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calliope

@ calliope @retrolemmy.com

Posts
1
Comments
987
Joined
6 mo. ago

  • For those of you in the path of this big winter storm, how are you / how have you prepared?

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  • Yeah… you can tell the media hype is more about where the storm is heading than anything. It’s cold AF here (Midwest) but it happens.

    The entire Midwest, Great Plains, and all of the states between have been warned “two thirds of the U.S. will be hit by a massive storm!” by various media, and so far it hasn’t come close to being true. They were literally even warning the Great Plains last week.

    It started in Texas. It’s exceedingly rare for a winter storm to go straight north.

    I’ve been watching the weather maps. For days now the maps have projected that it will mainly affect the southeast. Current projections barely have it getting to New York City, let alone the rest of the state. The storm skirts every northern state until it gets to New Jersey.

    “Two hundred million people will be affected!” How are they counting this?

  • ICE Agent Charged With Misdemeanor Following Scuffle With an Activist

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  • Imagine going after a 68-year-old man who is filming you in public. Throw this shitty ICE agent under the jail.

    In an interview, Mr. Held, a 68-year-old trust and estate lawyer, said that he had been using his phone to record the agent from a sidewalk on Dec. 27, when Mr. Saracco approached him seeking to take the phone.

    “He had his hands on me and threw me to the ground,” Mr. Held said. “He did grab my phone, but I held onto it with both hands, I had to use all my might. I said, ‘Calm down, you have to de-escalate.’ I heard horns honking and he got off me, he did not get my phone.

    “Calm down, you have to de-escalate” is such a badass thing for him to say while being assaulted.

    These chuds deserve a lifetime of mockery.

  • hp hate

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  • I have never heard a better reason to take a bat to a printer.

  • The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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  • This seriously sounds like a nightmare.

    It’s giving me Eclipse IDE flashbacks where it seemed so complicated to configure I just hoped it didn’t break. There were a lot of those, actually.

  • How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

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  • Definitely not just you! This author is 100% right.

    One of the main jobs of a software developer is continually trying to convince people estimates are kind of stupid.

    If we already knew exactly how to build something, we would have built it already.

    The whole point is that it doesn’t exist, and there are a lot of inherent risks when building something that doesn’t already exist! Like, duh.

    The issue, of course, is that everyone not in software thinks it’s like traditional manufacturing and not research and development.

  • The lost art of XML — mmagueta

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  • There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML

    That’s for sure. But not in the way the author means.

    There exists a pattern in software development where people who weren’t around when the debate was actually happening write another theory-based article rehashing old debates like they’re saying something new. Every ten years or so!

    The amnesia is coming from inside the article.

    [XML] was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won.

    This comes across as remarkably naive to me. JavaScript and the browser didn’t “win” in this case.

    JSON is just vastly simpler to read and reason about for every purpose other than configuration files that are being parsed by someone else. Yaml is even more human-readable and easier to parse for most configuration uses… which is why people writing the configuration parser would rather use it than XML.

    Libraries to parse XML were/are extremely complex, by definition. Schemas work great as long as you’re not constantly changing them! Which, unfortunately, happens a lot in projects that are earlier in development.

    Switching to JSON for data reduced frustration during development by a massive amount. Since most development isn’t building on defined schemas, the supposed massive benefits of XML were nonexistent in practice.

    Even for configuration, the amount of “boilerplate” in XML is atrocious and there are (slightly) better things to use. Everyone used XML for configuration for Java twenty years ago, which was one of the popular backend languages (this author foolishly complains about Java too). I still dread the massive XML configuration files of past Java. Yaml is confusing in other ways, but XML is awful to work on and parse with any regularity.

    I used XML extensively back when everyone writing asynchronous web requests was debating between using the two (in “AJAX”, the X stands for XML).

    Once people started using JSON for data, they never went back to XML.

    Syntax highlighting only works in your editor, and even then it doesn’t help that much if you have a lot of data (like configuration files for large applications). Browsers could even display JSON with syntax highlighting in the browser, for obvious reasons — JSON is vastly simpler and easier to parse.

  • I hope this message finds you well.

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  • Two favorite birds come to mind!

    I think pigeons are really neat. When I lived in denser cities I loved seeing the different patterns and colors. White with black speckles (I think of them as “cookies and cream”) are my favorite.

