The early twenties intermediate dev on my team was explaining the other week that if you remember a time before smartphones and broadband, you are old

I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024

Sounds like a great idea - I suspect the biggest obstacle will be finding someone at the home who is confident enough in what to do with it to be willing to accept it.

I’ve run into similar issues with schools where they are hesitant to accept donations of things like that because they don’t want to be saddled with equipment they don’t know how to use and maintain. Maybe worth seeing if you can raise a bit of money for a second hand Xbox or something?

There is one standard way to cast fireball - it works, it’s cheap, it very rarely backfires, it’s in all the textbooks, everyone knows how it behaves - but sometimes you sit down in a tavern next to another wizard and you just know before they even open their mouth that they are going to spend the next twenty five minutes telling you about how they learnt this alternative way to cast it and it’s taken a bit of practice but they can just about cast it as fast as they could before and how it’s so much more ergonomic or whatever

Debugging spells is just as much a dark art as spell crafting itself. When I was a young apprentice we didn’t have as sophisticated tools as you do now; you had to make sure you noted down your intermediate runes correctly and use those symbols to divine some meaning from the ashes of your failed spell. One time I mixed up my notes with the symbols of a different spell and when I sprinkled the ashes on the stack I was stuck speaking in tounges for a week.

These days of course you can summon a lesser demon to freeze your spell and ask it about the state, but the demons can be tricky and it’s easy for novices to make a mistake and allow the demon to run amok - makes a real mess of the lab.

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that’s been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it’s not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

Removed by mod

True randomness is really really hard to do in software; bigger CPUs often have hardware random number generators that exploit some sort of quantum or otherwise non-determanistic phenomena, but in software the best you can do is pseudo-random. These are algorithms that generate a sequence of randomly distributed numbers, but in a deterministic way - from a given starting state, it will always generate the same sequence of numbers. Good algorithms are designed to make it hard to infer the starting state just by observing the sequence (if you can do that, you can run the algorithm in parallel and predict the next number), but that’s an active area of research.

At a guess, the calculator was programmed to initialise the random number generator from something that it is hard for the user to control (milliseconds since power on would be a good one) the first time you used it, but maybe TI got lazy and just initialised it to a constant value

Same boat- AMAB, and no dysphoria with that at all, but yeah, a little jealous of women’s fashion options.

It’s taken me until my mid thirties, but things I’ve come to realise:

• There are a bunch more options for women - entire categories of garments that aren’t socially applicable for men to wear - but a lot of that comes from a much wider variance in body shape for women. There are plenty of things that just don’t work if you aren’t a size 12 B-cup with a conventional body shape. A cropped top is just as off limits if you are a woman with a bit of a tummy or D+ cup breasts as it is for men
• There are options for men, but they aren’t always as obvious, and often end up looking more formal - try different shoes, different coloured belts layering things (open shirt over a t-shirt etc)
• Most men (and I’m super guilty of this) don’t get a haircut as often as they should. There is a whole world of options and styles, try some out, find one you like from a barber you have a rapport with, go regularly to keep it looking good

I think the conclusion is that as a population of people grows the average behaviour stays pretty much fine, but the extremes of the bell curve become more apparent

Yeah, not even slightly true. Know a few people who work support for a major piece of financials software. Company has a written procedure for dealing with death threats that gets exercised multiple times per year

How’s the rollout of the 10G stuff going? Seems like it’s been coming “soon” for the last couple of years. Not that I could actually make use of 10G down.

950 down, 500 up for $109NZD/month

Do this specifically so a judge has to rule if someone is being a dick or not. File amicus briefs on the definition of being a dick. Assemble a jury of peers to decide if the defendants are being a dick. Appeal to the supreme court to rule if the court erred in their judgement of the dickishness at question in this matter.

Not had to do this myself, but any time we are hiring someone technical their CV lands on my desk.

1. Having a portfolio at all puts you in the top 10% of candidates. No, sticking your course assignments on GitHub doesn’t count.
2. If I’m hiring a full stack dev, I’d probably be more interested in seeing a well-developed “thin slice” through all the layers than lots of features - it’s a portfolio piece, you don’t need to convince me to buy it, just that you might be interesting to talk to.
3. No matter what you do, I’m probably going to ask you to defend your technology/design/architecture choices, partly to see how you react to criticism, partly to see if you can talk intelligently about things.
4. Personally I’m a pragmatist, so I’d probably rather see that you’ve gone and found a suitable ORM/front end framework/… and used it sensibly than written everything by hand yourself (a builder who insists on forging their own nails isn’t a very good builder), but be prepared to talk about the tools you’ve used

$229k NZD for a 2 bed, 1 bath 80sqm slumlord rental in a shit neighbourhood in Christchurch, New Zealand

I spent a couple of years doing contract work in a team that built the APIs that ran behind a fairly complex site; they understood that I was helping build the site, but really didn’t get that I had nothing at all to do with the UI or content, and yes thank you for your suggestions about the layout but that’s not something that I can “just go fix it” because a) change control is a thing and b) that part of the site is maintained by an entirely different team, from a different company, and I don’t have access to their source code

Baking is applied chemistry. Cooking is jazz

Typically, you’d need to maintain at least an A- average GPA to be accepted into the next year of study.

Describing American pizza and Italian pizza as being the same thing is imperialism