Thank you to all geo-politically educated mods on all instances, for keeping my feeds relatively free of US/western propagandist echo-chamber warriors.

You’d think inside your own echo chamber you’d be able to hear yourself.

Say, “What’s the haps, jazz cat?”

I’m as American as the notion that apple pie is American and I use metric all the time. I convert in my head though, I can’t get my brain to completely switch over.

It is super funny that Americans will deign to use millimeters for ammo, considering how much cultural cachet “caliber” has. Or had, I guess, I think it’s less cool than it used to be.

Oh, I was talking about the 25,500 full moons.

Keep an eye out for results from the Roman space telescope, with any luck we’re about to have a buttload of new data about dark matter.

And, predictably, Americans will literally use anything before they use the metric system.

I think it’s “dark” because it doesn’t interact with photons (except gravitationally, of course)

undesirables

lol yikes. The seating chart brings out a lot of brutal honesty in people. Or brutal passive aggression, in my case. The “leftovers” relative said they “just really didn’t fit anywhere else” but made it clear that these people were only invited because they were doing an act of charity (that wasn’t their decision anyway) and they “didn’t judge, but some people just don’t live Christian” 🙄

In spite of the planning committee it was a pretty fun wedding, and the Leftovers table was a big part of that. I got some cool weirdos in my bloodline.

Different smokes for different folks

The Sinners’ Table is a fantastic name for it. I’ve heard it called it the Maybes or, less charitably, the Leftovers but this is way more accurate.

It’s not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.

I buy new equipment when I can and make do with old equipment when I must. All the equipment I’m running at the moment was purchased or salvaged before 2021, much of it well before. When hardware fails, I scale back as needed. But I can run a fair amount of webservice from an old chromebook when the max concurrent users is in the mid-to-high single digits. I am definitely skimping on redundancy these days.

Mental healthcare provider hopping. You don’t really know what a good one is like until you’ve had one. A lot of people try one, work really hard and get nowhere, either because their therapist is a crank, or maybe they’re a competent professional that just doesn’t work for them for whatever reason, so they conclude that therapy is a sham and they stop pursuing it.

I think it’s good practice to evaluate whether what you’re doing in therapy is helping at regular intervals. If it ain’t, talk about it with your provider and if y’all can’t fix it, hit the bricks and find someone who can. If your therapist is worth their salt they’ll be happy to provide you with a reference if you ask. If they aren’t, all the more reason to find someone better.

I like them. I use them infrequently because they’re a bit of a hassle to use with the piefed interface, and I haven’t bothered to install an emoji picker on my desktop, because I use them so infrequently. But I am a big fan of how they augment written language.

I tend to use them as tone carrying punctuation if I’m making a joke or expressing a particular emotional meaning 🙃 It’s rare for me to put an emoji anywhere but at the end of a sentence 🧓 Emotions are hard for me to convey at the best of times, and text-only communication makes it harder 🤷 and emojis can fill in somewhat where tone and cadence would in verbal communication.

It’s not a perfect analog and the medium of emojis is still so new that the meanings vary a great deal, to say nothing of how different emoji “fonts” can convey vastly different meanings. For example, the emoji “😕” can express a wide array of emotional states with particular mouth and eye attitudes, the orientation of eyebrows if they’re included, etc. A comment that says one thing in one font can express something quite different in another. It’s a problem we’ll need to sort out, eventually, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s top priority at the moment. Emoticons suffer less from that problem because the glyphs are more standardized: regardless of font, everyone recognizes “:)” as “generic smiling face”. Between that and the fact that I can render text emoticons without having to open another dialog or application, the vast majority of my emotes are text-based :)

To believe someone is hard-wired a certain way is to deny their humanity. I think you should reconsider your beliefs.

There are two types of passive income: the first is where through the magic of capitalism, you benefit from the labor of others; the second is the same but it’s someone else earning money off of you. Those internet survey things are the second type, as are all pre-packaged passive income type things. It is possible to profit from them, but that would involve you scamming others, so I advise against it. I think the better path in life is to try to make a living with your own efforts.

Learning new things is hard, and it takes a long time, longer if your schooling didn’t give you a strong foundation to build from. In that case, you’ll have to repair the cracks in your foundation as you find them, which can feel like going backwards. It isn’t, but I can’t deny that it sucks to have to go back and learn stuff you “should” have mastered as a child. But you can’t change the past, and your options are either learning it now or not learning it now. Might as well do now.

Learning is also work, because what you’re learning to do is work, and you learn by doing. If the work is fun that can be a bonus, but it’s not necessary, and it can even inhibit you from expanding your toolbox if you only ever do things that are fun. I would approach your practice with the same attitude you would with household chores or personal hygiene: it’s work that needs to be done.

As to talent: I have never met anyone who had zero talents, but they are rather beside the point. If you don’t have a talent you want to pursue, then just pick a thing and start doing it poorly. You have to actually do it, even if you’re really bad at it. The doing is the important thing. Since you’re broke, I would pick something where failure isn’t prohibitively expensive, because you’ll be doing it a lot. Music is very cheap to make poorly, as is software, as are garden veggies (some of them), as are knitted or crocheted garments. Pick a thing and start doing it. It’s ok to switch things, but don’t switch just because it’s not fun. Do it a little bit every day, and soon you will have a skill. More importantly, you will have developed your skill in developing skills, and you will understand your own learning style better, which will help you in the development of other skills. You may even come to enjoy the process in time.

I don’t have a ton of advice on making money, especially now. I’m between gainful employments myself, and I’ve yet to turn my own skills into sustainable self-employment, though I do make some cash with them at odd turns. The world never really has times where it’s easy for everyone, but this does feel like a particular hard time, compared with when I was younger. I think times will get easier eventually, but it will take time and work.

Well, I wrote more than I thought I would. I hope some of that is helpful.

Compared with whom? Complexity in general is a rather elusive concept, and since its effects on software are (usually) cumulative over multiple years, devs working in systems that reward quarterly or annual performance metrics are incentivized to ignore it. I don’t think ignoring complexity because your job compels you to is the same as not understanding it.

Most of the devs I’ve worked with grasp the theory of complexity fairly easily once it’s been explained to them, but tend to underestimate their own ability to manage it because they don’t account for how their scrum-addled environment impacts the quality of the code they write. They just look on the tangled mess they’ve wrought and assume the fault is individual, not systemic.

Software developers, of all people, should be used to the idea of complex projects not turning out quite the way they envisioned them. We’re still building the World Wide Web, and the Fediverse is part of it. I don’t even think we can call it a proper 1.0 version until every person has access to it, and we’re still quite a ways out from that. After we hit that milestone, there will still be an avalanche of maintenance and QoL improvement work to do. I don’t think the Web is something we’ll finish building anytime soon, if ever.

That’s a feature. every instance gets to set and enforce their own rules. The users get to decide which communities (and their attendant rules and admins) they participate in. Humans don’t suddenly become more immune to the follies of power, but power is more distributed and (so far) are less likely to be captured by monied interests.

If you’re waiting for humans to suddenly stop falling for the temptation to abuse of power, I think you’ll be waiting a while. I think it’s a significant improvement on the centralized corporate model.

A lower court did.

The process to execute Pike began at about 8 p.m., her lawyers said, after the Supreme Court vacated a lower court’s Wednesday morning order that had temporarily blocked the move.

Back in my day we had six image macros and a font, and we all had to share the font!