Is it running arbitrary python code server side? That sounds like a vector to do bad things. Maybe they constrained it to only run some trusted libraries in specific ways or something.

I ran linux mint for a couple months. It was nice. Very few problems.

Unfortunately, when I tried to install it on this newer desktop it was a shit-show. No wifi or ethernet, no hdmi, it crashed when I tried to play elden ring. I should try another distribution, but I was so distressed after two days I just rolled back. The people in the mint discord were helpful, though, and got some of the problems fixed.

Windows sucks though.

I was on a grand jury some years ago in NYC. It really did a number on my faith in people and the legal system.

Now, a grand jury is different than a regular (petit) jury in a few key ways. First, you only need simple majority to move forward with an indictment. You can’t 12-angry-men hang a grand jury. Second, as I learned later, even if you do convince a majority to not indict, the prosecutor can just try again. So all those times the police didn’t get indicted for murder and the prosecutor just gave up? They could have tried again. They didn’t, because they didn’t want to.

All of that said, the cases were largely about drugs. People selling weed and heroin and the like. No violence. I suggested to the jury that we maybe just say no, and don’t ruin people’s lives over marijuana. You don’t have to show your work. You can just say whatever. The whole rest of the jury was like “are you insane?” Some of them were just anti-drug, full stop no context. Some of them were like “We have to do what they tell us” very obedient. Some of them just wanted to go home, and thought an indictment would be the fastest way.

They all voted to indict on every charge. The guy who was sleeping, and the lawyers and cops laughed at him snoring, also voted to indict.

I asked the little old white lady sitting behind me a hypothetical. I asked if she was on a jury in the 60s, and the charge was a black man eating at an all white’s diner, if she would indict. She was like, “Hmmm maybe.”

I tried. One of the cases the cops said they found a gun in the man’s house, so they charged him with intent to use it in a violent crime, or something. I was like, they didn’t even try to prove it was his or that he was going to use it. Everyone voted to indict. I’m just like, why do you have to make it easier for the police?

But don’t LLMs not do math, but just look at how often tokens show up next to each other? It’s not actually doing any prime number math over there, I don’t think.

There are many things wrong with the laws in the US. I’m not even sure where I’d start

But the other bigger problem is enforcement. Some people do a murder and get a nationwide search. Others the victims family get a “lol can’t help you”.

Recommend reading “the new Jim Crow” for one look at one part of this.

Looks pretty typical to me (longtime nyc resident). It’s rare to see trash, and graffiti is pretty uncommon. People sometimes think the subway is still like The Warriors where it’s just a wall of spraypaint, but not so much.

Oh, I fully support shooting nazis and their collaborators dead. I was taking a shot (pun intended) at the moderators who remove comments like “the guys running today’s concentration camps should be shot”

I think this is one of those pearl clutching instances that won’t take kindly to that kind of language. You need to use the legal system to oppose the corrupt legal system, I guess.

Software engineer.

Morning meeting that’s supposed to just be “what you did yesterday, what you’ll do today, and if you need help”. People fuck that up and go off on tangents. What should be a ten minute meeting takes 30.

Product owners at some point told you what the features to work on this month will be. For example, we need to add the ability for some reasons to bulk delete appointments.

Chat with product and other engineers about what that entails. Product probably won’t give complete, clear, requirements so you need to pull it out of them. (Hard delete or soft delete? Do you need an audit log? Are you sure with no take-backs you don’t need an undo? Do you want to notify anyone when it’s deleted? One email per request or per event? Do you have designs for that email? No? Of course not. And what do you want the UI to look like? If I “just put a button somewhere” we both know you won’t like it. Give me details or that blank check in writing.)

At some point sit down and make code changes to do the thing. Change the backend server code to accept your new request. Write automated tests. Change the frontend to make the request. Write more tests. Manually bang on it. Probably realize some requirements were missed (you guys know there’s a permissions system, right? I hooked this up to the existing can-delete permission. What do you mean CS doesn’t use permissions? You made them all superusers??)

Manually bang on it a little. Deploy it to dev or some non-production environment. Have product and other stakeholders look at it and sign off. Probably get feedback and either implement it, or convince them to do it “later” (or: never, because they’ll forget and it’s not actually important).

Get code approval from other engineers. Make changes as needed.

Merge and deploy. Verify in production.

Meanwhile, do code reviews for other people’s work. Context switch. Feels bad. Other guy is working on a progress report tool that’s in a whole other part of the code, so every time you look at it it’s a shifting of brain gears.

Also look at dependabot for libraries that need updating. Read release notes. Make changes if needed. Test. Pray.

Also periodic meetings to go over work in the backlog. A meeting to discuss how the team is doing that usually doesn’t produce results, but can be a vent session.

I imagine from the product owner it’s something like:

Get a mess of contradictory ideas from leadership. Try to figure out what they actually want and in what order. Manage their emotions because they have all the power and don’t like being told no or otherwise feeling bad.

Talk to customers and other users. Try to figure out what they want. They say things like “make it go faster” or “can you make the map bigger?”. There’s no map on the website.

Talk to engineering. They ask so many questions. Why can’t they just do the thing? They’re always going on about stuff that doesn’t seem important (like security and permissions and maintainability). This needs to go out Friday because the CEO wants it out.

Write tickets (a short document describing work to be done). People don’t read them. Or maybe don’t finish writing them, and leave a vague “as a user I want to be notified about changes to my project”, without specifying any details. (Notified how, Ryan??)

I don’t know what else they do.

Startups are a mess. Anyone who says they want to run the government like a startup should be banished from the land.

Also Uber just sucks. It’s a private for profit solution (that lost money for years) to transit, which should be a public problem to work on.

Conservatives are like toddlers. Emotion driven to the point of having no mapping to reality, truth, and causality.

This is my favorite new to me song of the month: https://pearlcharlesmusic.bandcamp.com/track/does-this-song-sound-familiar-12-version

tagged as rock, desert rock, folk rock, garage pop, psych folk, psychedelic pop

No one I know wants to go into the office just-because, but they also don’t want to starve. When the choice is yield or die, it’s not much of a choice.

I really dislike that the incompetent dolts who can’t adapt to the internet are dragging everyone else down. I don’t want to be in an uncomfortable office, losing hours a day to a commute, so someone can walk up to me and say “Hey” instead of using slack.

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I imagine there are some “written in blood” laws and regulations that apply to hotels that airbnb is ignoring, too. That should also be addressed.

I read that airbnb lead to rents rise, because it made it so easy for landlords to run their property like hotels. I don’t use them, and kind of think lowly of people that are like “well it’s convenient so i don’t care”.

Feels like there should be large disruptive protests around wherever ICE is headquartered. Surely they have offices?

I do believe that DND is a poor first RPG, and creates a weird survivor bias in the hobby. Because it’s so popular most people try it as their first RPG, and then some of them hate it. Some of them then think the whole hobby is like that, and then leave.

So the bulk of the people left in the hobby are people who like dnd, or at least tolerate it enough to stick around.

One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, tactical combat (as much as DND is that), or resource management. They had no interest in DND. But they really liked Vampire.

I keep trying to get people to play fate, but all of these games struggle with finding people who will show up. Everyone seems to be just barely holding it together, and asking them to be creative and present once a week seems like a big request

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Musk should really be removed from power.