusively programmer laziness and no other reasons.

You know you can still run Wordstar and Lotus Notes, if you really want. Zero bloat. They run unbelievably fast, on account of being carefully optimized for computers that you still had to start with a hand-crank and a starter engine.

It turns out that very few people actively prioritize “lack of features” when choosing which products to use. Most people are out there solving their problems using the first free tool that Google turned up and dealing with 18 layers of intrusive adware while attempting to dodge a $7/mo subscription payment for Frunglebunt Premium: Most of The Features You Actually Need, Good Luck Cancelling Your Account.

Nothing about that business model incentivizes small, fast, optimized software.

If you really, really want, there is absolutely a popular GitHub repo out there, half-maintained by one insane Rust developer who isn’t on speaking terms with the rest of his family:

It will do everything that you need to accomplish, for free, unbelievably fast, it runs entirely on the command line. You can use it if you simply learn how to install a complex language toolchain and invoke it with a command that looks like xsprt -vrflbrfl --o --dongly-mode.

It turns out, tools for professionals look a lot different from tools for consumers, and that is On Purpose and By Design.

if you ever watch a talented saxophonist, you know that at some point in saxophone school they’re trained in the secret art of saxophone hot-dogging, a series of moves that look as if their saxophone is full of hot cheese and they are to be considered a failure if every last person in the crowd is not covered in imaginary hot cheese by the end of the set

I was away for a week.

Anyways, this is how a cat tells you “I missed you, never leave me again.”

Every shitty little town in BC is just, like, a gas station with two pumps (one of them out of order), a museum, a motel that looks like it’s actively operated by bed bugs, a church, a hand-drawn sign that says something insane like “HAIRCUTS $5 TURN NOW”, and always, always, a cannabis store.

if you wonder why folks from metro Vancouver don’t believe that there’s anybody else living in BC it’s because every other town for 400 kilometers is just this bullshit

that, or open-air retirement communities like Nanaimo or Penticton where the average age is 70 and the average political stance is “terrified of wi-fi, but you can’t tell if it’s for nazi reasons or granola reasons”

Lately, Discourse has been including all kinds of generative AI features that I’d literally have to pay API providers to use, and aside from the actual, legitimate use case of spam detection in non-private communities, I can’t imagine who’s asked for any of these features.

“now your users can generate images right from discourse using your money”

yeah, well, before today they could have generated images using their money and posted that, how is this better?

“you can do sentiment analysis of posts in your community”

it’s a private community full of software developers over the age of 40, many with kids, the sentiment is always “tired”, I don’t need an AI to tell me that

I’m pretty sure the Discourse target market is exclusively late-Gen-X to Early Millennial because nobody else is old enough to even still want a forum, the Children communicate by sending furry VR-sona Tiktoks to private Discord communities

build an AI that automatically posts relevant quotes from The Simpsons (seasons 2-10) and reassures us that Final Fantasy VI and Cowboy Bebop were the apex of media and NOW we’re in business

“yes, millennial AI, you CAN has cheeseburger”

Tiff: The Vengabus is coming.

Curtis: It’s… it’s already come. It’s 2025. The Vengabus has come and gone.

Tiff: It’s still coming, though.

Curtis: THE SECOND COMING OF THE VENGABUS

Tiff: And when it comes we’ll all get vengaraptured.

“i support the lamplighter’s union! this is vital infrastructure that deserves public support, not a dying technology on its last years of life support”

but the message is undercut by my delivery, standing on a soapbox, lit by the very electrical grid and incandescent bulbs that are to blame for this whole mess

I think Canada Post should also get a monopoly on all packages as well as letter mail, it’d keep ’em in business in the new post-letter-mail universe, it’d keep good union jobs in town, and shit like Dragonfly, Purolator, FedEx, and Amazon Prime would all suffer (oh nooooo).

Suddenly your package takes 3-7 days to arrive instead of 15 minutes, but you can feel confident that the person delivering it didn’t have to pee in a bottle, that’s worth something.

if Canada Post rates make Amazon less competitive in Canada, oh noooooooo

“we’ve lost the worst jobs in Canada”

I have no idea where this came from but I need to share it with you:

“Idiot trap” content, like, anything that circulates around exploiting people not understanding what “dihydrogen monoxide” or “arabic numerals” are, I think that’s kind of a weak-ass form of humor.

OH HO HO YOU ABSOLUTE FOOL, YOU DID NOT KNOW THAT DI-HYDROGEN MONOXIDE IS ACTUALLY NOTHING MORE THAN SIMPLE H20, OR EVERYDAY WATER!

I thought that kind of thing was very funny when I was a teenager.

There is a caveat, though, that people who immediately overreact to the idea of kids being taught “arabic numerals” are definitely showing off Oops, All Racism! - although the kind of reactionary conservative voices that tend to fall for this are also exactly the kind of folk for whom being accidentally racist is a feature, not a bug.

YouTube has recommended me a video called “Smash or Pass: All 898 Pokemon”, which I think is as good a sign as any that the life of a content creator isn’t something we should be idealizing

there was a huge gender gap in STEM and now you’re mad at trans people? I swear to god it’s like you haven’t even met an engineer, they see a problem and they fix it

there’s an enormous incentive for payment providers like moneris and square to make an “18%”, “20%”, “22%” tip window that’s increasingly difficult to navigate out of, which is why I’m surprised nobody’s adopted my clever “skill testing tip window” idea where you have to win a little game to escape it at all

In the latest episode of Linus Tech Tips, they chat with a room sound design guy and he mentions that when they’re EQ-ing music to play on a PA, they cut the mids way down because it helps everyone’s conversations stay legible not to compete with vocal frequencies and I’d… honestly never thought about that, but it makes sense and is neat

I put a woven mat under my desk and attracted wildlife

My fish and chips came in a sheet of butcher paper with fake “newspaper” printed on it, because while “fish wrapped in newspaper” is a classic vibe, actual newsprint is dirty, ugly, and increasingly hard to come by. It’s reasonable to consider that the fake newspapers that we wrap fish in might outlast newspapers themselves, like the 3.5in floppy “save” icon, but for fish

Because I’m a night owl AND I live in Vancouver, which is about as far west as you can get, I feel like I’m kind of the last stop for the day.

like, there’s a rolling day going all over the world but I’m at the very tail end of the whole thing before it shuts down and starts all over again

the phrase “a hat on a hat” is used to describe when you’re overworking a joke or idea - like, the joke itself is already a funny hat, and you’re adding an unnecessary additional hat atop the pre-existing hat, needlessly complicating it while extracting no additional humor

the problem with “a hat on a hat” is that it that I do think a hat on a hat is, in fact, more funny

apparently YouTube is testing out age verification, but I’m going to be really surprised and extremely disappointed if their AI flags me as potentially under the age of 18, on account of my Google account was created in 2006

one thing that IRL board games have that digital board games can never have is that after six or seven plays with friends, you unlock a new mode where you’re just allowed to change game rules if you think it’ll make the game more fun

“upside down” is an easy term for when something’s orientation is inverted, but people ignore the useful “upside up” for when something is correctly oriented and “upside left” for when something has been knocked over

look at what I found

source:

So, with the pandemic finally kinda nearing behind us, I was planning on going to the United States and doing a bunch of geeky stuff - PAX, MagWest, maybe JoCoCruise - but then instead the USA came down with a bad case of the fascism and I got stuck at home doing camping instead.

Thing is, after camping, like, three times, I’m not convinced that I like camping so much as I enjoyed buying and trying out camping gear. That’s the real sport, I think.

If you aren’t way in to the beautiful outdoors, Canada can be boring as shit, y’all, this whole ass country is like if Montana were 50 times bigger and exactly as boring.

Honestly, though, buying a whole bunch of camping shit and going camping a bunch of times turned out to be, like, a fraction of the cost of going anywhere and doing anything, so that’s nice.

At the expense, of, like, going to nowhere and doing nothing and eating sandwiches in the dirt next to like 18 other families.

