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groucho

@groucho@lemmy.sdf.org

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groucho,
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A very long time ago I was on psychedelics at a Phish show. I had a blast at the show, but the venue also had an upcoming Guy Fieri event and I ended up confronted with massive posters that were just Guy Fieri’s weird head everywhere. I had a really bad time for a while until I got out of there. Just frosted tips and flames as far as the eye could see. I had welcome to flavortown on loop in my head and in that moment I experienced true cosmic horror at the idea that Guy Fieri existed in our universe and we were powerless to stop it.

This picture is like that.

groucho,
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Given the deeply adversarial relationship I have with any GPT I’ve used, I doubt this.

groucho,
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Yeah, the answer to “can you do me a big favor?” is “what’s up?”

groucho,
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This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.

One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.

So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.

I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.

groucho,
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Yeah my wife calls it Resting Warlock Face.

groucho,
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Claudia explained to police that her daughter had a demon because she would ‘wake up and scream’ in the night.

I feel like crying. All kids do this. You address this by having a happy bedtime, keeping the room cool, keeping ambient light out… There’s so many options. My daughter and I talk about the parts of the day she enjoyed right before bed so she’s thinking happy thoughts when she falls asleep. And she still wakes up every once in a while. She gets a hug when that happens. Sometimes my wife sings her back to sleep.

‘Arely’s death made him question his gift to heal.’

No shit, sherlock. Lock 'em all up.

groucho,
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This is pretty coherent for an ambien post. I had a friend that used to hang out on groupchat after he took an ambien and at a certain point he’d just start sending random strings of text, but really emphatically.

groucho,
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Authority is a privilege and a responsibility, not a virtue or a right. If you are in a place of authority your life should be harder, not full of fawning sycophants that give you an ego boost.

Arizona Republicans Advance Bill To Have Public Schools "Post And Discuss" Ten Commandments In Classrooms - Joe.My.God. (www.joemygod.com)

Courthouse News reports: Arizona’s House Education Committee advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow public school teachers and administrators to post and discuss the Ten Commandments in the classroom. State Senator Anthony Kern [photo], the bill’s sponsor, says the Ten Commandments shaped the country’s heritage. “Our...

groucho,
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“Does the commandment to not make graven images excuse me from shop class?”

groucho,
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Yeah well Chuck Norris didn’t invent the rolling office chair.

groucho,
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It kind of does that for everybody?

groucho,
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Ring mostly smooshed. Ring family mostly awful.

groucho,
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“I’m a specialized clerk interested in mathematics” if you don’t wanna get burned.

groucho,
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Pretty sure One-Who-Goes-Bankrupt-Running-A-Casino is a Ferengi insult.

groucho,
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It’s a goddamn horror story

Most of them are. I dunno what was up with that lady but I think maybe there was lead in her watercolors.

groucho,
@groucho@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

If you’re trying to pull your weight, and it sounds like you are, the problem is either with the tasks, the codebase, or the teammates:

Potential problems with the tasks:

  • they’re not researched sufficiently
    • is this doable?
    • should we we even be doing this?
    • have we actually thought about how hard this will be, or did someone say “well that should be trivial” a bunch?
  • there’s not enough info on the tickets
    • inexperienced leads tend to just shit out tickets with zero info and underpoint them
  • they’re not broken down into small enough pieces
    • are you working “implement X” tickets while everyone else is working a series of “implement X: step N” tickets?

A ticket needs: clear repro documents (if necessary), screenshots, and clear steps to reproduce. It needs more than “Title: Add X to Y. Description: We need Y in X. Implement it.” unless you’re intimately familiar with the codebase. And even if you are, you still need a paper trail to back up what you’re doing. If you’re not closing tickets, be very chatty in the comments. Share where you are, problems you’re running into, and who you’re waiting on for help. If there’s a consistent theme to the things you’re fighting, keep a list of them and bring them to your manager. Be your own advocate and be very transparent about all the research you’re doing because other people didn’t.

Potential problems with the codebase:

  • someone preemptively optimized it
  • it’s not documented well
  • it’s spidery bullshit code that someone has deep emotional attachment to

Hey, it works. But it’s not documented, someone decided to be clever instead of elegant, the local story sucks, or it’s optimized to such a degree that you have to refactor just to add a simple option ("lol why would we ever need that data here? It’s inefficient!)

Potential problems with teammates:

  • they’re not supporting you
  • they’re grabbing easy tasks because you’re the "code whisperer"
  • they didn’t know what they were doing either so they’re vague when you ask them questions

Everyone pulls their weight. Everyone communicates in clear, declarative sentences and provides examples if necessary. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Evasiveness, vagueness, specialized jargon, or acronyms point to the dev being insecure about their knowledge in that area. Be very suspicious of the word “should”: “that should work”, “that shouldn’t be hard”, “you should be able to…”

And, as an aside, I’ve seen this happen a lot. A new dev or contractor comes on, blows through tickets, gets good marks, and an existing dev or two get called out for not contributing with the same frequency. One of two things are happening here: the new devs are getting softballs, or they’re creating a lot of subtle tech debt that someone else will have to fix because they don’t have a full picture of the codebase. Eventually, those devs will be where everyone else is, but it’s still frustrating.

Hang in there.

groucho,
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Statue of Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister to be erected…

He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it?

As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren’t as familiar with it. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do....

groucho,
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Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.

groucho,
@groucho@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.

Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.

groucho,
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It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.

groucho,
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Oh hey, it’s a list of everything I’ve been ranting about for the past three years.

groucho,
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The horny brig? You mean the room Riker insists is just his satellite office?

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