tef

it's kinda funny/tragic that we've gone from regular stories like "the employee was fired for outsourcing work to sone third party contractor"
and now we live in the opposite world, where refusing to delegate your work to the lowest cost bidder is now grounds for termination

2025-10-01 09:44:38 GMT

saw a post citing "no silver bullets" only to add "but i'm built different"

2025-09-21 19:43:53 GMT

got waved over to help someone with directions, and i mentioned "yeah it's easy to get disoriented around here because the road snakes around, north is actually that way"
after sending them off in the right direction, i figured i'd check and yes it was
i live in a old european city before you grid moders tell me it's easy

2025-09-15 18:05:07 GMT

it's kinda funny how we use the term "cargo cult" to mean "we recreate the environment in the hope of summoning results, without any causal understanding"
but that's also how every software methodology is applied in practice, "if we have the same meetings and process of a successful team, we'll be successful"
even though for the most part, we're copying the c3 team at chrysler, who were not successful by any measure

2025-09-12 23:03:36 GMT

at some point in my life i had to explain who donald knuth was to a table of not-cs type people
"he wrote a book about programs, then a program to write books, and then wrote a book about the program, in the program to write books"

2025-09-07 18:29:26 GMT

saw a cat
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/164/428/427/204/592/original/8c2f672e664488c4.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/164/428/789/771/387/original/e0cd52850e97af51.png

2025-08-28 14:56:06 GMT

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"We regret that, sadly, unanimity is not possible on this issue and kinder ground eludes us." adding this to my list of ways to tell people where to stick it

2025-08-18 22:33:00 GMT

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have you considered getting a copper coaster to rest your drinks on

2025-08-10 13:02:04 GMT

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people do love to over estimate the amount of mathematics in programming when a lot of it boils down to word play

2025-08-10 12:58:06 GMT

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that said and done maybe CanCancel is the right one, as the client doesn't actually care what the thing is, and only really cares about "should i send a cancel if i give up" so maybe i'm overthinking it

2025-08-10 12:52:44 GMT

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the larger issue is more accurately "this is a server side resource being held open for the client and it will expire if you do nothing, and also if you do not need it, it would be nice if you told the server if possible"
and although these properties usually happen to be true at same time, i'm also working out if "things that can only expire and not be cancelled" exists in a useful sense

2025-08-10 12:48:57 GMT

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fwiw, i have some long running operation on a server, which can be cancelled by the client, and i'm looking for a good way to say "and make sure to cancel this if you give up"
rather than something that only implies "you can cancel this if you want", or worse "you should cancel this"
like CancelOnError rather than CanCancel or ShouldCancel

2025-08-10 12:45:25 GMT

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for some reason, managers like to think programming is the bit where i'm using a keyboard, rather the bit where i'm actually thinking about a problem
when i'm at a computer it usually means i'm debugging

2025-08-10 12:44:03 GMT

doing some programming: walking around the block for 20-30 minutes as i try to think of the right word or name for a thing

2025-08-07 00:46:59 GMT

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will you make the stock price marginally rise enough to stave off the activist investors though, that's the key problem a ceo faces heh

2025-07-20 20:36:25 GMT

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in all earnestness "here are signs to check for hazardous waste" and a point of contact to get someone out to check would be a safety improvement
although i don't expect another orphan source i would not be surprised by mercury batteries

2025-07-20 16:16:27 GMT

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that said I do think a "It has been XXX days since our last radiation accident" sign on the swap shop would be funny enough if not potentially lathe of heaven

2025-07-05 15:29:20 GMT

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it is 2038, every embeddded device is about to brick itself, we've replaced all our IDEs with gatcha games, and now loot box coding is our only hope

2025-07-05 15:27:32 GMT

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at the same time i remain entirely unconvinced that a development methodology that resembles "outsourcing to a different lowest cost bidder on each email sent" will magically make companies any more successful at writing software, let alone to time or budget
a tool that is optimised for creating drive by commits, you will be charged once per question, and another time for the build and test. if it doesn't work out, or you don't like it, you can pay to try again: it never does same thing twice

2025-07-05 15:23:20 GMT

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the irony is that i do think that machine translation from prose to code can work in small doses
eg a local model on a curated dataset could turn a bunch of text into a handful of lines of sql
it's relatively easy to inspect output and there's no intention of maintenance, just regenerating a new report query
for "i need a config file" or "bash one liner", i have come to accept that the future will involve a lot a lot of shotgun debugging and copy and paste guesswork, but semi automated now