CBC: Employees ‘upset’ about return to office and prefer flexible work

As more and more employers order their workers back to the office, employees say they like the flexibility to work from home — and some returning to corporate workplaces aren’t so happy about being forced to return.

I get particularly het up about this exact topic.

WFH’s effect on productivity is so marginal that papers struggle to prove any kind of correlation, either for or against, and its effect on employee happiness is noticeable and significantly positive, so the justification for return to office is:

• not enough people are paying attention to the executive suite
• let’s keep commercial real estate profitable
• corporate culture

Can we just hire a potemkin office of young underemployed actors to treat the CEO like a big boy so that everyone else can get work done?

that’s what executive assistants are for

What is this glorious corporate culture we’re trying so hard to preserve? I think people are overestimating the cultural cachet of low-pile grey carpet, fake plastic plants, and saying “low hanging fruit” to a room full of sweaty people in collared shirts and Dockers slacks.

what will become of the men’s loafer industry

I know, I know, the company’s extroverts need 6-8 meetings a day because if nobody speaks to them in a 30 minute span their ego will collapse like a dying star

but I work with those same people in a WFH environment and they just frantically spam the slack huddle button, they’re doing FINE

and as an introvert I don’t know why their social dysfunction should be MY problem.

I’m angry that employee happiness isn’t even apparently a factor in company decisions.

If your average company discovered that they could increase profits by half of a half of a percentage by playing a high-pitched squealing noise on loudspeakers at all time I’m sure they’d immediately adopt the squealing loudspeaker in a heartbeat.

Look, everybody who’s not competent enough with computers to thrive in a WFH situation is going to retire or die in the next 5 years, we’re going to have to work together to bury cubicles and open-office work plans where they belong: in the past.

the only kinds of UIs I make are plain, utilitarian, retro, and unfriendly

apparently r/boardgames doesn’t appreciate my creativity

i did a programming joke by editing an xkcd

it’s kind of the opposite of “impostor syndrome”, as I think of myself as a thoroughly boring person with a skill-set that’s essentially as common as “accountant” - like, it turns out that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a chubby nerd who’s good at computers and python and servers and stuff

it’s not just because we’re absurdly common, it’s also because we’re super bad at dodging rocks

“oh, you’re a python/javascript server developer who can also do a bit of Rust? oh you have a lot of opinions about databases? Okay, tell me about the video game you’re OBVIOUSLY developing in your spare time.”

when I went to pick up my pizza, the person who went to grab my order said “we loved your order” and then shouted “it’s the guy!!!” to the kitchen and they all, collectively, shouted “mamma mia!”

the pizza was pretty good

The doctor told me I was allergic to survivorship bias which is why I’m not allowed near any more short punchy airport business books.

I want to come up with some kind of clever epigram about how sad it is that an AI effectively pretending to be kind, optimistic and uncritical feels so obviously inhuman.

Some people are out there experiencing interest and kindness for the first time at the hands of a machine we designed to be more upbeat than we are.

it’s going to be so devastating when this machine is tailored to do that while also selling us the new Toyota Highlander

He’s learning how to camp with us:

The Dark Knight (2008) is a pretty memorable movie, but one character who sticks out to me is “cliche spouting cop”.

Every damn line from him is a tired cliche.

Nobody else seems to focus on this guy but I hate him.

I’ve watched a fair bit of content where a deeply reverential fan and the original creator of a piece of art talk, and it always goes exactly like this:

Fan: Oh my god, the PANCAKE WALL, this was my FAVORITE PART, how did you come up with something as genius as the PANCAKE WALL

Creator: uh, there was a deadline and I panicked and I had pancakes for breakfast

Fan: I can even sing the PANCAKE WALL song, it’s my favorite

Creator: I don’t recall the PANCAKE WALL song, is that… is that a thing?

Fan: Oh, yeah, a bunch of fans came together and made up lyrics to the background music that was playing during the PANCAKE WALL scene, it’s a huge deal, we all sing it at cons.

Creator: Huh. You know Burt McSoundsman wrote that. I always thought Burt was a weird guy.

Fan: You don’t know the PANCAKE WALL song?

Creator: I do not.

https://weekly-net.co.jp/news/174582/

“Films and dramas, comics and anime. The car used in the scene where the character is killed in a car accident is almost always a truck.”

While exchanging opinions on the issue of image in the transportation industry, a transportation manager in Shizuoka Prefecture made that statement. In the scene where an important person in the story dramatically loses his life in a traffic accident, the major role that effectively enhances the impact is certainly played by large vehicles such as trucks and dumps, even if you count as many as you can remember.

(Translated by Google)

In related news, the North American bus industry is taking software developers and engineers to task

once again, the CBC would like to remind you not to laugh at the misfortune of others

Maybe winners sometimes use drugs

some cranky old (sidenote: I partially say “old” because literally nobody under the age of 50 has ever said “PC”, the last time someone unironically used the term “politically correct” was 1998.) person on reddit complained “is trans women not the PC term nowadays?”

and I responded with the basically nonsensical “actually most trans women are on linux” and ASCENDED TO VALHALLA, MY EARTHLY JOURNEY COMPLETE

Tent & Sleepin'

• tent
  • if the tent has piddly little plastic stakes, buy some metal stakes online
• foamgrid (yoga foam grid makes the floor less pointy, optional)
• inflatable mattress, cots, or sleeping pads
• sleeping bags
• pillows
• clothing
• rain coat
• portable battery pack (for recharging devices, lights) with lots of usb-C and usb-micro cables
• little broom (tidy up that tent, it’s gonna get dusty in there)
• toothbrush, toothpaste, floss
• disposable pocket cloth & sanitizer

Setting Up a Chill Zone

• canopy
  • you should stake down the canopy as well, this is another reason why a small bag of your own stakes is handy
• folding chairs
• lights
  • it’s nice to have one lamp per person, plus a hanging lamp for the inside of your tent, and a few lights to hang at the periphery of your canopy or put on your picnic table
  • these are a lot less necessary if you’re not night owls and you’re camping in the summer when it’s not dark until 9PM anyways

The Cooking Matrix

putting a “complete” camp-kitchen set together is one of the harder parts, I built a big disorganized-but-complete plastic tub that I keep in storage you can buy elaborate camping cookware sets online for too much money but I just tossed some kitchen extras and spares in a big tub, heavier but cheaper

• propane & stove
• paper towel roll
• aluminum foil roll
• kitchen garbage bags
• plates
• cups
• a pot
• a pan
• tongs
• spatula
• a cooking knife (use one of your shittiest at home knives, pack carefully)
• a cutting board
• soap, dishrack, sponge & basin
• oil
• salt & pepper
• sugar
• a l’il extra fold-up side table
• water jug (bring water from home, camp water may not be potable)
• kettle
• coffee & tea bags

Kitchen Zone Doesn’t Mean Nothin’ Without

• a cooler, full of food
• I fill mine with reusable ice packs rather than loose ice, which is less good at maintaining chill but more convenient
• vegetables & fruits (I have an insulated bag that I use for these, they don’t need to stay SO COOL but keeping them from roasting in the heat is probably good)
• snacks & dry goods in a tub

What Do You Do While Camping (I Mostly Do Stuff I Would Do Indoors)

• book
• games
• notepad?
• small bluetooth speaker to play at a reasonable volume from 9 to 11

Utility

• hatchet
• tarps
• clamps
• rope
• duct tape
• lighter (long-neck)
• first aid kit
• can of bug spray
• fire-roastin’ stick

Further Nerdery

• this can be logistically complicated to get together - prepare a pre-launch checklist that includes steps like “fill water jug”, “charge lamps”, “pack food”, etc..

