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Joined 23 days ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • I’m a purist. The stable and persistent main branch, regardless of what you want to call it, should always and only ever be exactly the same as the code that’s currently deployed to the production server. Generally the only exception is for the short duration between a push and deployment under normal circumstances.

    But every job I’ve ever had, there’s at least one maverick who knows git way better than anybody else and is super advanced, so they do their own thing which is totally better in a million different ways but essentially fucks everybody else over. And I’m not even here to say they aren’t smarter than the rest of us and I’m sure that somehow their process is better than what we currently do. But with version control, my anecdotal experience has been that the most important things for running smoothly are: consistency and having everybody on the same page. Process doesn’t need to be perfect, maximally efficient, bleeding edge, etc to achieve that.


  • I’ll be interested to read the other comments when I have the time/attention span.

    It could just be the part of the country where I live (i.e. deeply conservative rural south), but everybody I know who identifies as a Libertarian (going to hand wave over the reality of whether the pedants and purists would agree) is basically what’s termed as “Republican-lite” or “Conservative-lite” aka right-wing.

    If I tell you I’m a Libertarian, but my voting record is such that I’ve essentially only voted for Republican candidates in all prominent elections in the past decade (or sometimes more) and/or the majority of my political speech is in opposition to Democratic politicians and liberal policies, what does that suggest?

    If I identify as a vegan but I like to eat meat with every meal, am I really a vegan?



  • People living in cities sometimes leave and many have not lived in a city their whole lives. Additionally, the power can go out at night in cities. For instance, where I live we sometimes get tropical storms, winter storms, and other disasters that can knock out power for hours (and even days) even inside the city – I imagine that’s not uncommon elsewhere. A lot of cities in poorer nations ration power or only have electricity available during certain hours.

    So, overall, I would say that it’s probably not the case that “most” people have never seen a full starry night unless you’re getting super technical and pedantic about the word “full” to where you’re specifically asking about a completely unobstructed view with 0% light pollution, in which case then I would say that almost nobody has seen a full starry night in that case, regardless of whether or not they live in a city.



  • Intentionally inflammatory posts? I haven’t noticed an uptick, honestly. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one and doesn’t mean I won’t notice now that you posted it.

    But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

    Mostly I assume we must’ve recently gotten an influx of new users from Reddit or someplace similarly toxic. Things usually get a bit unfortunate for a time when that happens.






  • Is there a name for this video artifact effect in this image? I’d love to see a bunch of this.

    It reminds me of the early 2000’s digital satellite television. Any time the signal got blocked a bit by the weather, the on-screen content would do this. Very trippy. Later on when cable tv in my area switched to digital, I noticed it happening there, too, but nowhere near as often as in satellite. Now that over the air is all digital where I live, however, I almost never see this happening anymore. I guess it’s not a thing that happens as much with modern encoding formats.


  • To be honest, the self checkouts are almost always time savers for me, but it really depends on the store and set-up.

    The poorly designed machines that make you touch the screen before you can even start, scan each item one by one, place each individual item in the bagging area and leave it on the scale until the very end, use “AI” to make sure you’re not stealing, and then force you to select your payment option on the touchscreen rather than just automatically detect when you’ve swiped/tapped? Yes, those are an abomination.

    However, there are a few stores in my area (surprisingly Walmart is one of them) where they’ve mostly got a decent implementation. You can walk up and just start scanning. You don’t even have to place items in the bagging area/scale, you can literally scan everything in the cart with that hand scanner if you want. There’s probably loss prevention / AI watching you do your thing, but I don’t know. I’ve never been stopped by it or noticed anybody else getting stopped. If I tap my card at any point, it automatically understands I’m paying now and just wraps the order up. Plus, these places usually have a sufficient number of the machines with an open corral style set-up, so that one or two people who’ve never seen a self-checkout machine in their entire life are only tying up one or two machines and the rest can move pretty quickly.



  • My current “provider” is an NP. I like her, she’s personable and does the basic stuff well enough. I can understand having her do the basic annual physical type stuff for relatively young and healthy people.

    But, for one of my recent visits, they scheduled me with a doctor instead (dunno why), and the experience was honestly almost night and day for the better. Granted, the way my health insurance works (ugh USA), the NP visits only ever cost me a flat amount, perhaps $45 for the copay. The doctor’s visit cost me the $45 copay, plus additional coinsurance down the line that I got billed a couple of months later because the clinic apparently charges two different rates depending on whether you see a doctor or not, I guess?


  • I bought a handful of cheap / deep discount games during the Summer Sale this year.

    One I wasn’t sure about was BIOTA. Turns out it’s been more fun than I expected for such a simplistic game.

    I’ve also been playing Blasphemous. I really like Metroidvanias but these “souls like” style games are irritating to me. Still, it was cheap and I can appreciate the aesthetic.

    I’m looking forward to having more time to play these games, as of yet, it’s been like 20 minutes here, 30 minutes a few days later, so it’s hard to make much progress and enjoy them with such limited time to dive in.