I don’t know if it’s favorite of all time but I thought of this one now:

haha and then what ;) by jawbreaker reunion. Probably gave some software nerds a headache trying to incorporate the semicolon and parenthesis. Points for a confusing band name, too.

https://jawbreakerreunion.bandcamp.com/album/haha-and-then-what

“Patches” might be my favorite track on it.

The bit about avoidance might be insightful. Some people have anxiety about reading and writing, and the LLMs feel like they’re helping. But as this post says, they’re not. They’re making the anxiety worse in the long term.

Many people legitimately are bad at reading and writing. You’ll won’t find a ton of them here, on a platform that’s mostly text, but they’re out there. Struggling though life, probably embarrassed. An LLM that purports to let them skip uncomfortably engaging with text probably feels like a godsend. But it’s a trap. It’s a tarpit they’ll get stuck in and never develop skills of their own.

Pretty much every time I go to one of the local grocery stores I see a crew of firefighters roll up in their truck buying food.

I just link people to good posts I find on here.

You’re not going to get a typical apathetic person to change anything.

• Bandcamp
• see who tours together. If you like A and they open for B, you might like B
• indie record labels
• see who’s playing at local venues.

I was just telling a friend about my how cat was so annoyed today I wasn’t sitting at my usual desk. He was yelling and standing on it until I sat down. Now he’s snoozing in my lap, at the desk, as intended for this time of day.

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

I wouldn’t mind ads on streaming media if they were limited to a few seconds at the start and end, and had some constraints (eg: no volume tricks to sound louder). Just a calm voice saying “This episode brought to you by WidgetCo. The best in Widgets. [logo] [url]” over a neutral color. That’d be fine. But the hunger for profit can never be sated, so it’s longer, more obvious ads more frequently forever. So they can all get fucked. I won’t watch at all.

This seems like an obvious improvement and I kind of want everyone who thought otherwise to be banned from working in decision making roles.

I call my cat by his name. Not his full name, just the first name unless he’s being formally introduced or in a lot of trouble.

the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

Most people don’t really care about anything. They won’t put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

• it’s free
• runs on a wider range of hardware
• is more customizable
• can run much windows software with wine or proton
• has a large ecosystem of native software
  • much of it free and open source

The advantage of Mac is it’s more widely used and thus more widely supported (for things that are supported at all). You can just buy an apple computer from a trusted source and it’ll work. Linux doesn’t quite have that yet. If more people move to Linux , you’ll find better drivers and stuff.

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.

As someone who works in software, I’ve been using macs at work for more than a decade. One job had Linux machines. One place had windows for developers and it was a shit show.

Apple isn’t amazing but at least the terminal is sensible.

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.

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”.

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.