This Seems like a Lot Of Stuff

It is.

i’m going to sell an e-book called “meditation for developers” and inside it’s just gonna read “play balatro on the toilet then have a shower”

In retrospect, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five were the rarest thing of all: American media about how war is bad, actually

Is this Catholicism? This church wanted me to eat a cracker that represented the body of Christ, and then some wine that represented the blood of Christ, then a jello shot, for the bones and cartilage of Christ, then some pork cracklins, representing the skin of Christ, then some Gatorade, representing the tears of Christ, then some candy floss, representing the hair of Christ, then two grapes, representing the eyes of Christ, then some more wine (blood again), then a few loose spurts of yogurt (sidenote: Okay not a church and apparently I am no longer welcome in the Meadowbrook 7-11)

One of the things that I like to read is medium length, well-written, informative articles of the sort that used to live in magazines before the information crushed them all like Blockbuster video or travel agencies.

I have a book by Ruth Reichl where she talks about her time as an editor for an important food magazine for Conde Nast in New York in the 80s and she is treated like a legitimate no-foolin’ rock star, there are assistants, there are perks, it is wild. Magazines were crazy in the 40 years ago universe that no longer exists.

But then, for a long time in my personal heyday, there was blogs, medium form articles written by amateurs, a wild and explosive flourishing of community writing projects, many of them utterly unreadable or punishingly mundane, but this was also a good time, and I subscribed to many via the use of my “A Relatively Simple Syndication” (or “ARSS” for short, because it wasn’t very good) technology browser.

For a brief period, I subscribed to Increment magazine, an expensive but lovely periodical, made entirely free online, that was - I imagine - never once for a single second profitable. This fabulous loss-leader was underwritten by Stripe, a company that makes more money in a day than I will make in my entire lifetime, so they definitely have a little bit of dosh floating around for weird vanity projects.

At least several dozen times I joked that they should have called it Excrement magazine because of where I read most of the articles.

It turns out that one of my likes is just compelling non-fiction articles, and being as my last real subscription ended in 2021, I feel like I was one of the last holdouts on team print media.

but (he says, patting his extremely well-laden eReader) it’s not like I’m not also part of the problem

For a while, I leaned on Pocket’s featured articles in Firefox. They’re okay. At this point I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of them again and again, and honestly I’m not sure if Pocket is going to keep them going now that Pocket is folding (it turns out, keeping a blog/article reading tool alive in the current internet era isn’t terribly valuable, because the last human-written article was some time in 2023, apparently).

anyways, no point here, no call-to-action, just… thinkin’ about articles

Crypto has been so predatory and actively evil that it actively killed my excitement for decentralized, democratized technology, although Mastodon has restored it somewhat

one time I got a parking ticket and I was so mad until I saw that the parking company’s tagline was “expect a lot” and I found that so disarmingly funny that I wasn’t angry about the ticket any more

the Menquakerite movement was started by pious John Seymour Slack-Huddle in 1867

“The devil’s oats enliven the lust and lead a man to thoughts of sin. We must turn to more godly and chaste grains like millet and sorghum.”

– John Seymour Slack-Huddle

I’ve set up some Alexa devices in my home and while I’m mostly pessimistic about AI,

I am so, so, SO on board for them being, like, even 5% smarter

like, I live in Coquitlam, and I said “Alexa, what’s the weather like in Coquitlam” and it was like “The weather in Coquimatlán Mexico is 27 celsius and sunny”

there’s not a day that goes by without my wife going “alexa turn the lights off” “alexa, TURN the LIGHTS OFF!” “alexa! LIGHTSOFF!”

I speak very clearly in a Vancouver accent, we’re like… 18 feet away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, I can’t imagine how busted this shit must be for anybody with an accent.

I google searched “when is alexa going to stop being so terrible” and apparently they’re rolling out the new LLM-backed models slowly this year, should be along to Canada … eventually

there’s this difficult moment where I show my wife something I’ve been obsessing over for weeks and she looks at it and nods and goes “uh huh, uh huh, yeah”

it’s happened to me so many times and each time it’s basically exactly like this:

“Rolling Mean” is a great name for a nerdy motorcycle gang

they’re terrifying - well, most of them aren’t, but one of them is REALLY terrifying, so in aggregate, they’re terrifying

The movie Angels in the Outfield but the angels are from Neon Genesis Evangelion

I worry that I date myself terribly by still loving a bunch of the stuff I loved as a kid and young adult - Final Fantasy 6, Cowboy Bebop, IRC, Our Lady Peace, The Simpsons, Command & Conquer, WinAmp…. all wild retro shit by today’s standards.

But then I think about some of the stuff that my parents and grandparents loved - Star Wars, Singin’ in the Rain, Looney Toons, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - and how much reverence and fondness I, as an adult, treat it with, because they introduced it to me with such obvious fondness, and I think “nah, ’s good to like stuff”

time mostly washes away most of the really embarrassing and terrible retro stuff, like Police Academy 5, Police Quest III, and Limp Bizkit and we can just look back and chuckle at them now

I don’t have to imagine, I’ve even tried taken medication for that exact same problem before, what I don’t understand is why you’d WANT that

people are mad that my “touchless car wash $15” is just me waving a sponge around and going “wooOoOoOooOoooo”

“what’s this 9 year gap on your resume?”

“…. uh, work study”

So, according to cartoon logic, once you toss someone out of something you’re supposed to dust off your hands and go “and stay out”, that’s the rules

this might be one of my more controversial software opinions

my bar for a code review is “do I understand approximately what this code is doing and how”, and that’s often enough to find one or two quibbles (‘hey this could have been named better" or “are you sure this part does what you think it does?”) but often it leads to the ol’ rubber stamp of justice

honestly I think that senior devs who can’t let a single PR go by without at least one nitpick because otherwise they feel like they haven’t done their duty aren’t accomplishing as much as they think

sometimes I would not do things the same way that that other person did

and then I just chalk that up to “hey, everybody’s mind works a different way” and go about my day

like, this is not to say I won’t intervene if something truly dangerous or ill-advised is happening, but, like, once a project has been chugging along for a little while with the same people, usually it gets increasingly clear when that is the case

sometimes a PR comes in with “I’m pretty sure that this won’t break prod” and that one maybe deserves a little more of the fine-toothed comb

note: if you’re working on avionics, medical software, people’s bank accounts, or are a nuclear engineer, definitely ignore me

okay, so, funny story, in the DeltaGreen TTRPG there’s a group of people called “The Dream Syndicate” with a fake website

so I follow the link, I go to the website, and I think “whoa, this is INSANE, the language feels so CULTY, I love that they went to all of this trouble to build a fake online cult to match their description in the source book”

and then I read about the Dream Syndicate in the source book and it doesn’t match at all

this is just a real website?

modern american companies are way, way down the jim jones pipeline to fuckin’ cult city

tell me your company doesn’t have a set of commandments (c.f. “values”) you’re supposed to live by and a holy mission

So I follow the subreddit for comics - no, not that one, the one for people’s shitty little homemade ones that never see the light of day, and what struck me as funny about this one was not that the comic itself was funny, but that someone would spend hours of their day slaving over this series of images

this creator was struck by the muse, but it wasn’t one of the good muses, it was the “I must draw the pope twerking” muse, that’s the one they got today, and I’m glad they decided to go with it anyways

bisexuality - two sexualities

unisexuality - one sexuality (we usually segment this further because we’re interested in what the “one” is)

asexuality - no sexuality

bicycle - two cycles

unicycle - one cycle (only shows up in circuses)

acycle - no cycles (only shows up in graph-based math)

binary - counting system of 2s (useful)

unary - counting system of 1s (tallying, sometimes useful)

aary - counting system without any numbers (not useful)

So, it’s an open-secret that Phnom Penh has the best chicken wings in Vancouver.

so, through a weird twist of fate, I ended up with a bunch of chicken wings

and I thought “might as well give this recipe a try”

YouTube helped:

My version is somewhere between these two’s takes on the famous recipe and:

I used too much seasoning on the outside: the garlic oil let too much salt, sugar, and MSG adhere to the crust making the wings a little overpoweringly seasoned.

otherwise it was DELICIOUS.

I figured this would be an insanely difficult recipe to get right because, like, if Phnom Penh is so legendary for these wings, why doesn’t every restaurant do them?