2025-07-05 15:13:49 GMT

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here's what one developer said "look, i just don't know what's in the training set, and i don't ask questions" before adding "i really hate my job, and this turns the boring tasks into something novel. i get to pretend i'm solving a much more interesting problem too"
"it sucks, but on the plus side, they've poisoned the dataset, so the ddosing will slowly ramp down as curated sets become only realistic option for training, so maybe there's hope for provenance too"

2025-07-05 15:06:17 GMT

great news everyone, i've managed to combine the technologies behind "excel thinks it's a date" and "my phone keeps saying duck" to produce an office memo generator
it can also draw sentient anime breasts, as well as generating occasionally correct stack overflow replies
here's how: first we harvest every website, and use it to train a spam filter
we run the spam filter backwards on a massively parallel system to generate the desired output
then we try to filter out racism and csam. ish

2025-06-26 14:21:52 GMT

i think a bunch about how edsger dijkstra didn't set written exams for his students, the final was an oral exam, he'd sit and ask them questions
written exams aren't used because they're better at evaluating students, but because they're way easier to scale up, marking and grading can be pushed onto other students
with things like chatgpt destroying most of academica it's nice to think that dijkstra would be "have you tried actually examining the students" heh

2025-06-26 01:05:49 GMT

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realistically though, neurotypicals say "you talk too much" but often mean something else
much like the "you don't give enough eye contact" feedback, which means "please occasionally make contact at end of sentences so i feel you're paying attention to me, but not too much that i feel watched"
"you talk too much" is often the polite phrasing for "you do not show enough deference, i did not get a single chance to demonstrate status"

2025-06-26 01:01:05 GMT

did an interview, opened it as always by saying "i have adhd, i will go off topic, if you give me an agenda and times we can stick to it"
got told not to worry about it as it was just a casual conversation, and then got told i failed the interview because "i talk too much, and go off topic"
it's a knife in the back to spend hours proving my technical chops, only to fall by something you can learn about me in approximately 90 seconds
and it's a twist to hear it's adhd kicking my ass as ever

2025-06-17 01:32:56 GMT

in case you missed it, someone has been porting mario64 to the gameboy advance
in what i can only describe as incredible hackery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kueoO3b4B-M
technically speaking, it isn't the first 3d game on the gba, that honor goes to "asterix and obelix xxl"
technically speaking though, porting an n64 game to the gba is even more ridiculous

2025-06-05 11:50:34 GMT

correction: i have been calling ai tooling "per request billing for editing text files"
after some research i have realised the billing model is slightly different
given that you have to make a few pulls to get something that compiles, it's closer to a gatcha game
or loot boxes, but with way lower payout rates

2025-05-31 04:22:43 GMT

fun facts:
mbas don't increase profit or returns, they just cut wages [1]
in fact, ceos tend to be more self serving than other people [2], and risk taking ceos correlates to childhood exposure to pollution [3]
'superfund ceos' tend to get promoted [4], even though unionised places perform better in stock market [5]
sources:
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf
[2] https://hbr.org/2016/12/mbas-are-more-self-serving-than-other-ceos
[3] https://www.iimb.ac.in/sites/default/files/inline-files/hazed-confused-prenatal-ceo-risk-taking.pdf
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5270031
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0929119921001127

2025-05-30 16:02:54 GMT

i'm looking for work as of today!
if you need a staff level backend/database person, i could very well be that person: https://tef.computer
if you know your company is hiring, drop me a link to the careers page.
nb: due to having a sleep cycle resembling a melatonin free jazz solo, i usually work in Eastern Time, remotely.
as a result i generally work for east/west coast firms in the us, or very flexible employers in the uk

2025-05-25 02:11:58 GMT

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i am watching a real life demonstration of searle's chinese room argument and the people inside the room have announced they're geniuses at language

2025-05-25 02:06:05 GMT

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it's bad enough trying to keep a straight face as people talk about "levelling up and investing in the team" but their best idea is "what if they also outsourced things to computers and emailed back and forth until software magically appeared? it works for me!"

