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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • If I was still in a senior dev position, I’d ban AI code assistants for anyone with less than around 10 years experience. It’s a time saver if you can read code almost as fluently as you can read your own native language but even besides the A.I. code introducing bugs, it’s often not the most efficient way. It’s only useful if you can tell that at a glance and reject its suggestions as much as you accept them.

    Which, honestly, is how I was when I was first starting out as a developer. I thought I was hot shit and contributing and I was taking half a day to do tasks an experienced developer could do in minutes. Generative AI is a new developer: irrationally confident, not actually saving time, and rarely doing things the best way.



  • Or just the price of gas, the only price posted on billboards, and groceries, which we all buy. They’re also, unfortunately, amongst the most volatile (for seasonal, geopolitical, or whatever reason). But it’s the prices the average person tracks and the news reports the 3 stock big stock market indices with a one-sentence summary as if every stock moved up or down for the same reason.

    I’m not judging here. Like, food, power, and retirement account (if they have one) should be what the average voter notices. It’s just unfortunate that it’s also basically fool’s gold for long term national policy makers. The weather can change the price of your favorite food more than the president.


  • Probably Janelle Monae - Archandroid. I love Afrofutrist funk like (Parliament-Funkadelic). It appeals to my 2 identities as a space nerd and the funkiest of the funky. Archandroid was sort of the peak of her sticking close to that genre. (Her three early works called the Metropolis Saga — Metropolis, an EP, Archandroid, and The Electric Lady — form a whole story.) The albums have multiple Suites like classical works so the themes change even within the albums. But Archandroid is my favorite part. And you can totally nerd out on it forever and still find new things.





  • As there’s no responses, I’ll offer that my friends’ kids in dense parts of NYC, LA, SF, DC, etc. do all those activities. (Maybe the ones in LA don’t go sit by the LA “river.”) There’s usually loads of neighborhood parks and less formal places in cities where kids play (like playing soccer in an alley). And I know my friends in urban centers have their kids in just as many organized sports leagues as my friends who live in the suburbs. (It might actually be easier on the parents in the cities because my suburban friends are like youth sports taxi services every weekend whereas the ones in NYC have enough population density where the league is in the neighborhood.)

    So, my impression (from the parents’ childless friend’s side) is that kids, like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, find a way. They’ll play hide and seek in a desert and try to hide behind tumbleweeds.

    Again, sorry if I’m talking out of turn but this is Lemmy and there were no responses yet so I thought I’d toss in what I’ve seen as an adult. Gotta feed the content maw until the Fediverse grows up to be an uncontrollable beast.



  • Unspent campaign money is a whole thing but it usually gets transferred to a future campaign, other candidates, state/local/national party, or used to create a “Leadership PAC,” which is like a slush fund to donate to peers. A more honest example of a Leadership PAC might be someone with unusual star power (like AOC) raising a shitload of money in a safe seat and so using funds to donate to progressive candidates in tougher races. A shadier example might be the Speaker of the House using their fundraising ability to let people know that if they expect a donation, he or she expects their vote on a bill. And I’m sure you can imagine a thousand undeniably corrupt ways to use a Leadership PAC.

    They could also refund donors or donate to a real charity if they’re done with politics or trying to stay in donors’ good graces for the next try. But that’s not what ambitious politicians (basically all of them) typically do.

    But unless a candidate drops out or is in a safe seat, they really do try to spend every dollar that comes in almost as it comes in. There’s a very good likelihood a candidate ends up in the red at the end of the campaign and has to solicit donations even after the race is over to pay vendors, staff, etc.


  • I don’t think it’s about abortion. I think they decided allowing a transgender teen to exist is “dismembering children” even if surgery for trans teens barely ever happens IRL. If they were actually worried about gender affirming surgery for minors, they’d want to ban nose jobs and fake tits too. So, it’s just part of the general trans moral panic amongst conservatives and “Won’t someone please think of the children?” bullshit that always accompanies moral panics even if children aren’t involved.

    I’m cis but my understanding is that even trans adults find getting access to gender affirming healthcare is a huge, expensive ordeal. Philosophy Tube had a good video on her experience in the UK and I sincerely doubt it’s any easier in America’s labyrinthian, absurdly expensive non-system. It’s definitely not like parents are swinging by the urgent care to get their 13 year-olds free bottom surgery.







  • This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.

    Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.

    Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.

    A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.