Codex

Turns out, most people think their stupid views are actually genius

They say there are no asexuals in fox holes

I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.

I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.

Picturing a wimpy sad hand labeled “The Klan” which has been left eternally hanging.

I’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.

Just takes one angry teenager with a baseball bat or drunk moron with an automobile. I’d like to see the automotive crash test data on survivability of this water tank vs say, an oak tree.

As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.

My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).

Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?

Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.

I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.

1. use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
2. Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
3. Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
4. PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.

Cool art style! Reminds me of 90s CGI in a really good way. The nostalgic return to an optimistic time for me, when people seemed to really believe in environmental change, fits the concept well I think.

If you’ve never dug deeply into the ramifications of the Gates’ charity work, you might be surprised how much they use charity and their organizations to exert influence and control over the regions they help. It isn’t purely from the goodness of their hearts: billionaire philanthropy is both a PR tactic for washing over their bad behaviors and a way of creating a captive, dependent population that you can control.

thar*

The Saw killer planning his next 10 films worth of traps.

Kramer-san!

I did briefly misunderstand this meme as being so aggressively anti-ableist as to be pro-color-blindness. The internet has ruined me.

What’s up with the word “amused” there? Looks like someone badly photoshopped a different word in.

POS I find very funny as I’m often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.

Jraphical interchange format

Now that you call it out, I agree! Bale gets a lot of praise for his ability to morph his body for different roles, but is otherwise only alright as an actor. But he happens to be in many great movies with other iconic figures which really elevates his cachet.

Affleck is pretty good. I also really liked Pattenson’s emo sad-Bruce version quite a bit more than I expected to. For me, nothing will ever be as nostalgic and iconic as the Tim/Conroy animated portrayal.

I’ve seen that damn cart ride in Skyrim so many times that Ralof and Hadvar are basically family. I consider the alternative start mod an absolute requirement now.

I love Thief and Thief 2 but there are a few levels in there (Thieve’s Guild, Trace the Courier) that are pretty dull and uninteresting to replay. They’re the songs you’re still tempted to skip on otherwise perfect albums.