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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There’s one street in a major metro near me that has been timed this way for decades and it’s incredibly noticeable because it is a dead straight thoroughfare through a few dozen small blocks of housing. You can see the next 3-5 lights lined up ahead of you at all times. You absolutely learn to pace yourself so you aren’t stopping/starting constantly, looking like an idiot when you get to the next light too fast and have to stop and then watch slow cruising cars whip past you when the light turns green. It’s like a game. I think about nothing else when I’m on that street. Not even remotely new, and it definitely works. But you have to pick which big street gets this treatment and then all streets intersecting with it have to work around that.







  • Absolutely perfect example of what I mean. You want to talk about gamers like they are this specific sub-niche of humans who are all the same.

    Would you do this with movies? “People who watch movies are like XYZ and they only have a couple of skills.” What about music? “There’s a music listener in this thread and he said ABC.”

    This is why I led with “do you know how many people play video games?” The gaming industry earns more annually than movies and music combined.

    You have some stereotype of gamers in your brain, fine. That’s your deal. But “gamers” is just “people” these days. Including me. I’m a gamer. And I say: what bogus hysteria.


  • What bogus hysteria. Do you have any idea how many people play video games? Would you expect them not to advertise a recruitment drive on television because we don’t want our air traffic controllers to just kick up their feet and watch the screens? Let’s not be idiots.

    It’s far more interesting to ask why they need to advertise a recruitment drive. The profession has been losing skilled people because its high skill, high stress, high stakes, and their paycheck gets jerked around every time there’s a government shutdown. Let’s focus on that instead of clutching our pearls over them hiring people who have played video games before.







  • I’m from the US and didn’t circumcise my son. It’s really simple. Who doesn’t want more penis? I’d take more penis. Penis is all good. Why subtract penis?

    When my older brother had a son he DID circumcise him. When I asked why, he gave me this head shake as if to say “huh? what?” and all he said was “that’s just how they do it at the hospital we went to.”

    I mean labor and childbirth are a whirlwind so I don’t blame anyone for losing a detail or two. Unless that detail subtracts a part of my penis. Then we gone fight.


  • It may sound odd but I’ve heard people bring up the above point a few times. “AI isn’t bad - if you run it on a sustainable off-grid system it’s perfectly fine.”

    But I have NOT encountered people actually doing this even once, let alone a few times. That’s why I was asking.

    Anything that wastes energy can be recast as harmless if you put it on an imaginary sustainable setup but that just seems like fantasizing.




  • It’s guaranteed that one quick attempt at something sophisticated will fail. It’s almost guaranteed that anything sophisticated will fail, no matter how much preparation and practice you have. However for something straightforward and toilsome, AI tooling can often save you 50% of the grunt work. I use it to pull and collate updates from JIRA, gitlab, slack, and zoom about what happened to this set of 12 projects being worked on by those 25 people. It tabulates and summarizes and I dig into specifics from there. It’s not doing anything critical, I’m not passing on slop to anyone, and I’m not relying on it to take things to the finish line. It saves me some busywork and occasionally finds things I didn’t know about. Really, the tools are great for specific purposes once you understand them and dial them in. This gets lost when everyone is either hailing it as the Second Coming of Jesus or hating on it as the Antichrist.

    Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere between.