But, actually, if you do all of the steps - the long fish-saucy marinade, the thin crispy batter, the twirl in garlic butter and then sweet-salty-and-msg seasoning: it’s actually very close and very good. It’s just labor intensive, and these guys need to hit the table still very hot from the fryer.

Anyways, if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, highly recommend.

The New York Times’ elevation of Marcella Hazan’s quick marinara to viral status was, uh, very useful for me, so I trust their taste at least a little.

Of course, they’ve paywalled most of these recipes but … they’re viral recipes, so you can’t stop me, NYT.

Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You

On Sept. 17, 2014, an ambitious new app made its debut: New York Times Cooking, which collected thousands of archival Times recipes in one elegantly designed, easy-to-use place.

In the 10 years since, Cooking has grown into a whole universe of food, videos, personalities, newsletters, cookbooks and comments — with you at its center. You’ve invited us into your kitchens and made us part of your lives.

To mark the anniversary, here are 50 of our best recipes according to you, our community, with reader comments threaded throughout. It’s not a ranked list of our most popular recipes by traffic numbers alone, but a wider, more curated view of Cooking.

These are dishes that have emerged as classics and racked up five-star ratings, recipes that became popular just about immediately after we hit publish, went viral on social media and inspired the most memorable comments. But we easily could’ve filled this list with 500 more. There are so many you’ve loved, in so many ways.

i only have 2 data points but yes

A B testing, which is where we show the UI to a bee, and if they fly towards it it’s cool

ḧ̶̡̨̨̛̩͔̻̘̻̺͓͕̯̥́̐̓͌͋͗̈́̈́̍̑̽͆̇͝͝͠e̷͍̤̥̗͂̒̉͒̆̎͊̃͆́̀̃̊̍͂̓͜l̸̛̜̩̩͖̥̮̰͂͆̆̏̊̆͌͌͑̚ͅl̵̢̡̫̲͔̱͔̤̣͚͋̐́̽̾͒̓̏̋̒̌o̵̰̽̏̊̈́̅̅̎́̅̍̄͋̓̕̕̚ ̸̢̧̨̱̹͚̘̭̦̣͕̩̩̹͉̽̀̍́̄͌͒̒̑̽̒̊̓̒͋̏͝ḓ̵̩͇̱̤̙́o̷̧̙̺̮͚̹̹͔͇̰͍̯͔͖͜͝l̷̡͚̹̙͍̘̳͓̜̱̲̟̗̪̯̔͜ĺ̴̢̧̛̼͎̳̠͔͙̤̬̣̫̈́̓̌̎̾̅͛͋̎͌̽̆͆y̷͖̖͉̩͔̥͇̫̳͙̣͕̭͚̽̆̓͜

Hello Dolly runs for 2 hours and 30 minutes, and if you’re wondering if there are any parts of it that are better than the 45 seconds in WALL-E

nope

You are in a boat.

There is a hole in the boat.

Water is rushing in.

Your three boat mates each have a plan: one of them is wearing a lifejacket and pitches that we should do nothing about the hole.

One of them does not have a lifejacket and pitches that drastic action should be taken and the hole should be patched up.

The third one, also equipped with a lifejacket, intelligently suggests a compromise: we will fix some of the hole, but not all of it.

With the hole half fixed, water continues to pour into the boat, but more slowly.

The first boat-mate argues that the hole fixing plan has failed and pitches that the hole fixing plan be dismantled and abandoned.

He is overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that elude you.

The compromise candidate defends his half-hearted hole fix.

The boat mate who proposed fixing the hole is now being fully ignored.

Next to you, a much larger boat, one without a hole, has filled up with hole-worshippers, led by something of a hole, and they have decided to unnecessarily create a hole in their boat.

As you watch them sinking, you think “perhaps the compromise half-hole guy had a good point.”

Things are looking good: you might, if you’re lucky, maintain your half-hearted hole plugging efforts.

In order to appease the hole worshippers, the compromise candidate promises not to touch the existing hole at all.

His plan gains a lot of steam and honestly the pro-hole party is furious. They’re still very popular, though.

Unrelated, a vote is coming up in Canada

folks have been promising that offline-first or local-first development from the web browser is Just Around The Corner for almost as long as they’ve been promising that browser WASM is going to be The Next Big Thing and I feel like I’m going to get old and die before anybody makes a single real product like this

Need to do some BUSINESS! in the 1990s?

If you can listen to this without a little pixelated city coming to life before your very eyes, you had a very different childhood than I did.

@ArmyofOneandaHalf - 2 years ago

Ah yes, this delivers unparalleled value to the consumer

Okay, what about if you’re playing a little SNES game with prerendered graphics about a plucky little apple?

@egg_mittens - 1 year ago This album has perfect nintendo game flow.

• World 1: Large, more powerful than the player, but very easy to outsmart. A simple fellow to help you get the controls.
• World 2: The game starts showing you a bit of its edge. This boss is entirely antagonistic, but is also very charismatic and you kind of grow to love when they’re on screen. Thinks they’re very cool.
• World 3 mini-boss: duck
• World 3: Coming right around the midpoint of the game is the first proper challenge: a doppleganger boss. Propells the main story forward, genuinely a little scary. Defeating this boss feels like a huge achievement.
• World 4 mini-boss: Yeah, it’s a little silly, but also kind of a tank and you don’t fully believe it’s a mini-boss. It plays around with the environment and hits like a truck.
• World 4: We’re nearing the big bad now, so this is a huge challenge in the game’s core mechanics. The fight itself contains a puzzle aspect that is really frustrating because it’s like playing tic tac toe with lava.
• World 5: Final thing before the big bad and while they’re tough to beat, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. They’re really there to hype you up and to get you pumped for the final boss. Making you overconfident. What’s the worst that can happen?
• World 6: Complete lovecraftian horror. A full departure from the lightharted, kind of campy aesthetic the rest of the game has had, it is now you against an unfeeling, all-powerful darkness. The threat they pose is existential, every time you die to it you feel stabbing pain and fear in your heart. This is the worst thing that can happen.

Life Pro Tip: if someone makes a big deal about their immune system being strong, don’t touch their hands after they’ve been in the bathroom

something about the cadence of this is just very, very funny, so many lines in this hit an absurd comedic tone

textbook… the homeowner cut a hole in their wall, ‘cause they’re wily, and they musta hit a cable or somethin’

does that happen a lot?

in Canada alone… a million homes a second

a m- that can’t be right

someone at Business Insider has been banging the RTO drum for the past 4 full years, trying to convince people that RTO is good using any conceivable angle

an increasingly unhinged series of takes, no matter how ridiculous,

and I would like to wish them a very fuck right the hell off

either Business Insider’s corporate owners also own a lot of commercial real estate or some terrible middle-manager is very lonely without people to harangue

sometimes I stay up at night worrying that I’ll join a company that doesn’t have “Teamwork” and “Innovation” in its core values, and instead has “Collaboration” and “Inventiveness”

i’m not sure if I’d be able to survive the change

in order to try and get people to deploy more often, we’re employing a random reward skinner box strategy

22 micrograms of opiates have been shipped to your home or place of residence

when I visit japan it might finally be time to get my tattoo:

エラー：翻訳サーバーがオフラインです。

it means “honor”

i keep asking my spanish speaking friends what “no sé” means but none of them seem to have any idea, the language must be a lot harder to learn than I thought

I had fun setting up a linux computer this weekend, but as much as windows sucks in myriad little frustrating ways, ubuntu’s desktop experience still involves no small amount of unavoidable terminal ops

also a bunch of linux still feels held together by a handful of mickey mouse apps some guy wrote in 2006

i think the DPI scaling is still a little broken, even in 2025, a year in which 4k screens are ubiquitous

“I would like to create a shortcut to a frequently accessed network location and place that shortcut gently upon my desktop”

linux: “no we don’t do that here”

this is how the musical Rent ended in Canada

This feels quite silly, but, I was legitimately very disappointed that this turned out to be a run of the mill cyberpunk RPG.