2025-05-25 02:04:45 GMT

this is very much the bubble i live in, but the push for "ai coding" stuff really does seem to be coming from the top down, to me at least
now, sure, there are people more interested in the algorithms and statistical techniques, but that's not who i'm talking about
and yes, pretty much every coding trend is driven by fashion and status at the best of times
but, yeah
you can draw a graph of "excited about programming" and "excited by ai tools" and it's 1/x

2025-05-23 16:11:41 GMT

it looks like my role is about to be made redundant, so i might be looking for a new role, staff developer, remote uk/us
my resume/cv is here: https://tef.computer
i am pretty good at the whole "fixing distributed systems" stuff but i'm also pretty good at the "levelling up a team" stuff too

2025-05-15 15:33:35 GMT

as someone with a broad vernacular and a parochial habit of em-dashes i feel personally attacked by the "this is what ai looks like"
plus, that's the training data, people are like this

2025-05-10 03:57:35 GMT

idle question, does anyone know why the german passports use 'D' and not 'DEU' or some other three letter code, like _everyone else_
no, really, everyone else has a three letter code
and yes, i have seen that travel stack exchange post you're going to find in the first page of results

2025-03-12 16:15:33 GMT

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yeah i would say i warned you but honestly i feel partially responsible too

2025-03-11 18:13:44 GMT

to be clear, when a recruiter, manager, or ceo says someone is a "genius programmer" or "10x" or similar
they mean "someone who works 80 hour weeks and we only pay them for 40"
every time

2025-03-01 22:11:16 GMT

i learned a cool bithacking trick and now i am in search of some tedious justification to use it in code, a true story

2025-02-15 19:25:41 GMT

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oh, right, yes, misreading you entirely
i meant "read repeatable is technically si" but yeah for some reason i mistakenly though that was the default, not read comitted

2025-02-15 15:13:16 GMT

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edit: me getting confused, rc is the default, rr is si in postgres, but not the default

2025-02-12 21:39:46 GMT

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buy a film development tank

2025-02-08 00:02:21 GMT

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it's a stim toy

2025-01-29 12:07:40 GMT

lol, the jack dorsey talk at fosdem has disappeared from the schedule, without explanation

2025-01-17 17:40:37 GMT

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the thing about nerds at fosdem,
socioeconomically speaking, it's full of people who had access to computers at an early age, and people who earn well over the median
so, well, there aren't many people who've ever had to fight or protest, which is why you'll always hear "have we tried not causing problems" as a preferred option
it's the same sort of brainrot logic of "blocking a road could block an ambulance" where a theoretical consequence blocks any action with a result

2025-01-17 17:31:55 GMT

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someone has explained "pulling the fire alarm causes problems" and "the event organizers can suffer consequence for it" in what i can only describe as an incredible achievement in understanding a post

2025-01-17 17:26:09 GMT

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it's funny to note that the systemd guy doesn't protested at fosdem because despite the invective, he isn't as despised as jack dorsey

2025-01-17 17:11:15 GMT

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the thing about pulling the fire alarm to stop a talk, you don't even have to be in the same room, just in the same building, or somewhere on the same fire circuits, it's pretty impossible to stop
that, and with large enough buildings, they can't turn the alarms off without having someone from the fire service check
the more you know huh

2025-01-17 17:06:40 GMT

btw if you're planning on protesting a talk, the easiest way is to pull the fire alarm
and if you're at fosdem, you can say "i just saw a vape cloud i guess" if anyone asks why

2025-01-05 04:05:30 GMT

huh. i probably should `WITHOUT ROWID` in sqlite3 for a while, and `STRICT` too
https://sqlite.org/stricttables.html
https://sqlite.org/withoutrowid.html

2025-01-04 19:56:51 GMT

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we did through example, luna

2024-12-18 15:47:47 GMT

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i see brat summer is still happening huh

2024-12-12 17:21:26 GMT

@npub16y8…d455 total aside but programmers think "version numbers will fix this" despite twenty years of the user agent string proving otherwise
it's easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem

2024-12-10 20:09:50 GMT

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it took me a while to realise what looked off, there's no adverts

2024-12-08 18:44:06 GMT

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i.e welcome to the tolerant left, we've got [checks notes] capitalists who think it's ok to be gay but school meal debts are fine, neoliberals who think racism needs to be means tested, and new york times readers who've been patiently waiting to cheer on a war crime

2024-11-28 20:48:02 GMT

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phoenix is 25% off until end of month

2024-11-28 02:51:41 GMT

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if google decide they do not want email from you, it's bad news trying to send email
also bad news: that ip address you just got used to be spam, here's a fursuit, it's your best way to find a spam list admin

2024-11-28 02:50:16 GMT

i am reading a post and i agree but seeing "no-one owns or controls email" is like a reading a paper and finding a bedtime story for children halfway through

2024-11-27 18:27:32 GMT

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McAffe, McAffe and Me

2024-11-24 20:30:41 GMT

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someone has suggested "the opposite can be worse" and i do not have time to draw out the gundam and the shot firing over their head
the point is not "here is a choice between extremes with no in-between" but "no matter what methodology you adopt, management will use it to push risk onto those with no power in the company"
yes, it's a purpose of a system is what it does post, fill in your bingo card now

