SRE:

• Receives a slack message that lighbulb is broken
• Realizes that they never got an alert when the light went out
• Fixes their monitoring thresholds
• Routes all broken lightbulb alerts to a slack channel nobody reads

This makes me realize that I want desk toy which is metallic, heavy and has a satisfying mechanical action, but which does not resemble a firearm in appearance or function. Basically all the tactile experience of playing with a revolver, but none of the legal or emotional baggage.

One downside of the method is that each molecular message can only be read once, since decoding the polymers involves degrading them.

New DRM just dropped. Imagine pouring rented movies into your TV like laundry detergent.

I realize that this is a humor post, and not necessarily the right place to provide advice, but never underestimate the power of adding a Q&A meeting to someone else’s calendar. Someone doesn’t want to make time to explain mystery tool? Well you just made it for them. Usually I try and be polite by asking before I arrange something.

I feel like the plot undercut the otherwise cool metaphor that the gorge represented.

East and West, separated by nothing but their deepest fears. Two killers searching for human connection but unable to reach the nearest person. How fucking cool is that? You can do so much!

Then you find out that there isn’t really any East/West divide, they’re both working for the same bad guys. Traversal of the gorge plays like a joke instead of being a serious moment of character development. Then the ending is a bunch of run-shoot-explode.

Thinking back on being a beginner, my problem wasn’t that instructions were imprecise, but more that I didn’t interpret “to taste” as a real instruction. It means I should fucking taste my food as I go, when at the time I would just taste it at the end.

So many bad meals can be avoided by sampling them over time and adjusting. I should know, having made too many.

I would classify this as an example of cooking logic (my own phrase) that needs to be learned. A lot of good recipes will assume the cook understands fundamental concepts like this, but it’s not necessarily the recipe’s job to teach you. Same as how IKEA assembly instructions might seem cryptic at first, but really boil down to using 3-4 different techniques to screw wood panels together. I do think there’s a general lack of awareness that cooking has a separate logic, and this means a lot of people never teach it to others.

every single time I’ve gotten past the first round I am rejected for someone who was recommended internally/someone with job experience

Sounds like unfortunate timing. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know how far along in the hiring process other people might be, so sometimes you’re interviewing for a job that’s right about to be filled by someone else. My only advice on that side would be to make sure to be responsive to recruiters and try and get your interviews scheduled quickly.

Getting to first-round interviews is a good sign, especially with so much of the interview process being sloppified by AI tools. Your resume is catching eyes and someone thinks you’re worth talking to. Give yourself some credit then: you’ve set yourself up for success. The beginner career market is always going to have tough competition, so getting your resume on the desk of a real human is very important.

My only other advice would be to focus on getting past those first interviews, and that might require you to examine your shortcomings on that stage. Are you failing the coding challenge? Find opportunities to practice and improve. Are you failing technical questions? There are github repos with common interview questions (eg “Tell me the difference between private and protected keywords in C++”). If you’re failing while talking about your technical/school experience, find some time to refine your thoughts and practice selling your strengths.

The more times you get past introductory interviews, the more chances you have to be the first candidate who “checks all the boxes”. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Whether or not you’re wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I’d expect demand for juniors to rise also.

Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when “back in my day” they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it’s possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who’s in it for more than just money.

I prefer to call for food because it guarantees that the restaurant (which I presumably like) will get all of the money I spend on food.

Nearly all of those online ordering platforms take a cut from whatever they facilitate. Sometimes that means prices are more expensive online, or sometimes it’s the same price on my receipt but less money for the restaurant.

And I’m not sure what your point about minimum wage workers is. Normally it’s already someone’s job to talk to customers and enter their order in a system.

I’m not going to say “Don’t learn gentoo next” but if you’re already well versed in Nix or setting up a base arch install, I feel like the only thing Gentoo will teach is “How long does it really take to compile Firefox from source?”

At my last job, there was no planning of work/projects. Like, there was a general plan of “We need feature X by Q3 and here’s what it should do”, but nothing about breaking work down into smaller units or prioritizing different tasks.

The manager would drop an email: “Hey, can you do …” and that was it. Now it’s another thing to throw down the waterfall. Big surprise, the same bastard would harp about how the project was underperforming!

ARR I think is Annual Recurring Revenue

There was nothing RESTful or well planned about this API’s interfaces, and the work to do something like that would have been nontrivial. Management never prioritized the work.

At a prior job, our API load balancers would swallow all errors and return an HTTP 200 response with no content. It was because we had one or two clients with shitty integrations that couldn’t handle anything but 200. Of course, they brought in enough money that we couldn’t ever force them to fix it on their end.

I understand what you’re saying, but his experiment allowed the embryos to come to term and be born as human babies. Scientists have worked with human embryos before and avoided similar outcry by not allowing them to develop further (scientific outcry, not religious). Calling his work an experiment on human embryos ignores the fact that he always intended for his work to impact the real lives of real humans who would be born.

I always felt like murderous clones are a bit different from evil twins.

From a sci-fi perspective, I’ve noticed that murderous clone stories tend to explore the following themes:

• Whose life is more valid? Does an original have any more right to life than the clone? What aspects of life can never be split between two people with equal claim?
• Would the murder ever matter, in the grand scheme of things? As far as society can tell, the world is exactly the same before you are cloned and after one of you kills the other.
• Could the survivor ever be brought to justice? If the clone tried to kill you because they knew you would try to kill them, does that make it self defence or premeditated murder? Would any punishment would be a net loss for society, when compared before the clone appeared?
• Could this “self destructive” impulse hide deeply inside even the nicest person? How much does a person love themselves? Can self-love even apply when the “self” is also external?

Thunderbird is back in active deleopmemt though, and not just as a maintenance project.

What, and miss out on all the overtime pay from fixing everything at the last minute?

Definitely a fungus that grows huge under the earth and spouts a few fruiting bodies every one in a while.

Just leave me alone and unbothered to grow and eat, maybe with a few other fungi in the area so I can exchange signals with them.