Notices by Dana Fried (tess@mastodon.social)

Since living in a place with wildfires I have an indoor air quality meter and a thing I have found is that those candles with the wood wicks absolutely destroy the air, while soy candles with cotton wicks don't affect it at all (200 μg/m³ PM2.5 vs literally 2)

Watching my favorite semi-reactionary lady YouTuber doing a video about sexualization of female characters in video games.

Not gonna engage directly with it, but I Have Thoughts™️

Women characters - in any medium - created by men for [straight] men feel icky.

There's a very clear difference between sexy and porny. When a character is very obviously something for men to fap to or a projection of the creator(s)' fetishes, you can tell. You *feel* it. And it's okay to not like that.

In French they don't say "small talk" they say "the exchange of banalities" and I think that's beautiful

One way to increase the breadth of your impact in an organization is to stop using your personal area of expertise to tell people "no", even if people are suggesting things you know won't work.

Instead, try, "no, but..." or "yes, but..."

When you constantly say "no" you shut down conversation and set yourself up as an obstacle to be worked around. So naturally, people won't ask you for input on designs or decisions or new projects.

@inthehands I have had literally that exact problem with every other language I've learned well enough to travel with.

It's just French that's kicking my ass.

Mumblecore-ass language.

Also I cannot pronounce French. I can say each word carefully, constructing it from its constituent phones. But I cannot string together long sequences of /u/, /y/, /ø/, /œ/, /æ̃/, and /œ̃/, all separated by random /ʁ/.

(I am making some progress with /ø/ vs /œ/, which was something I always struggled with a little in German.)

"Learning French is going so slowly!" I say to myself, feeling down about the fact that the audio being thrown at me is only now starting to make sense at full speed.

I look up at my Babbel streak, which I've kept going since I started on the app.

"10 days" it says.

Oh.

Well I guess I am doing okay?

Feels like a godsdamned slog tho.

I used to say that the most important skill I had as a software developer was google-fu, because 99% of the time someone else had already solved the problem I was trying to solve (sorry @mcc - you seem to be perennially in that other 1%).

But I never blindly submitted Code I Got From The Internet without at least trying to understand (a) what it did, and (b) why it worked. Also: (c) writing tests to ensure it actually did work.

Sometimes the code snippet from SO was actually kinda bullshit.

If you're using an LLM to write code, you need to treat the output exactly the same as a random answer from Stack Overflow, or some shit an intern wrote.

It might be great! It might miss corner cases! It might completely misunderstand the codebase and use APIs incorrectly, or just not compile, or solve the wrong problem!

If you're employed as a software developer, it's *your* responsibility to proofread anything you didn't write yourself (and also, to be fair, the stuff you did actually write)

I don't know who I have to say this to, but:

If you put your name on a professional product - whether that's a pull request, a legal brief, a business report, or anything else - you are responsible for the quality and correctness of that product.

Corollary: I doesn't matter if you use an LLM, task an intern, hire a temp, or crib from Stack Overflow. You had better be able to vouch for the final product.

If you cannot, you are making it clear that you cannot be trusted to properly do your job.

@GossiTheDog @catsalad I have definitely used their refund policy before but I'm just not sure I want the emotional damage.

@catsalad @GossiTheDog lol

lmao

Monster Hunter Wilds Question

Since I know a lotta gaming nerds follow me:

I got a two year old gaming laptop that allegedly meets the recommended PC requirements (just barely) - what is the chance the actual game will not run and/or look like shit on my PC?

For reference: the benchmark crashes immediately on start; doesn't even get past compiling shaders.

@hacks4pancakes yeah in Seattle when they see certain things on a scan the first thing they ask you is "do you have any tattoos?"

As someone who has worked in supply chain automation, there is no elegant code solution to real-world problems.

Even Amazon, who one might argue has perfected the art of moving and tracking large numbers of things, has done so through (a) massive investment in infrastructure and (b) hiring a massive number of human employees who are (c) held to inhumanly strict rules in (d) a mostly closed and highly-controlled environment.

Real life is messy; you need people (and often experts) to manage it.

@roadriverrail for example: mine.

Everyone is going to get hurt. But some people are going to lose their jobs *this week* and be staring down the barrel of homelessness and starvation - many of them in a country where social services have been suddenly defunded.

This is going to be a brutal week for everyone, but working Americans and immigrants are going to bear the worst of it.

Over $1T of stock value was destroyed overnight as a result of recent actions by the US. More is likely to come.

I feel not for the investors, but for the millions of people who work in farming, shipping, retail, and manufacturing worldwide whose livelihoods will be negatively affected by these pointless and destructive actions.

The only silver lining is that, having read Piketty, I understand that a lot of capital just needs to be burned if we are to have a chance to preserve democracy.

I just paid rent. It was free, through my bank app, and got to my landlord basically instantly. All I needed was my property manager's email address.

I could send money to a friend the same way.

This doesn't sound much different than ACH or PayPal but I assure you it is 1000% nicer.

One of the many things you don't realize living in the US is how much friction is added to basically everything you do to ensure some middleman or service provider can profit off of it.

Yo

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-leonard-peltier-clemency_n_67608b04e4b0d06419ec6367?ds

Considering signing up for a pixelfed account to replace insta for posting random pics (not that I normally do but...)

I would prefer to pick a server based outside the US. Is pixelfed.de a good choice, or do people recommend something else?