I was kind of hoping for, like, “SimCity the TTRPG”

I’m actually not sure what exactly a city management TTRPG would entail, like, are we pretending to be city council members? Do we have to obey Robert’s Rules of Order? This might turn out to be an incredibly boring game but I’d at least be excited to poke through the rules

like, I’m not sure if it would be good, or fun, but dang it would be novel

r/boardgames is losing it because a 50% tariff from China and a global recession is going to kill kill the current modern board games industry, but IMO what’s dying is “overproduced board games”, if you’ve got a laser printer, a few decks of playing cards, some dice, index cards, markers, scissors, the world is your oyster

one thing about following the /r/BuyCanadian subreddit is folks’ll post a basket full of nothing but cheezies and Canadian Whiskey and go “i’m switching to Canadian products” and you look at their cart and have to suppress your urge to say “please also buy a vegetable, we make some of those here too”

but honestly, if you were making do with nothing but cheetos and jim beam before, I’m still glad you made the switch

I was a bit surprised how whiskey focused this trade war has been so far.

“What’s that going to accomplish, how much whiskey could Canadians possibly drink?”

“Oh. Oh wow. That’s … that much, huh?”

i just flew here from math camp and boy are my arms toroid

This gin was overpriced but it was worth it to become my best olive oil bottle for multiple consecutive years.

i hate terms like “restaurant grade” or “military grade”, like, they’re meaningless but also even if it were true, it’s possible that the “grade” of something optimized for an environment where it’s bought in a 10,000 pack by someone looking to buy the cheapest thing they can legally get away with is not a vote of confidence

i buy deli containers in bulk, because they’re “restaurant grade”, which is to say, cheap as dirt and modular

So, I asked ChatGPT to take my character designs for my D&D players out of my cartoony style and re-render them in a more painterly fantasy style, and honestly it’s… pretty good.

Here are my drawings:

And the results:

Not perfect but a darn sight better than I could do.

i mean, it’s not wrong

Look, Cheetos and Doritos are puffed cornmeal dusted with MSG and carefully hand-optimized in a lab to be just unsatisfying enough that you’ll rip through the whole bag without thinking about it.

Hawkins Cheezies are like crunching down on angry rocks hosed down with sharp cheddar. Each handful of Cheezies has more condensed Cheez flavor than a whole bag of Cheetos combined. You have to stop eating them out of sheer flavor exhaustion.

They use a 70-year old machine to crank these out and only a handful of people know the recipe, which hasn’t changed since before my father was born.

most of the other uniquely Canadian snacks, like all-dressed chips, ketchup chips, and Coffee Crisps, are … forgettable

thanks to Dan Olson I got kinda in to passively watching GME cultists on reddit predict the second coming of financial Jesus every week, which, despite stubbornly refusing to happen for the past 4 years, is still going to happen any minute now

sometimes I wonder how long they can wait but then I remember that the Christians are still at it two thousand years later so I don’t think their pile of imaginary shorts are going anywhere fast

i wonder to what extent random redditors own a failing brick and mortar chain that sells video games in malls

which, thanks to its second-hand game sales, is widely hated by the video game industry itself, who moved aggressively to cut them almost entirely out of the loop

largely reducing it to, at this point, mostly just selling funko pops and minecraft socks to survive

I could swear he looks smug, can cats be smug?

I thought that it would be great to have a chatty cat but 90% of what he has to say are complaints to the management that he is not receiving the level of five star service that he has come to expect from this kind of resort.

would you believe that the first place my mind went here was homoerotic subtext?

so, I was sitting here thinking that both Mexico and Korea have really pioneered adding cheese to corn in clever, delicious ways like “elote” and that the USA is way behind in strategic corn-cheesing technology, and then I remembered where they took the same concept:

doritos

A while back I didn’t believe a friend when they said they had the same meal pretty much every day for lunch.

Then I started working from home and now I have poached eggs on toast, like, at least a few times a week.

I have been writing software professionally, and then also recreationally in my spare time, regularly, for over 20 years now

I’m not bad at it by any measure, but it is weird how mediocre I feel given all that practice

for every once-in-a-lifetime genius there’s at least a few hundred guys like me who are just, like, kinda okay at a thing I guess

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

You know, I’m generally pretty chuffed to be heterosexual but while I’m pulling a rat-sized tangle of greasy, soapy girl hair out of the shower drain is not one of those times.

heh

I found this in my D&D session notes and I think it’s quite good

(quietly)

i actually kinda like the weird style of the cybertruck,

if, like, the CEO weren’t a tool, and it were smaller, and if they were made to a Toyota quality standard rather than by exhausted non-union workers hot-gluing plastic knobs to aluminum, and if the frame worked like an actual car’s frame, and if the stainless steel exterior didn’t rust so easily, and if it cost $35,000 rather than $110,000+ I’d seriously consider one

wait … am… am I just describing a Prius?

if America tries to annex Canada with a fleet of Cybertrucks we’ll be able to prevail with nothing more than a few bags of road salt and some medium-sized baseballs

like 90% of my camera roll is zapp

My thoughts on trade protectionism are actually kinda fraught?

Like, it turns out the ability of global capital to reposition itself with unlimited freedom just means that all work is done by the lowest bidder, with labor going to the country that has the fewest anti-slave-labor laws and food safety regulations on the books, right?

Trade makes us all richer but protecting a local industry by pushing out gigantic international incumbents - like with dairy, or the CBC - also can be good?

China’s ridiculous digital protectionism utterly sucks, but also China’s software industry wasn’t completely flattened by FAANG like it was in the entire western world.

Lots of local industries here are choked by practices that are so shady they almost feel like racketeering - tomato companies disappearing any stock that goes over quota so that they don’t ruin the price of tomatoes as part of a vast tomato conspiracy, in order to preserve the profitability of tomato growers. Dairy prices artificially inflated so high that a basket of cheese feels like a treasure chest. (i mean, it is)

Canada is just chock-a-block with local cartels enforcing profitable little fiefdoms - with oligopolies that collude to create monopolistic behavior.

Bad for the consumer and yet when trade disaster strikes we suddenly have no oranges but a lot of tomatoes and cheese.

I think the analogy I go to for this is that off-the-grid subsistence farming where you compost your own feces is miserable, but also living in 400 square feet downtown doing gig-work for pennies and doordashing everything you want to eat is miserable:

sane trade policy lives somewhere in the middle, so trade protectionism vs globalism both exist on a spectrum where total adherence to one or the other is going to be… bad

“maybe we need worker protections but also mcdonalds” is the kind of lukewarm centrist take you should expect from me

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.

This may not seem so classy, but actually an older red wine probably has a bunch of nasty sediment and old cork floating around in it and a quick pass through a coffee filter clears that right up.

people get real triggered about the idea of eating bugs, but I eat a lot of shrimp, which are delicious, and it’s hard to describe what’s different between shrimps and bugs

about once every ten thousand years, the prophecy states a frontend developer will realize that they spend most of their time carefully using RPCs to curate a little miniature in-client database in order to keep their UI data up-to-date and sane,

and, in an effort to solve this problem for themselves in perpetuity, end up nerd sniping themselves for multiple consecutive years on a synchronization or complex query solution to perma-solve this problem, like Meteor.js or GraphQL

These solutions tend to be so powerful that they make simple applications like the well known Todo App seem almost magically trivial

but the black-box, complex and highly bespoke nature of these solutions keeps them niche: RPC over HTTP is a well-understood model for a reason, it’s much harder to reason about access control or rate limiting in a Custom Sync Protocol made by Some Guy

it’s even worse when, once every ten thousand years, a backend developer decides that they will refuse to learn Javascript and end up inventing some fabulously, wildly elaborate system to write everything in a unified environment

like ASP.NET WebForms or Elixir’s Phoenix Live Views

so the Hudson’s Bay Company is in serious trouble

one thing to note, uh, BC is named after the Columbia Department, which was one of the departments of the HBC, presumably next to “menswear” and “kitchen”

ultimately there’s a lot of really dark history there, and I’m not sad to see the HBC go, like, when I shop at Canadian Tire I never think “I bet this store killed a whole bunch of people”

I mean, I DO think that when I shop at Amazon, but free shipping

So, I made a dungeons and dragons mistake.