2024-11-24 19:47:34 GMT

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it is very funny to me that agile is pitched as "give workers agency over the process" and adopted in industry as "do these exact things in this exact way or else"

2024-11-24 19:45:56 GMT

software engineering methodologies are simple, there's really only two goals
the first goal of a methodology is to make workers replaceable, and this is usually achieved by removing any worker agency in the project
the second goal of a methodology is to insulate decision makers from risk and this is usually achieved by blaming the workers for failure—for not hitting estimates forced upon them
unfortunately, "delivering software people want" doesn't make the cut

2024-11-09 06:14:45 GMT

anyway, "world standards day", to celebrate international standards, was on october the 14th
unless you're in america, in which case it's next week, the 14th of november

2024-10-31 17:26:26 GMT

https://em-tg.github.io/csborrow/
"the C# borrow checker", a nice little post about how C#'s ref is rather analogous to lifetimes in rust
it does ask why these changes went under the radar, and i think it's that the changes landed gradually, as it's the first i've heard of them

2024-10-16 22:34:25 GMT

i need that "did i eat?" "have i forgotten to drink water again?" flow chart tattooed on the insides of my eyelids tbh

2024-10-16 00:07:33 GMT

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even before you open up the book labelled "the guy has really skeevy opinions and doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut"
or the large overflowing binder of "people who have left free software because of his behaviour"
there's a quick summary note that says "other free software organizations have broken ties with the fsf because of him"
for someone who kicked up a fuss over sudo it is kinda tragic they're clawing onto power over others despite the consequences

2024-10-15 23:59:49 GMT

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"what's his job" promoting free software and providing a real alternative to proprietary systems
"how's that working out" gcc kept getting forked to stop him sabotaging the project, eventually forcing clang to exist.
"oh" immediately after he stepped down, emacs replaced the default config with something useful over his crufty defaults
"i guess" other people have successfully written microkernels several times over, their secret was not reporting to rms. he is the reason hurd does not work

2024-10-15 23:55:59 GMT

to be clear, stallman has repeatedly shown that he's not a capable steward of software projects (everything that happened to hurd and gcc), and even less capable as a leader of an organization
even before you get into his toenail eating: he is very bad at his job
if free software is to mean more than a cult of personality, he should be replaced at the fsf, no question
i do not think he is capable or responsible enough to perform the job he gave himself

2024-10-13 16:01:12 GMT

i have seen a long post lamenting the decline of the yahoo! directory and the rise of google
but unfortunately i was alive and using the web at the time, so i remember things differently
the yahoo directory was already off centre stage by the mid nineties, and yahoo search used altavista in 97, then inktomi in 98, well before google arrived
and then yahoo search used google for a bit, heh

2024-10-11 16:56:01 GMT

the secret to having a good time on mastodon is immediately muting any post that gets boosted more than twice

2024-10-11 16:47:25 GMT

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anyway this is why i'm such fun at parties
"yeah when we liberated the camps, we put the queers back in prison"
"the tuskegee syphillis experiment lasted almost four times as long as the apollo program"
"yeah we don't know because the uk foreign office shredded all evidence of torture"

2024-10-11 16:39:51 GMT

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there's just this category of "rising tide of fascism" post that's just "bad things will start happening ... to people like me"
it's just yeah, the machinery is already in place and it's just aimed elsewhere, and the hypothetical examples of a fascist future have historical president that's never mentioned

2024-10-11 16:17:08 GMT

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it is a mystery why all these silicon valley types turn to fascism
well i guess except for the deeply racist and misogynistic work environments
and the whole "i am biologically superior to my peers" thing so many of them spout
oh and the whole "rules do not apply to us" thing or the "we should be in charge of everything because we're smart" things
the phone call can't be coming from inside the house

2024-10-11 16:12:36 GMT

kinda funny how the rise of fascism gets presented as an external influence, or something more grassroots, when it's bankrolled by the rich to consolidate their power, every time

2024-10-02 22:42:42 GMT

if i had a nickel for every time a shitty reactionary wrote their own libc,

2024-10-01 05:20:49 GMT

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i found that jpegtran will do the lossless rotation, but i'm not aware of others

2024-10-01 05:16:59 GMT

found out you can losslessly rotate jpegs, but if your image dimensions aren't multiples of eight, you end up with a weird fringe
i was looking at ways of stripping exif data from jpegs, including the rotation data