    My other favorite is the nuthatch! They’re so cute. They hop down tree trunks and are really fun to watch! They make little peeping noises as they go, too. They’re super cute.

    I have many favorite birds it turns out. Tufted titmice, dark eyed juncos… female cardinals are so beautiful too! I love birds.

    Also, recruiters are seriously the worst!

  • Steve Yegge’s Gas Town: Vibe coding goes crypto scam

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  • Same, and I’ve obviously heard the name from his blog.

    Over time, it always gets easier to tell who writes blogs and who writes software.

  • Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog

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  • That was really interesting, thanks for sharing!

    I thought the illustrations of the settlement “plans” were especially cool.

  • Ubisoft shares drop 33% following its ‘major company reset’ announcement - The company’s share price has dropped 95% in total over the past eight years

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  • The fact that they have shareholders means that they’re likely to keep rehashing old stuff.

    Shareholders love “guaranteed” money, which is why movie studios keep making the same crap over and over again. It’s more stable.

  • The Death of Software Development

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  • He also seems to refer to himself by the title BDFL (“Benevolent Dictator For Life”) on his own company’s blog.

    Which is so cringey it makes my skin crawl.

    Every child with a blog is convinced they’re Guido van Rossum like it’s 2010.

  • The Death of Software Development

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  • This part

    I’ve always been passionate about finance. I used to be a regulated person— an executive director at a firm that created derivative products. Since moving on from that world, I still get the occasional urge to check macroeconomic data and dig into market dynamics.

    A few weeks ago, I decided to analyze Polymarket. I wanted to spot insider trading, whale activity, derive volatility — the kind of stuff only a finance nerd would care about.

    Maybe just me, but that screamed “finance bro” to me. “Since moving on from that world.”

    The inexperience in professional programming is indicated by the entire article. There’s a huge difference between a hobbyist who starts at 11 and a professional developer. Real professional developers don’t start with “I started when I was 11.” I started when I was 15, 20 years before the author did. Who cares?

    His LinkedIn shows little experience in professional development. Just a bunch of “CTO” positions.

    He dropped out of university in 2018 after eight years.

    I’ve also never heard anyone experienced say “I checked the code. It’s good.” Because it’s embarrassing. And he put it in writing. “LGTM 👍” Insightful.

  • What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure. | A decline in homicides across the country was a stunning reversal after crime rose during the pandemic.

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  • How is it a “stunning reversal” when it was declining significantly before the pandemic?

    It was declining before the pandemic. Everyone knew this. No one is stunned.

  • The Death of Software Development

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  • The authors of these articles always make it crystal clear how inexperienced they are.

    The role has transformed. Engineers are no longer writing software — they’re designing higher-order systems.

    Whoa you don’t say?! We’ve only been doing that for thirty years now. Glad you finally noticed.

    You know what the major problem has been for the past couple decades of my programming career? Hint: it wasn’t writing the code.

    Leave it to a finance bro to think everything he does is “DiSrUpTiNg.” What year is it?

  • Why I'm Leaving Big Tech

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  • Suicides Were Frequent at the Golden Gate Bridge. Not Anymore.

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  • One of the most (personally suicide-deterring) quotes I’ve ever read is from Golden Gate Bridge jump survivor Ken Baldwin.

    I realized then that all of the problems in my life that I thought were unsolvable were in fact solvable—except for having just jumped.

    There’s nothing more horrifying to me than the possibility of realizing that regret.

    There’s also a documentary called The Bridge that recorded jumpers while they were filming. “During filming, on average, one person jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge every 15 days.”

  • Both Beautiful and Terrible at the Same Time

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  • Blaming AI is such a sad excuse.

    By their own chart, StackOverflow’s decline started at least five years before the popularity of LLMs skyrocketed.

    Meanwhile, as a developer I feel like I wasn’t using Stack Overflow at all by 2020.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Oh I’m not complaining about you! It’s a major source. I have read their paper magazine.

    I’m like come on Hockey news, help us out.

  • Miami nightclub plays Ye's nazi song for Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes

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  • Written by American rapper Dave Blunts, it was produced by Quadwoofer and Sheffmade.

    “[Blunts] still defended the track, stating that, "everybody acts like they don't like [it]. It's a good fucking song. The beat was pretty good."

    Ok dummy.

    From the Wikipedia article on the song.

    Also the article linked says

    The video, which according to the The Express Tribune was recorded on Thursday, January 18th. [sic]

    Haha I doubt it!