Some android phones have the ability to long press on a notification, click on settings, and alter what kinds of notifications you receive. I’ve had a few instances like you describe, but where I’ve been able to turn off “special deals” or whatever. I think implementation of this is done by the app developer though, because I’m sure I’ve had some apps that had no useful settings. Example screenshot of Gmail settings:
Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy
Theme Hospital is one of the greats of an era. (N.b. there’s a mod called CorsixTH which fixes a lot of issues with the original game (mostly age related clunkiness)
“vendored my library”
I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?
You might enjoy Freya Holmér’s videos - I mostly know her for her excellent mathsy video essays, but she has loads of videos about “maths for game Devs” that might be useful.
That there is no silver bullet, no quick fix, no “Eureka” moments that happen without work. “Progress” is less an exciting event, more a rhythm made by the repeated struggling against entropy; when you’re doing it well, you’ll come to hardly notice its beat until one day you look around and everything’s different.
You’d think that recognising this progress might be motivating, but it’s often demoralising because it demonstrates how unglamorous the work of self-improvement is. You hardly get time to enjoy your achievements, because as you grow, you become aware of how much more there is to do; the burdens on one’s time and energy tend to expand as our personal capacities do, so even if one makes incredible progress it can feel like you haven’t moved at all — in both your “before” and “after” snapshots, it can feel like you’re still barely staying afloat in life, even if objectively, you have massively improved your coping skills.
And the worst part of it all is knowing that it’s okay to be feeling like this. You’re tired because it’s a lot of work, and you’re demoralised because the work doesn’t end. You’re not the only one who has the stake in your life and your wellbeing, and as you grow, this will be underscored by a greater sense of duty towards the systems and people that depend on you; When I was young and very depressed, I stayed alive for my family and I resented the fact that they cared about me because it bound me to life. (Un)fortunately(?), over the years, my attempts to stick around to avoid hurting the people I care about has led to a bunch more people being invested in my wellbeing and I ended up loving those people too. How privileged I am to have such wonderful people in my life, who give me hope for the world and embolden me to keep fighting. And yet, I resent these people too. I have to allow myself that, at least a little bit, otherwise I’d collapse under the pressure of a duty to a world so much larger than I am. The worst part of it all is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So here I am, still plodding along, despite everything, hoping to make my existence a tiny little monument to resistance, as I stubbornly push back against all-consuming entropic decay. I know that in the grand scheme of things, nothing I, as an individual, does will matter, nor will it last, but I don’t care. Well, I do care — the enormity of it threatens to swallow me whole — but I don’t care that I care, because what difference does it make? The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that everyone feels this way, to an extent, and I’m nothing special. In that truth is terror, but also the comfort of solidarity. I may be scared and exhausted, but I know I’m not alone in this. For better or for worse, my life isn’t just for me.
I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.
That’s a hilarious reply, and I can’t think of a witty response to match it
I mean, racism has as much reason to exist now as it ever did. “I’ll protect me and what’s mine” has been the dividing line between species for thousands of years, and we have to choose whether we’ll continue it. A “Kill or be killed” mindset might keep you safe, but you’ll never know if the person you killed did indeed mean you harm, or if you could’ve instead lived without killing, and broke bread with a rival. The logic still applies
Yup. We’re least safe when we most think we’re safe. Architects of self fulfilling prophecies
I always experience a weird sense of sonder[1] when I see spam bots, because even if it’s a huge, highly automated network of bots, there’s at least one human involved if you could trace the bots back to their source.
I wonder what kind of person they are, and how the hell they make a profit from the spam. They surely must have a non-zero return rate, but how well does it work? Are they making bank from the task, or barely scraping by? Are they surviving on the scam income, or is it just a bit extra on top of a regular job? Do they enjoy the work, or are they as much of a wage-slave as I am, just in a different way. Were they themselves a victim of some scam, perhaps? I’ll never know, hence the sonder.
[1]: Sonder, noun, neologism. “The feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles” (dictionary.com)
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I’ve already played it but yes, that’s a great recommendation for anyone who has enjoyed the games I mentioned. I especially enjoyed it because I’m also a fan of Dark Souls (& other FromSoft games), and it was neat to have souls-like combat in such a cute packaging.
Probably incomplete list that I may update after a nap.
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(Edit 1: formatting)
The thing is that that was how Google became so big in the first place. PageRank was a cool way of trying to filter out the garbage and it worked real well. Even my non techy friends have been getting frustrated with search not working like it used to (even before all this Gemini stuff was added)
One of my favourite Yorkshire dialect jokes is how “tin tin tin” can mean the complete sentence “It isn’t in the tin”
I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.
Neat idea, I hope I’ll remember this when I’m setting up my next server.
(RTFM = Read the Fucking Manual)
Adding this because I only learned this acronym just last week, and wish to share the knowledge with anyone else like me)
Gin, I think.
It’s debatable about whether this counts for the question, but I’m commenting because this wasn’t a case of “drank too much, was very sick” kind of story, which many people have about alcohol. Basically I was at a small party and I downed a shot of clear liquid that I believed to be vodka. It was not.
I didn’t even know there was any gin in the house, I hadn’t seen anyone drinking it. I wasn’t keen on the taste of gin before, but the unexpectedness of the taste was so bad I was sick. People were concerned because they worried I was overly-drunk, but it was entirely the flavour that did it. Now, anything that tastes or smells remotely similar to gin makes me feel sick.
Though even if we are counting gin as a food here, this is very much gin not being consumed in its normal way - I have never met anyone who would choose to do a shot of neat gin.