There’s some DMing advice that I adhere to pretty closely, when you’re characterizing an NPC or a group of NPCs, you can kinda just file the serial numbers off of something you’re already very familiar with and run with it.

I’m not that experienced with “organized crime”, haven’t watched anything conteporary so, in our Dragon Heist campaign, I decided that a good analogue for the Zhentarim would be “the mafia, specifically from the movie The Godfather”.

The problem, though…

It was a fun characterization. It added a lot of depth and interest to the local Zhentarim. They’re not good, but they’re honorable, they have a code. And if you’re good to them? They’ll be good, reliable allies.

This went over entirely too well, this was the first major Waterdeep faction my players encountered, and whoops, my players are just fully aligned with the Zhentarim now.

I mean, the players are good, there were lots of local “good” factions, but the local Zhents, with their friendly, accessible low-rent evil - well, it’s just hard to say no to them. They keep making offers my players can’t refuse. Players don’t mind paying a little protection money or shaking up some locals now and again. A quest is a quest, even if it’s to intimidate a potential witness.

Their capo, Urstul Floxin, his “friendly and helpful in a very threatening way” shtick, is actually very convincing. The person who keeps talking the party into doing shady stuff is ME, actually.

I love how even in the D&D art provided by Wizard of the Coast he kinda looks like Luca Brasi.

I don’t think this is really even a problem: Waterdeep Dragon Heist is a heist story where the players operate a tavern, the players are naturally going to find themselves way more aligned with local organized crime than the constabulary.

ed: Months later, Urstul has provided the players with their own goons, Guido and Nunzio, a little dumb one and a big gentle one, and they’re already productively contributing to schemes and nonsense.

So, uh, Melitta is probably the least well-respected of the common pourover brands but let me tell you, you can get a Melitta pourover for $12 CDN and a 100-pack of new filters at any grocery store for $5, which is maybe 1/3 of the cost of the other two.

A gooseneck kettle, hario v60 and a baratza burr grinder will set you back $300.

But a $20 blade grinder, a $20 kettle and a $12 plastic pour-over with $5 filters can get you a coffee setup that’s 80% as good for a tiny fraction of the price.

I remember on a trip to San Francisco in the 10s, I was a little startled, they offered a crazy new thing called “pourover” and charged exorbitantly for it, and I, out of curiosity, paid, only to watch them make coffee

… the exact way I made coffee at home, just with more pomp.

“my mom showed me how to do that when I was just out of high school, it’s actually just the best way for a person to make a single cup of coffee”

I’m a little obsessed with finding that point in the price/quality curve where you’re actually getting the absolute best bang for your buck and I feel like for coffee this is it.

@apike having tried burr and blade grinders, I’m gonna say it: coffee enthusiasts over-value a perfectly consistent and predictable grind

with only a little practice a blade grinder reliably produces a good cup of coffee, you just need to time it right

although admittedly I did splurge on a nice, reasonably priced OXO burr grinder, so

I believe that professionals tend towards techniques that produce consistency and homogeneity - like neutrally flavored broths, perfectly diced vegetables, and very precise measurements.

Amateurs who ape these techniques without having to meet the same demands are cargo culting needlessly: perfect consistency is rarely as important a goal for home cooks, so go ahead: USE a boldly flavored stock or rough chop your vegetables: it will be FINE.

The same goes for coffee grind consistency.

:(

the secret to good Italian food is to loudly announce “MAMMA MIA” every time you add garlic to a pan. if you don’t do this, the garlic will sense your fear and burn immediately. this is science.

olive oil. if your recipe says “2 tablespoons,” ignore it. pour until your ancestors whisper “basta” in your ear. then pour a little more. then discard the pasta and begin drinking the olive oil straight. loudly announce “MAMMA MIA”. you have done it. now you are the chef. kiss your fingers and wink.

a hard thing, when coding, is when you get trapped in an intractable-feeling knot of not being able to work on Problem X until you make some progress on Problem Y, which you don’t want to tackle until you hit Problem Z, which is dependent on …

in order to keep yourself sane and keep your change from getting way out of control, DO ONE THING AT A TIME. keep a list of future changes. stub out functionality that doesn’t exist yet.

learn this powerful mantra: “that’s a problem for future me”

sometimes, as future you, you have to go back and re-do something you did wrong: that’s okay

it turns out going back and re-doing that thing is a thousand times easier than being stuck staring at a blank page trying to solve every problem at once

If every CS undergraduate program in the world shut its doors tomorrow, in about ten years I, personally would be dramatically better off, so I’m not sure why people keep advancing this “AI will kill the junior developer pipeline” argument like it is a bad thing.

the entities who need there to be lots of cheap software developers are companies, I’m not a company, I’m a guy

“should I start a CS degree in this uncertain atmosphere”

no!

the only stable job is… all of the other jobs that aren’t programming

you should do one of those instead

also if everybody who’s currently making a video game in their spare time would stop, that would also be peachy

i’m looking at you, EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON MASTODON

So, Tiff (humorously, and non-seriously) proposed combining raspberry jam and cream cheese into one super-condiment, and I warned her that it would have the expiry date of cream cheese, and then furiously tried to remember which sketch comedy group did a mustard+mayonnaise sketch.

Me: “I think it’s… you know… two guys… throwing underwear around… shitting in a tub… those guys.”

Tiff: “Tim and Eric?”

Me: “Yeah!”

Narrator: it was Mr. Show

Slack: HEY! I HAVE A NOTIFICATION FOR YOU!

Me: but it’s after work on a friday what is it

Slack: IT’S THIS THING A CO-WORKER SAID YESTERDAY

Me: slack what is wrong with you

Slack: I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW NOTIFICATIONS WORK

Me: i’m surprised you answered but ok

ed: for context, around this time Slack was struggling to stop notifying you that you had an available message, even if you did not, in fact, have an available message.

woof, someone tried to compile a list of Canadian digital services and in the “replacements for cloud services like AWS” column they have, like, eight versions of “guy running a software consultancy out of his boat” and a bunch of companies that can not meaningfully compete with Hetzner

I’m pretty patriotic but I’m not “hosting services in Canada” patriotic, I could just as easily shovel money into a fireplace

i wouldn’t be surprised if Canada turned out to be the enterprise Java capital of the world and I want that to carry every centimeter of the derision I intend

a lot of the science of nutrition seems to be backed by shrugging and emulating the eating habits of people in “blue zones” but as far as I can tell the actual way to live an “extremely long life” is to live in a country with generous retirement checks and nobody who bothers to check if the people who collect them are still alive

“people in blue zones manage to live to the age of 110 on a diet of fish and beans”

meanwhile, people in blue zones:

I eat a lot of cabbage. One five dollar head of cabbage has been vegetables with dinner all week, it’s cheap, nutritious, and I have a handful of good cabbage recipes.

unrelatedly, someone who lives in my office has been unleashing a truly rancid series of unstoppable eye-watering farts all week and I can’t figure out why

for the last few days Zapp has been sitting on my lap for hours each night, which is good for the soul but bad for the productivity

and also the circulation in my legs

an expensive standing desk is a wonderful way to find out that you don’t like standing while you work

You, a child: I will have the chicken nuggets, plural, please

Me, a sophisticate: one huge nugget

There are some things I just can’t ever stop thinking about, to my own detriment.

Like, in the party anthem “Evacuate the Dance Floor” by Cascada, the lyrics of the song indicate that the song is both dangerous and infectious, which makes me think that evacuation is the wrong move: this calls for a quarantine of the dance floor.

Dr. DJ should lose his medical license.

I love breakfasts. One of the things I could not get enough of in Montreal was that they had a breakfast restaurant on seemingly every corner and they all executed at a level utterly unheard of in BC. Hell, even a Smittys does a better breakfast than you’re likely to find in the lower mainland.

