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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

    They’ve got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is “why hasn’t the competition eaten their lunch already”.



  • I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

    Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

    It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.


  • Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

    Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

    Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.


  • I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

    Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.


  • I am not saying it did not sell. That’s the one thing it did really well. But it’s hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s certainly not good.

    Over 6+ books it’s really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it’s really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don’t risk writing yourself into a corner. I’m sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically – it’s hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

    Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it’s hard, but that’s what storytellers do.


  • Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with “yer a wizard” in the first 50 pages and that’s the end of his character arc. From then on he’s a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

    … As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry’s uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don’t recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.



  • Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

    Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

    That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

    Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

    The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.







  • I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.

    It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.

    What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.


  • “Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

    Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.


  • Ideally you’d use the docker executor with a dind service instead of docker commands in the shell. You’ll have better isolation (e.g. no conflicts from open port forwards) and better forward-compatibility (the pipeline won’t break every time a major upgrade is applied to the runner because the docker - especially compose - CLI is unstable).


  • For gitlab this is only correct with a shell executor which is to be avoided in the general case in favor of a docker or k8s executor for isolation&repeatability.

    Those you can actually run locally with gitlab-runner, but then you won’t have all your gitlab instance’s CI variables so it’s a PITA if you need a CI token which you probably do if you actually make decent use of gitlab’s features.

    In most cases I just end up committing my changes to avoid the headache. :!git commit --amend --no-edit && git push -f goes pretty dang fast and 60 % of the time third time’s the charm.


  • One thing people who don’t build products tend to imagine is that PMs are constantly doing market research, data analysis, focus groups, etc.

    That may be true at some companies, but IME they can be clueless beyond belief because their real job is to be salespeople. They sell dreams to executives. Whether those will actually sell is a much lower concern.

    See also: AI being shoved down everyone’s throats.


  • My guess is the same thing as “critics say [x]”. The journalist has an obvious opinion but isn’t allowed by their head of redaction to put it in, so to maintain the illusion of NeutTraLITy™©® they find a strawman to hold that opinion for them.

    I guess now they don’t even need to find a tweet with 3 likes to present a convenient quote from “critics” or “the public” or “internet commenters” or “sources”, they can just ask ChatGPT to generate it for them. Either way any redaction where that kind of shit flies is not doing serious journalism.