• Technology Consultant.
  • Software Developer.
  • Musician.
  • Burner.
  • Game Master.
  • Non-theistic Pagan.
  • Cishet White Male Feminist.
  • Father.
  • Fountain Maker.
  • Aquarium Builder.
  • Hamster Daddy.
  • Resident of Colorado.
  • Anti-Capitalist.
  • Hackerspace Regular.
  • Traveler of the American West.
  • 3 Posts
  • 191 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • My code projects lately?

    “This project uses an API written in PHP, with HTML in Lua (OpenResty) and JavaScript. We’re starting with the PHP component, please write me a burger with cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, pickles, ketchup and mustard.”

    “Absolutely! I’d be happy to help with that! I understand that we’re creating a burger in PHP. Here is a burger, with cheese, bacon, lettuce tomato and mustard. Explanation of the burger: The bacon is on top of the cheese, so it doesn’t fall off. The lettuce is included, to create an underlying HTML structure.”

    "Um, that’s not at all what I asked for. First of all, you completely forgot the ketchup, which I explicitly told you was a requirement. Secondly, you said there was mustard, but I don’t see any. Third, the cheese is cottage cheese? No one puts that on burgers! Why would you put cottage cheese? Third, the bacon is turkey bacon. That’s not what I wanted at all. On top of that, the lettuce is UNDER the burger, not ON it. We’re not writing HTML, this is meant to be a rest API. All the output should be JSON.

    Please try again. Write me a burger in PHP with pig bacon, mustard and ketchup, which you forgot to include last time, cheddar cheese (NOT cottage cheese) and tomato, pickles and lettuce INSIDE the bun. This is an API, so don’t write any HTML!"

    “I appologize for the misunderstanding. Here is your burger with bacon (made from pigs, not turkey), mustard, ketchup, cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles and lettuce inside the bun. I understand this is an API, so I’ve taken out the HTML. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

    “It looks like you’ve called a function to put the lettuce inside the bun, but you never created that function?”

    “You are correct. Your PHP code would need to have the function defined to put the lettuce inside the bun. Here is your updated PHP code with the putLettuceInsideBun function included.”

    “Thank you, there’s a tomato and the lettuce is inside the bun now. I’m not sure why you called the putLettuceInsideBun() function twice, but at least it’s in there now. I note there’s still no bacon, cheese, ketchup or mustard. You know what? I’m just going to write those parts myself!”

    “Writing PHP code can be a fun and educational challenge! Please let me know if I can assist you any further with your PHP hot dog grilling project.”




  • Sure, that was overly broad. But I’ve got a BUNCH of tools in my garage and they’re fine, but my dad’s got a bunch of the same tools in his workshop he had when I was a kid, and they still work just as well now as they did in the 80s (I think his drill press actually used to belong to HIS dad and it’s never failed me). Also, his table saw and band saw rock. I remember using them to cut things for silly projects when I was a kid and I just used the table saw the other day… same saw, great results.

    My take was all centered around “solid” and “built to last”. I don’t have any faith that the tools in my garage will outlast his tools. Don’t see it happening. I think me inheriting his tools is more likely than my tools outlasting them.



  • It’s not going to collapse over night. Instead, things are going to get worse and worse gradually, with each step backward becoming the new normal.

    Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we’ll all just carry on until one day we’re like just chilling in our debris city, hoping we don’t have to sell any teeth for bottle caps in order to buy food today when some ghoul comes storming in and shoots up the place trying to murder a harmless old man with a dog, and then some naive vault dweller tries to intervene, but she only makes the problem worse and we’ll all wonder how the hell we got here.




  • I do remember some posts on r/sex back in the day that were absolutely kids (teens) and you could tell by how

    • Freaked out they were about totally normal stuff.
    • Excited they were about how great sex is.

    I remember there was a funny day when there were two top upvoted posts on r/sex (probably in like 2017) where one was like

    • It turns me on when my boyfriend masturbates to me, am I normal?