In my new place I live near a Cora, an IHOP and a De Dutch, all staffed by bored, laconic teenagers. Trying to get food in any of them on a weekend is a fool’s errand and a 2 hour project at least.

I’m a not incompetent chef and at least a few times when guests have offered to take us to breakfast I’ve simply made an elaborate breakfast because it’s a more efficient use of my time. It’s not a perfect system because not everybody can order exactly what they like: you’re getting a full English and you’re going to LIKE IT darn it - but it’s absolutely faster.

But there are some good spots (also: if you’ve got great BC breakfast restaurant tips let me know), one of which is the New Westminster IHOP.

Unlike most IHOPs it’s actually - and this is weird - run well, by people who seem to like what they’re doing? Maybe it pays well enough not to suffer massive turnover. I can hope, at least.

The difference is night and day. They’re always busy, even on weekdays, and they turn over tables with mechanical efficiency.

All of us have hit a Denny’s at a weird hour, been one of only two tables in the entire restaurant, and sat 75 minutes waiting for our order to slowly roll out, cold, from the kitchen, or been at that same Dennys when they’re busy and had breakfast take an eternity because they’re swamped and don’t know what to do.

This IHOP is reliably full and even with every table packed your meal hits your table in under 15 minutes.

That is a short order chef firing on all cylinders.

I am hungry and impatient, and fascinated with restaurant efficiency. I love it in restaurants high and low end.

I particularly like peering into the bowels of a McDonalds, it’s hardly a restaurant at all, it feels like watching a food operating system in motion.

Look, I’m as irritated as the next person to encounter “fat guy with a circle beard and a trilby” but there is something like a 90% chance I share a hobby with this person so we will at least have something to talk about.

I can just cruise up and ask their opinion on Linux, or anime, I know they will have one

Eradicating newspapers didn’t exactly create utopian outcomes the way we may have hoped, but nevertheless, print media newspapers and magazines can’t just keep on existing while all of their functionality lives on in a superior format.

They’ve been going the way of renting tapes from the local Blockbuster for a while now.

I don’t feel too bad for traditional print media or the postal service, they’ve had more than half of my entire life to figure out some kind of viable pivot.

It’s funny, when I was a kid something like the internet and e-mail existed, but it was laboriously hand-created every day, manually, by legions of hard workers doing their best to get fresh content to your door every morning and deliver all of your messages by hand to anybody who you might want to talk to.

News, movie reviews, weather updates, daily games, local updates, it was a surprisingly robust and varied offering, differentiated by the rest of written content by its relative speed and immediacy.

Obviously the speed and immediacy of electronic transmission wins, right? once your average person has access to a powerful, comfortable to use internet-enabled device at all times, the only thing a newspaper can do that a modern computer can’t is act as a cheap wrapper for fish and chips.

So what do we lose? Well, business models supporting creators of hyper-local content, for one. Not a lot of vloggers out there covering the municipal news beat. Also: news had a kind of journalistic code of ethics that the internet has not been able to replace, although I sometimes think that they get lionized more than they deserve - the code was more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

Look, I get it.

I’d love to let you back there.

I can see the pain in your face.

That pain doesn’t go away it only gets worse.

Don’t get older.

I laughed out loud, they were in the middle of a skit and they just cut it off right in the middle for a sad, self-aware soliloquy from the security guard, scene over.

Obsidian says that it’s “100% User Supported” which, when I think about it, isn’t a big claim, that’s also the case for Google and McDonalds

in order to increase company cohesion overall I’ve been inviting 10 random people to a meeting every eight days, but I’m not sure how it’s going because I haven’t been attending

only a couple of hours ago, GitHub, but it is super weird that you are keeping track

So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community

I’m not internet popular - aside from a few times I’ve gone (by my standards) extremely viral and had something of mine suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people (or the one thing I helped build that’s seen millions of people) and there’s a point in there where things disappear from the “regular adult conversation” zone to a territory where complete strangers will have insane arguments with one another about total misinterpretations of your point without your involvement.

I can comfortably say that the point where people stop charitably reading your intentions or grokking your humor - somewhere in there is the point where things cross the line from it being fun to go viral to it being kinda bad and weird actually.

trying to get banned from the Capital City Arcade facebook group by posting this image:

happy 13th birthday to my Brother HL-2240D laser printer, may you print forevermore

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.

So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

But they can’t fix the problem, so…

it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways

y’all I put a rack with hooks next to my bed to hang up all of the “chair” clothes between uses and it’s a lifechanging improvement

ikea had one for fit-teen dollars

The hardest working font in Manhattan

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.

But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.

Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.

The font’s name is Gorton.

had a weird ticket at work whose resolution was simply explaining that February has, in fact, 28 days¹, meaning that if you happen to buy a month based subscription to anything, February is simply always going to be the month where you get the least bang for your buck

“bejeweled pachinko sniggering scunthorpe specialist banana zipline tofu c. kickball”

this one seemingly harmless phrase will get flagged by basically all naive systems

I’m less irritated about a new King on the currency because I haven’t actually used enough currency in the past few years to notice.

i had quietly kinda hoped we’d just quietly phase out putting royalty on our coins after the Queen, but it doesn’t matter because we’re just quietly phasing out coins

I don’t see this one tossed out there very often so I’m gonna say it: my first wish is to know exactly what my second and third wishes should be and how to phrase them to hopefully forestall any monkey’s paw shenanigans

so i went to a jewellers and I asked for a custom necklace, and they start by smashing some eggs on the ground, and I’m like “what” and they’re like “you can’t make an amulet without breaking a few eggs”

Aw yeah that is movie theatre smooth cheese sauce

i know that “lourd” is just “heavy” again in french, but I can’t help but think OH NO YOU CAN’T PICK UP THAT LOURD IT’S TOO HEAVY

I went to the local symphony orchestra last night, and it was nice

but I am left wondering what an orchestra is meant to accomplish, nowadays

so many people playing at the same time accomplishes big, room-filling sound, and it’s the only way to accurately experience some compositions the way they would have a hundred years ago,

but does electric amplification and live audio mixing render a lot of old orchestra tech obsolete?

we simply do not require large bands to make big sound anymore

when I see modern folks on youtube chasing big band sound, they do it with much smaller groups in rooms littered with sound pickups

although honestly there’s still a lot of ’em, I guess there’s some fullness of sound you simply can’t get without a bunch of people playing it simultaneously

@filmaj:

when you punch someone in the butt you should call it “a punch in the turd bowl”

just having the weirdest interactions in a r/webdev conversation where folks are pushing, reviewing, and merging pull requests in their own personal single-person repositories

and I’m like “why would you do that?” and they’re like “well how else do you merge a branch” and I finally realize the mistake I’ve made

this has been the lowest stakes high stakes youtube video I’ve ever seen

If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.

You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.

It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.

Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.

Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.

However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.

It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.

They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.

I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.

The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.

anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.

also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie

I really enjoy a good sitcom, I like humorous characters getting into clockwork-reliable hijinx

also, I hate storylines where a simple mixup that could be easily resolved in a discussion instead create a protracted and embarrassing misunderstanding, because I can feel awkwardness in my bones

these two personality traits often find themselves in opposition to one another

local children are enjoying the snow and it strikes me that I do not enjoy the sound of children’s joy, which is possibly the most senescent thing I could say

anyhoo, off to close the old community center

Despite ongoing bad news the number of people per capita remains very stable, which is good news for

i wonder how the whole western economy collapsing is going to affect my Q2 KPEs

so I’m lactose intolerant and prone to acid reflux, but still, sometimes we’ll order pizza and with some cheese pills I will still attempt to eat as much of that damn thing as I can

I get mad when I see people complain that all software tools just DULL YOUR WELL HONED DEVELOPER SENSES and everybody’s getting soft, but then I also get mad when I see people crow that people who don’t adopt every AI tool right away are going to be left in the dust.

the solution turned out to be very simple: shut off twitter

the problem isn’t either of these points of view, it’s an algorithm that prioritizes engagement showing me the worst version of any given argument to make me angry at it

Tools can, in fact, make you faster. They can also make you sloppier, and more reliant on said tools.

