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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • My roommate had a butterfly knife in his room and I wanted to play with it. I was drunk and my hands were greasy from eating KFC.

    It slipped (more like threw it at the ground) due to incompetence and impairment and greasy KFC hands. I didn’t want it to get mashed on the ground so I used my lighting fast reflexes to catch a knife I just threw. Point first. Into my palm. My greasy drunk palm.

    Cleaned up the evidence as best I could. Put it back. Should 100% have gone to get it stitched up, but didn’t, and ended up with some nerve damage and scar tissue crowding some tendons.

    I haven’t really retold this story in a long time. As I’m typing this…



  • Steady uptick in trick or treaters over the last 3 years. I think the neighborhood demographic is shifting to having more kids in the area.

    We have a pretty large population of new immigrants in the area too, many with kids, and I think they weren’t super familiar with the concept of Halloween when they arrived. I mean… it does sound kinda insane if you didn’t grow up with it.

    But I think they’ve realized that yes, it is a real thing… strangers will happily shovel candy at your children when they knock on a door.

    Makes me very happy, it’s such a community building event. I was explaining to my newish-to-canada wife that as a kid it’s almost better than Christmas. As fun as Christmas is, as a kid you’re still the passenger. Halloween you actually have some agency… what are you going to dress up as? Who do you want to trick or treat with? What route do you want to take? What candy do you want to barter with your friends afterwards?





  • A crazy number of devs weren’t even using EXISTING code assistant tooling.

    Enterprise grade IDEs already had tons of tooling to generate classes and perform refactoring in a sane and algorithmic way. In a way that was deterministic.

    So many use cases people have tried to sell me on (boilerplate handling) and im like “you have that now and don’t even use it!”.

    I think there is probably a way to use llms to try and extract intention and then call real dependable tools to actually perform the actions. This cult of purity where the llm must actually be generating the tokens themselves… why?

    I’m all for coding tools. I love them. They have to actually work though. Paradigm is completely wrong right now. I don’t need it to “appear” good, i need it to BE good.





  • I’m not suggesting it’s beneficial to remove these people.

    I’m suggesting that they be paid the market value for thier talents and that their presence benefit that nation, not a specific company.

    H1B should be replaced by visas with no ties to a company. That’s it.

    When you argue about global markets, i see that as completely unrelated. There is a mechanism for that already and it’s called offshoreing. You wanna move a factory or tech work to an area with a lower cost of living and can pay them less? Go nuts. You want people on shore? Allow them unfettered access to market their skills at the market price of the labour.

    Again, I’m not against people who are here (there, the USA), and I empathize with rural Healthcare. As a rural Canadian all of my doctors have been originally from South Africa for as long as I’ve been alive.

    This genuinely isn’t an anti-immigrant stance. My wife is an immigrant.

    Bring people to your nation and invite them to join your society. The whole idea of bringing people in as second class citizens to be exploited is perverse. I’m not saying don’t have the people. I’m saying empowering those people is in the best interests of abso-fucking-lutely everyone.

    Except the CEOs, i guess, but you’ll forgive me if I can’t muster a tear.


  • H1-B’s, being tied to a company, are extremely exploitive.

    In Canada, you get fired/quit you don’t get a paycheck.

    In the US, if you’re a citizen or green card holder, you get fired/quit you don’t get a paycheck AND you lose your Healthcare. This is a major way to abuse your workers.

    In the US, if you’re H1B and you get fired/quit you don’t get a paycheck, lose your Healthcare insurance, and are ejected from the country. You can’t even just switch jobs. It’s extremely predatory and allows companies to fuck you so badly because you have so much to lose.

    If the workers were truly great talent, it’s in the interest of the country to have them working ANYWHERE in the country. If they were TRULY great rare talents in industries starved for workers, it’s counter productive to not let the free hand of the market guide them to the best employers.

    That’s the scam.

    H1Bs, being tied to a company, provide a clear incentive for abuse by a company to use them to pay people less than market wages knowing there is no recourse. It deflated the market value of local workers. Average workers who’ll work for below average pay, accept unlimited overtime, and not push back on HR violations or even explicitly illegal actions by their employers is a big win for the company.

    They aren’t the best and brightest. They by definition can’t be. With the reality of the arrangement, the “best and brightest” can and will and always have found greener less abusive pastures elsewhere.

    If you want to be in that arrangement, you’re not that bright. If you can’t find better, you’re not the best.

    H1B is a really bad program. Employers mobility would mitigate most of my issues, but that will NEVER happen because from the industry, that’s the whole point





  • Led Zeppelin - How the West Was Won

    I’d heard many times from people who were old enough to see them live that it was a completely unique experience, describing how the band fed off the energy of the crowd.

    Didn’t fully comprehend the magnitude of that truth until I heard that live album. I’ve heard other live albums from other artists where it was performed roughly the same as the studio version with the further addition of a cheering crowd. This was a completely different animal.

    How The West Was Won really showcased how malleable a work is in the hands of truly talented artists.


  • As others have said, the mailbox and booby-trap laws aren’t the same thing.

    Setting aside basic morality for a second, and strictly from a societal organizational perspective of which is the purpose of law, they’re incompatible with the reality of society.

    For starters, there is literally nowhere you can put one that society has agreed is off limits in all circumstances forever, which is important because the nature of a trap is that they can survive longer than whoever set it.

    Consider your neighbor witnesses you clutch your chest and collapse in your home so they call 911, and the first responders get blasted by a tripwire shotgun. Consider you get hit by a car and die, and your next of kin come to gather your belongings and meet the same fate. Consider you booby trap a basement closet, get dimentia, and your homecare worker gets blasted because you forgot you even did that when you were young and insane rather than merely old and demented.

    By nature of a booby trap, you can’t foresee who will trip it or why. You’ve surrendered contextual judgement. It strictly CAN NOT be proportional.