← Feed

Posts

• View post

  I love it when someone I mentor does cool stuff. One of the newly-minted senior devs got the standard stupid “productive people should be maximizing productivity” speech in a 1:1, where the manager heavily implied that future promotion would be blocked if they didn’t get even more productive

• View post

  One failure mode of an expert is that your experience can make you gloss over things that might be obvious to fresh eyes. And too many experts are too proud to take advantage of non-expert perspectives from time to time. I can't tell you how many times a junior has helped me find a nasty bug by simply being a fresh pair of eyes and not having as many assumptions in their heads.

• View post

  Oh right. This is why I took a break from management: managers are drama generators. I’m temp managing a team while the permanent leader is on parental leave, and I’m already regretting agreeing to this. My temporary peers are engaging in fact-free finger-pointing about an issue while the problem remains unsolved. Tomorrow I am apparently going to have to teach people the “solve it first, address accountability after the retro, if indicated” thing. Sigh.

• View post

  RE: https://oldbytes.space/@gloriouscow/116285522131405707 Thanks I hate it

• View post

  There used to be such an interesting theme ecosystem for stuff. There used to be constantly interesting and innovative window-manager and DE themes. WinAmp existed. And not just themes. Music players had visualizers, and an active community producing new and interesting ones. There used to constantly be new screensavers pushing the capabilities of new hardware/OS facilities/etc. These things are just... gone. Stagnant, or completely removed.

• View post

  Just a quick reminder that if you’re (rightfully!) upset about AI water usage, you should also be aware that the projected ~600B gallons for AI use is about 1/3 to 1/2 of what’s used to grow golf grass in arid climates in the US alone. And roughly 7/8 of the water the US will lose to residential private pool evaporation. It’s important not to lose sight of long-standing problems in the fight against new ones.

• View post

  One of my friends: > you know, I just find it weird that the tech industry is so excited by the concept of outsourcing their thinking. And I just… yeah. That. They’re so excited to outsource thinking that they’re willing to ignore that the tech doesn’t actually *do that*. How odd.

• View post

  My headcanon for Pinky and The Brain is that “one is a genius, the other’s insane” doesn’t fall the way most people think. Brain is _insane_. Pinky is a genius who understands how to foil Brain’s insane plots by feigning being an idiot.

• View post

  Got a call from the library where my kids are volunteering this summer. Apparently someone used a cheap combination lock to lock shut a bin of materials for a young readers program, as a prank. My kids shimmed the lock open for the librarian. And the librarian called basically to say ‘this was super helpful but also it seems like you should know they had it open in 5 minutes’ I don’t think she expected my response to be “that long?! I guess we need to practice”

• View post

  I continue to point out that different people and teams have different needs, and orgs should align to what makes their employees happy and productive. For some (like me), that’s fully remote. For others it’s hybrid or even going to the office every day. People’s life situations and needs are different, and it’s easy enough to supply office space for people who benefit from it. Only a few types prof roles really strongly require a particular work location; for everything else, give options.

• View post

  Kid1: I kind of want to join the Fae Kid2: you’ll have to pick a court to serve… Kid1: revision. I want to unionize the Fae

• View post

  We built these titties We built these titties On HRT ( to the tune of We Built This City )

• View post

  The tension between - your media is better when you respect and trust your audience and - a large portion of your audience actually need their hand held

• View post

  Interviewed a therapist today whose immediate response to me mentioning I’m not religious was “do you think you might be a sociopath?” Welp, at least I know right away I guess. Scratch that one off the list.

• View post

  My employer makes AI optional for devs (“we’ll pay for Claude Code if you want it, but you have to ask and we’ll expect return on it”). Adoption is around 40%; which means I’ve now been asked to spend some time building guidelines and job aids for use. 🧵1/4

• View post

  I feel like the under appreciated companion to “touch grass” is “spend time face to face with people”. It’s definitely less pithy. But spending time in the same physical space with people is important for our brains. It’s literally a physiological need, even if you’re a huge introvert. It is best if you have some kind of bond with them (even if it’s just community or acquaintance).

• View post

  I’m winding up almost all my fiction reading at the same time. And I want to read some really good sci-fi or science-fantasy, preferably set in a high-tech world. But I am absolutely spoiled for choice. Recommend me something? Preferences in reply:

• View post

  Co-parent is out of town, so I’ve been able to get the house clean and put banana bread in the oven and get the kids’ rooms tidied and vacuumed so they can do their Weekly Remote D&D Kids have been excellent helpers! Definitely starting to be more attentive to what needs to be done and just doing it.

• View post

  Well heck this could be a grindr alternative

• View post

  I don’t usually take work calls outside work hours, but I do trust a few people enough to give them a path to get hold of me in an emergency. Happened tonight because a co-worker I supported for promotion had some Not Ok Words with someone, which is way out of character; and the person that reached out is like “they’re gonna fire her and it’s giving bad vibes”.

• View post

  Great genre of internet comment: people genuinely unaware that a great many Pokémon are modeled at least a little after real animals, who have seen a posted photo of said real animal, and are very excited that the real animal “looks like a Pokémon”

• View post

  I had described a behavior from my spouse as “bullying”. My therapist said they weren’t sure about that, and asked if there were other behaviors I feel that way about. Sure. So they asked me to make a list of bullying behaviors. Shared ahead and we talked about it in session today. “Ok that’s mostly not bullying, but it does seem an awful lot like abuse”. Huh. I may have needed to hear that.

• View post

  Most FPS games follow a path of “get more extreme weapons so you can fight ever harder enemies”. I want the reverse. You start well-armed. Your shit breaks; you run out of specialized ammo with no more to be had. You’re thinning the enemy ranks as you go but your job get harder and you constantly have to worry that if you pull out a bigger gun, you’ll not have it when you really need it.

• View post

  You know one of my favorite things about Fedi is that it’s much easier to speak your mind vs corporate social media. Any of those Corpo sites will gleefully censor you for saying anything that might be distasteful to The Advertisers, while hiding behind “free speech” to avoid doling out any consequences for people just being pricks. Here, I don’t have to worry that any topic or word is out of bounds; no corpo newspeak required

• View post

  Hey pocket friends! I want your indie artist recommendations for people who draw dragon and fantasy art of all kinds, but don’t do a lot of highly-sexy content: my teen is aro-ace and so has strong 👎 feelings about how much of this stuff is very sexual, and I’d like to help them find stuff more to their taste It’s cool if there are occasional “sexy art” in the body of work, we’re just looking for mostly not. If you know someone, name and link them if possible! If not, please give us a boost.

• View post

  It’s early, but I’m still calling it: the dumbest thing said to me today. “Why do we need the national weather service? Everyone just gets weather from an app”