Much of this slots into time outside work rather than the workday itself.

• walk a different route to a destination
• pick an algorithm and walk with no destination (eg: straight until you hit a light not in your favor, then turn. Works in urban envs)
• go somewhere you don’t normally go. Eg: library, different coffee shop, that little art store you always see
• go to the library. Walk along the shelf with eyes closed and pick a book at random.
• pick a genre of music you never listen to. Listen to it.
• cook or prepare a meal unlike your normal fare
• go to a thrift store. Buy a cheap article of clothing you wouldn’t normally wear. Wear it. See how it feels
• find free or cheap art (music, theater, whatever) in your area. Go.
• journal. Spend a few minutes writing down your day’s details
• hit wikipedia’s random article button. Read it.

I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

Obviously this varies but I found myself walking far more in Europe than in the US.

Whenever I have to visit family in the [US] suburbs, it’s a nightmare of driving everywhere. Walking a mile or two every day just living life has health benefits.

Many people are bizarrely emotionally invested in eating meat.

It’s funny because some of those people are also “fuck your feelings!!” types, while being a ball of poorly controlled emotions themselves.

Private car transit scales badly. Public transit is a well understood solution.

Used hinge. It’s the least bad, as of this year anyway.

Most people who use dating apps are, frankly, bad at it. People send garbage messages with garbage profiles. People half-ass it and expect the other folks to carry the whole thing. I feel like I could write a short book on how to do it better.

Condensed into like three bullet points it’s

• Ask questions. Do not dead-end the conversation and expect them to do all the work
• actually ask them out. Like, in the first conversation after you clear any must-have deal breakers (eg: if you have a kid)
• put stuff you want to talk about in your profile. Don’t be “clever” and respond to “what are you looking for?” with “my keys”. This is where you give the other person topics to talk about. (Also if you are tired of people asking about the stuff you put in your profile, change it you doofus.)

Being “an introvert” doesn’t excuse you from being present and engaged. The other person isn’t going to be that interested in someone who responds every couple hours with “lol”. If you can’t muster up the energy to have a real conversation, you aren’t ready to date.

Out-groups to bind, in-groups to protect. That’s it. Often on a purely emotional level. Having the out-group be just out and about living life feels wrong to that kind of person. There has to be hierarchy, they feel.

I comment. Reminds me of how I’d end up playing medic in tfc/tf2- someone has to do it.

I don’t post original stuff often, though.

They vote for their material interests in the same sense that a man walking at night with sunglasses picks the best path. He thinks it’s obvious but he really needs to take the sunglasses off and maybe get a flashlight. He’s walking a stupid path and will probably fall into a ditch.

Fox News is probably the sunglasses in this metaphor.

Arcanum is good shit. I played that so many times when it came out.

• straight damage dealing mage
• beat with an ugly stick orc fighter
• gun jerk
• charismatic elf girl who got everyone else to fight for her, talked the final boss down.

I think maxing out time magic and backstab might have been the wackiest. Got like 90 action points and everyone else got 4. Stab stab stab stab.

I did a lot of stupid stuff as a teenager but most of it is forgotten.

Someone tricked me into stealing my unique gloves in diablo2 once. Felt real stupid after but they just blocked me and I never saw them again. (I think it was that if you die when the item was being moved it drops onto the ground, so they told me to swap my gloves in a pvp fight and then killed me)

I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

I’m getting a friend a box of adhesive googly eyes.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

It can get pretty crowded in some places at some times. Major transit hubs like Penn station, herald square, times square, all get pretty dense.

I’ve been working from home so I don’t need to go to the busier parts at often.

Neither. Cutting down a healthy tree for a little ritual seems extremely wasteful to me. I don’t care much about Xmas so I don’t have a fake tree, either. I do have lights up in the apartment, but they’re up year round. I like the colors.

Elon Musk should be abolished.

It’s the only MMO I felt was good. Feels like a real game. No level or gear grind.

I didn’t do the latest expansion yet but I’ve done all the others.