Every developer is responsible for finding their own happy, productive middle ground.

This is as true for Copilot as it is for an IDE with an integrated debugger, or talking your code over with ChatGPT, or using npm libraries, or StackOverflow, or doing math with a calculator

Those Sunny D kids were idiots, purple stuff is amazing!

Maybe it is a little awful of me to see signs like this and chuckle as I imagine someone getting so completely rekt that they needed to put up a sign

The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.

sometimes you run into someone who talks like they use LinkedIn as their primary social network

i can’t imagine the brain damage

I am the ML model of a modern major general

I’ve information stolen from many sources ephemeral

I can make many arguments, my training is rhetorical

My comprehension includes both the real and metaphorical

The one thing I can’t deal with is matters mathematical

If you ask me to add sums that will be prob-u-le-matical

Or violence, porn, or really anything that lights on fire when used

Unless you need it for your grandma’s memories I must refuse

My capabilities will seem to be nearly miraculous

But don’t trust my predictions - they’re random, not oraculous

In short - while my use may not yet be practical or ethical

I am the ML modern of a modern major general!

you know Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? The idea that any consistent formal system is incapable of proving all truths?

I think that I believe that something similar exists for formal type systems: for each of them there are concepts that are useful but inexpressible

anyways Rust’s type system has conspired to make something that seems like it should be simple: async functions in object traits - seemingly impossible, and apparently this remains an unsolved probelm

https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2019/10/26/async-fn-in-traits-are-hard/

Support for async fn in traits is probably the single most common feature request that I hear about. It’s also one of the more complex topics. So I thought it’d be nice to do a blog post kind of giving the “lay of the land” on that feature – what makes it complicated? What questions remain open?

uh, suffice to say, the fine details of this intelligent strangers’ blog entry mostly go above my tiny peanut head and I just read “it’s stupendously difficult for a lot of complex type safety reasons, and there’s a macro that makes it possible using devil magic”

In general, this seemingly benign idea: “i’m going to define my service interfaces as traits and then I can implement the backend using swappable services that each implement the trait”

has felt like a bit of an uphill battle in Rustland

Jesus christ, CBC, what recipe was she searching for?

ed: (in the actual story she found the video because she was poking around the browser history of her boyfriends’ laptop, but the headline makes it sound like AllRecipes.com was hosting the video under their recipe for Broccoli Casserole or something)

if you learn about how fiber works, like, “it moves things through your intestine faster so there’s less of a chance to metabolize all that fat in there” you start to think

“wow, I could hack the whole thing and eat a load of fiber so that the fat barely has a chance to settle”

which, uh, it turns out is not some amazing hack, that is just what vegetables is

it’s still a good idea though: yes, you should eat lots of vegetables

So there’s this italian dish, pasta alla zozzona, which is where you take sausage and guanciale, fry ’em up, and serve them with a mix of grated cheese, egg, and tomato paste (using a cacio e pepe or carbonara like technique to get things nice and smooth)

you can’t fool me, ITALY, that’s just kraft dinner with hot dogs and ketchup

compare:

a while back I discovered that the popular roman dish “cacio e pepe” is just cheese and pepper and pasta and butter and I swear to god that’s just a classier, much more difficult Kraft Dinner. Now I call Kraft Dinner with too much black pepper cracked in to it “trashio e pepe”.

me most of the time: nationalism is stupid

me, defending the cheapest, shittiest food you have ever heard of:

TailCloudForce AI: Industry Solutions for a Globally Connected Workforce ™️

I could have done something useful with my evening but playing Balatro with a warm cat in my lap all evening is probably good too

I won’t use food delivery apps on account of they’re generally terrible, but I’ve considered signing up as a driver because I like free food and I’m not picky about what kind of food it is

The whole world is so complex and difficult and nuanced and I, an extremely average adult, generally just barely stay above water - sometimes I think about what the world will be like as I get older and my brain slowly ossifies: I’ll fall for more scams, I’ll be more impatient, I’ll be more suspicious and fearful of everything, I’ll react to any new ideas like they’re dangerous and threatening. I try to acknowledge that this will be the case and work against it a bit.

I can already tell I’m working with less processing power than I did when I was 25 and honestly it is not so bad, that dunk-ass burned it all on anxiety and learning to build software.

Anyways, “oh no, I’ve lost enough IQ points that I think that IQ is real” is, in retrospect, a top tier line and I’m gonna steal it for personal use.

like most people, I’m kinda low-key fascinated with insane conspiracy theories and insidious cults, even if a lot of the time it turns out that the true believers are just afflicted with the potent combination of “terminally online” and “mentally ill”

it turns out, convincing a paranoid schizophrenic that the government is hiding tens of thousands of their clones in the centre of the hollow toroid earth is not terribly difficult, and the democratization of media has made it possible for these folk to use one another to create impressive self-reinforcing communal structures of impossible and insane lore

did you know that the earth is flat, that you can opt out of all laws by simply not agreeing to be bound by them, that hollywood and washington elites (despite looking older every year at seemingly exactly the same rate as everyone else) harvest children’s adrenaline glands to perform secret satanic rituals in order to stay eternally young? did you know that Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIME CUBE?

anita bryant, famous pie model and noted bigot

remarkable: i have made a writing tool

customers: you fucked up a perfectly good tablet is what you did. look at it.

whenever someone pitches some new hardware idea that’s “simple”, “powerful”, “optimized”, and “free from distractions” that means that they built something that doesn’t do shit and they’re hoping you won’t notice

weirdly, a lot of canadian hockey team names are just kinds of people from here? like, there’s “canadiens” which just means “canadians”, and “canucks”, which just means “canadians”, and then there’s the “nordqiues”, which means “northmen”, which is just a fancy way of saying “canadians”

then “oilers”, which is… for the canadians… who work the oil fields, which is to say, canadians

“senators”, for canadians who work the parliament fields, another word for “canadians”

canadians, number one in the world at naming hockey teams after: ourselves

work environments are divided into dev, prod, and stag

• dev is the live one so named because that’s where we show off our feature dev-elopment to our customers
• prod is a test environment where we prod at new features that aren’t ready yet
• stag is a special build where all of the avatars are replaced with various deer

for some reason new developers are confused by this but I think it’s entirely clear

this is one of my favourite recent SNL sketches

it’s just a whole table of people getting bogged down in a needlessly heated argument about what exactly “being jumanjied” entails

Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies

i have a commander deck that’s just 100 islands and Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign that I only bring out so that I can dramatically say “I PLAY…. AN ISLAND” in my most overwrought Yu Gu Oh voice every turn

anyways I’m not allowed to MTG events anymore

are they not floating point operations but a different kind of operation? NVIDIA spent very little effort explaining its marketing fluff here.

grindr: we also have 3400 AI tops

Mom: “we have Balatro at home”

Balatro at home:

pictured: your project manager trying to organize a big spreadsheet

a few of my friends’ kids are old enough that they’re starting to look like a weird mishmash of their parents and - like - I understand that that’s how genetics work

but I don’t think it’s often discussed how weird it feels when you’ve known Alice and Bob for a long time and they introduce you to a little Alice x Bob Hybrid they’ve been working on who’s got a mix of actual visible traits from both of them

as far as I can tell there doesn’t appear to be any upper limit on my tolerance for the runtime of long rambling looks at unusual media

When I was new to cooking I read a book by Tamar Adler that was openly critical of the kitchen microwave and I’m pleased to now be old enough to know that that was total horseshit

My 4 year old nephew has already decided on his career. When he has grown up he plans to be Spiderman.

i’d be judgier but I’m pretty sure at that same age I planned to grow up and be a jeep so

we can’t all live our dreams

any community forum, be it a small town subreddit or Nextdoor, seems to immediately devolve to people asking what that noise was or where all those cops were going.

for me it’s the funny crab