    And the other one was like

    • I (female bodied, they/them / nb) am a furry and my wife and I like to pretend that I’m a wolf and I’m hunting and eating her. What can we make that will look and feel like real organs I can “rip” out of her stomach and eat, and what could we use for fake blood that would be the easiest to clean up?

    People kept linking the second one in the first one and reassuring this poor girl that she’s totally normal.


  • Honestly, sometimes when I can’t sleep, watching eSports helps (especially Starcraft II). IDK why, but put on a super chill caster like Wardii and I’m out in 20 minutes.

    Having some loud, disruptive ad punch through my ad blocker and try to tell me about Liberty Mutual when I’ve almost dozed off is close to the most rage inducing experience imaginable. With Youtube now working to inject adds directly into video streams, I’m actually anxious about the future of my best sleep aid.


  • Here’s some ideas:

    • Put limits on the amount of residential property that can be owned by investors in a given market. Something like “In order for an investor to purchase a residential property within this particular municipality, no more than 40% of existing residential housing can be owned by investors, excepting where A) The investor in question is an individual or family who intend to reside in the property and share it with one or more roommates or B) the investor in question is an individual or family who are moving out of a unit they already own intending to purchase another one and convert the original home into a rental property.” Alternatively "No more than 20% of the housing market in the municipality may be owned by entities who’s majority ownership A) resides outside of the municipality or B) who’s ownership possesses a combined net worth in excess of $10,000,000 (automatically adjusting for inflation over time), excepting newly constructed properties intended for sale.

    • Reform property taxes to avoid squeezing out homeowners. I.E. Property taxes shall, in perpetuity, be assessed at the purchase price of the home when the current residents moved in. Meaning… If you’re a landlord, you don’t WANT your tenants to move out because then your property taxes will go up. Also “No insurance company may charge more for home owners or renters insurance than X percent of the current property tax rate.” And “No landlord shall charge more than X times the current property tax rate, where X is an adjustable number slightly higher than the current competitive market rate.”

    • Pin a carbon tax on retail or office businesses in a given area to scale with whatever commute they require for workers who live far away. Make it high enough to strong arm business owners into paying (and charging enough) that they save money on higher pay rates for employees so they can afford to live locally in affluent areas and areas undergoing gentrification. I’m totally OK with employers being like “We prefer to hire local (or localish) because of this tax” to a perspective employee. I’m OK with it being high enough for business owners to feel it, and with business owners screaming about it as much as they want. Affluent residents want to fucking shop locally and they WILL, even if that means local retail has to raise their prices. If it puts you out of business, good. Someone else will show up to take your place and will treat their employees better.

    Not that you would EVER see ANY of these ideas proposed in WSJ.


  • I grew up around the rich. They are short sighted idiots just like the rest of us, but with a whole lot more entitlement, self confidence and belief that things will work out fine (this matches their lived experience). They are just as prone to magical thinking and superstitious beliefs as anyone else, but NO ONE CAN TELL THEM THEY’RE WRONG. They lose touch with reality, because the human brain needs honest feedback from it’s community in order to calibrate it’s sense of reality and hardly anyone is honest with the rich to their faces.

    The point is, there is no endgame. It would be better if there was. A BUNCH of the rich believe the End Times are nigh, a bunch more believe that capitalism and innovation will solve whatever environmental disasters industrial society is creating. I know of one multi billionaire (the mom of someone I went to high school with) who pays a Buddhist “holy man” a very generous salary to follow her around and be her full time spiritual advisor. IIRC, she thinks the enlightened will ascend to some higher plane of existence before the environmental apocalypse consumes the rest of us (she still funds various environmentalist causes). Meanwhile, Zuck and the other tech bros seriously think they’re playing Fallout IRL and Musk thinks we’re doomed unless we build a Mars colony.

    It would better if there WERE a plan, or an end game or big conspiracy. We could maybe hold some actual people accountable for deliberately driving the planet into the ditch. But there’s not. Just a bunch of self serving, delusional idiots with wealth and power.