I watched a ton of standup comedy specials yesterday, and I have confirmed by belief that in general, women and queer comedians are far funnier than straight men, with Hank Green being an exception to the rule. (Patton Oswalt was okay too.)
I’m not exactly looking forward to this work week. Our sprint ends on Thursday, and I still have a ton to do before meeting my goals.
But there is a limit to how much time I will put in. I’ve done the “going above and beyond” thing, and it isn’t worth it. It just isn’t.
If I can’t meet the goals while working a standard 40-hour work week, then it is a failure in management, not in labor.
So I’m watching a bunch of different standup specials, and of course a few of them mention the pandemic, and all of the sudden it hit me: the world STOPPED. For a YEAR. Like, of course I’ve known that, but somehow it hit me like I hadn’t realized it. An entire year. And I, like, memory-holed it. And I literally divide my life into “before” and “after” periods. It’s so weird.
Projects adopting “no LLM-generated content” rules is a good thing. If a project doesn’t want that in their repo, they have the right to forbid it.
My fear is that human content, especially from some neurodivergent individuals, will be flagged as “LLM-generated”. Because I’ve written like an LLM long before they were a thing. And this will only become more of a problem as models evolve.
I don’t see how you end up enforcing rules like that short of personally knowing every contributor and trusting them not to use any generative-AI tools.
(And as a disclaimer, I have used Claude personally, and *must* use it professionally. I am not pro-GenAI, but neither am I an anti-GenAI absolutist.)
This is what's in the manual of my 1989 alarm clock in case you didn't know what we lost in repairability in just 10 - 20 years
It isn’t a work day, but I get up early anyway so I can have my slow morning.
The hallway and living room may be a mess, but the Hue is set to bathe them in colored lights until 7:00am, when they gradually brighten into their usual daily illumination.
The house is quiet and peaceful; the bubbling aquarium, whirring air filter, and ticking clock on the wall mingle with the sounds of distant traffic outside.
For just this moment, there are no responsibilities, no worries, just flavored coffee, a battered old leather chair, and myself.
“PHP, Gitlab, Node.js, the Number Four. Being a systems administrator today is more stressful than ever. Today, we’ll take a look at the best types of gin to help you cope with the horrors of the modern Internet, on this edition of ‘The Computer Chronicles.’”
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but impatience is the father of destruction.
Colin Hanks looks like someone tried to draw Tom Hanks from memory and didn’t quite get his face right
🔷 We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people; all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.
— The Eleventh Doctor, The Time of the Doctor
Continuing my reignited Balatro obsession lately.
Purple stake keeps destroying me, regardless of deck.
Likewise, Ante 11 always breaks me.
qBittorrent, the most popular BitTorrent client, has released version 5.3 and it is a big one, defaulting to supporting both v1 and v2 torrents. Previously you had to D/L a separate v2 client, and almost no one did that.
v2 torrents support individual file torrenting. If a file you want to D/L from a torrent is also included in 10 different torrents you now have 11 sources, not just the one from your initial torrent file. This should really help with abandoned torrents and disappearing files.
https://www.qbittorrent.org/news
https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
Little known fact: PHP stands for “Perfectly Hacked and Pwned”
It works!
The issue: according to Norton Utilities, the partition type was BIGDOS instead of FAT-16. Not sure why; DOS 4.01 FDISK shouldn’t have marked it as BIGDOS as far as I know. Also don’t know why that would give the XT-IDE trouble, but whatever…
Problem now is this is a 16GB CF card using only 528MB of its space, so I ordered a few other brands of 1GB card in the hopes that one of them will work.
Another thing I realized while running diagnostics: my naive 9-pin CGA to 15-pin VGA adapter cable ignores the intensity bit, so I’d need some in-between circuitry to get all the colors showing properly! (Edit: oh hey look, a circuit for almost exactly what I need: http://www.edn.com/cga-scart-adapter/)
(Edit 2: the drive will absolutely not work with this hack as-is; it would corrupt anything past 32MB due to the partition type being wrong)
Caught another field mouse last night. I’ve put the live trap next to Slate’s enclosure. We’d never feed a wild field mouse to Slate — they could carry diseases and/or injure the snake — but maybe, after I bring this guy/gal over to the prairie reserve, he’ll tell the tale of the house guarded by a huge and terrifying serpent, discouraging others from attempting to break in. 😆
While waiting on various things during the workday, I tried to get my XT-IDE card working with a CF card in my IBM 5150. It was *not* having it. I forced the card to use CHS addressing, which limited it to 528MB but should be more compatible with earlier DOS versions, but while I can format/read/write it, it will NOT boot. I wiped the MBR and recreated it. I made sure the single primary partition is active and the system is installed via FORMAT C: /S. But it just hangs when trying to boot.
Maybe I’ll try another CF card, or CF-to-IDE adapter, I don’t know…
Been playing a lot of Balatro lately. It helps me practice “failing slow”.
I’m reasonably okay at failing fast: putting a bit of work in, seeing that it isn’t working out, and abandoning it to start over. But I *suck* at failing slow. If I put a lot of time and effort into something, and it falls apart, I take it as a personal flaw. I get bitter and angry at myself, to have invested so much in a lost cause.
It doesn’t occur to me that the time and effort are still worthwhile even if the result doesn’t work out.
But when you get to the higher levels of Balatro — or indeed, anything — that happens *all the time*. You’re having a spectacular run right up until one round wrecks you. And that’s *okay*. That’s how we improve, consciously or otherwise.
I’m 47, but I’m still learning how to lose gracefully.
Please help!
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Current status, as of Oct 23:
***Our electricity has 3 days before it's cut off***
My wife is switching jobs. She'll get a little bit worse pay but better and more consistent hours. (It's also unionized, so yay!) But there was a hiccup with the scheduling: She expected to start last Wednesday, so she quit at Walmart, but now they've moved her start date to this coming Thursday, so we lost a week of pay.
In the meantime, we have to pay $223.26 by 10/26 to avoid our electricity being disconnected. I'm also getting calls about our internet going unpaid.
Can anybody help us out, please?
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I was recently laid off again, before we could properly get back on our feet. We have no savings. My wife's new part time job at Walmart isn't enough to even cover our bills alone, much less food and gas. We really need help. We are eating one meal a day, mostly consisting of hot dogs, beans, or eggs, but even that isn't a sure thing. And we are out of food for our dogs.
Please boost for reach! (If you've already boosted, you can unboost and then boost again.) Any help you can give, however small, can make a huge difference for us.
https://paypal.me/AaronHosford
https://account.venmo.com/u/Aaron-Hosford-42
https://Ko-fi.com/aaronhosford
I realized I never posted a picture of our new snake here. Slate is a pretty common corn snake. He still wiggles quite a bit when handled, but my daughter is holding him every day to get him more acclimated to it. His skin is extremely smooth, cool, and soft, a bit like worn leather to the touch.
Since I know some folks are afraid of snakes I’m CWing this post, but he’s totally harmless; even on the rare chance he did bite it would be roughly on par with that of a puppy.