2024-09-27 18:01:18 GMT

hearing that tim berners-lee has joined mastodon, so i'd like to repost my only interaction with him
(from a Reddit AMA over a decade ago)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/210/820/852/845/543/original/8fd6d34ff38fd3f3.png

2024-09-22 22:24:42 GMT

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i say this because, well, i don't want to chase down every account i followed, by the time i get around to setting up a rss reader
so if people lumped their feeds together, i'd have an easier time

2024-09-22 21:45:46 GMT

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would have accepted ikeas of contents

2024-09-22 21:45:10 GMT

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i joke about bringing webrings back but after watching the cohost departure i am wondering if rss aggregators are what we should bring back instead

2024-09-22 21:40:44 GMT

i guess i could set up a github action cron job which fetches rss and builds a static site, much like planet-reader used to work

2024-09-22 21:14:41 GMT

tried to pluralize "table of contents" and wrote "tables of content" before asking if it should be "tables of contents"

2024-09-17 06:12:20 GMT

after rebranding "doing your job and not working overtime for free" as "quiet quitting" i see we're rebranding "voluntary layoffs" as "rto mandates"

2024-09-15 11:29:19 GMT

just found out the factorization of 65,535 is 3 × 5 × 17 × 255
ffff
the factorization of 4,294,967,295 is 3 × 5 × 17 × 257 × 65537, too
ffffffff

2024-09-14 16:02:31 GMT

imagine burning all the good will accumulated to be known as "the esr of bookmaking services"

2024-08-31 02:10:44 GMT

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personally, i think i'd be ok with something more like "python but the compiled wheels are wasm"
but it feels the answer people are moving towards is "your pre-built python modules are in the docker container" so
even so i don't really think "linux but wasm userland" would be a meaningful improvement for people unless they're changing architectures and keeping the disks, and fat binaries make that work
without the performance overhead of a vm'd binary

2024-08-27 20:07:51 GMT

it might feel like the mono project is going away but at the same time, it's succeeded beyond all belief
c# is open source, there's a fork of mono inside the clr, and the reasons for mono's existence are no longer true
also, the wine project seems like an excellent home for mono, too

2024-08-22 23:49:21 GMT

wrote a post on why i'm having weird vibes about lock free hash tables https://cohost.org/tef/post/7397391-look-i-m-a-huge-fan

2024-08-10 23:16:49 GMT

have seen a "technically, itanium was a success as it killed pa-risc, alpha, mips" take and i'm not sure phyrrhic victories count

2024-08-06 21:07:50 GMT

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time to pull out the classic post
Operations Skills: PRIMARILY KAFKA AND CASSANDRA BUT I CAN MAKE ANY SORT OF PREDICTION AND HAVE IT IGNORED BY ANY TYPE OF BUREAUCRACY

2024-08-06 21:06:19 GMT

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i gotta say having to apply for a kafka job before you're told it's a kafka job is a pretty bad case of nominiative determinism

2024-08-06 20:43:27 GMT

seeing a "Senior Distributed Systems Engineer" job posting without any specifics about the day to day work and i know deep inside that this is a kafka based analytics pipeline, as ever

2024-08-04 12:45:19 GMT

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i am not saying things used to be better i am saying we're repeating our old mistakes, but the landing pages do look much nicer though, sure

2024-08-04 12:44:00 GMT

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look i know there's reasons behind "we bundle the entire thing up only then to split it back out into pieces, automatically" but
so much of web dev feels like "complex ways to do what you did before for no meaningful benefit other than the satisfaction of solving a harder problem than you needed to"
at some point you have to ask why there are webapps that send over a docker container's worth of code to insert html into a web page, where the html is rendered server side for speed, of course

2024-08-04 12:39:01 GMT

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look, i know it's a thing where someone who doesn't understand the problem at hand (me) looks at what people are doing (webdevs) and goes "what is going on"
but i have lived through countless webdevs complaining about the "mysterious asset pipeline" breaking again and all i can think of is "we have reinvented C++ but with a whole different class of format string like issues" when i see what absolute torment passes for a build process
we have learned nothing from automake and autoconf, nothing

2024-08-04 12:35:24 GMT

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it amazes me that "please show me all the posts in the order they were made in" now takes three different types of per-request billing to run in the cloud

2024-08-04 12:34:13 GMT

i know i'm old but i've learned what the front end devs are up to now and i'm both yelling at the cloud and telling the kids to get off my lawn

2024-07-19 16:06:00 GMT

no one is asking questions about my t-shirt, huh
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/814/003/968/357/762/original/cc662009d774397c.png