Council Bluffs, IA. I once had family there and there’s a story in our family. One of them had a radio of some sort that works on trucker frequencies and he overheard a conversation between trucker CBs that went something like:

• “I’ve never been to Council Bluffs before. What’s it like?”
• “Well, if the earth needed an enema, Bluffs is where they’d put the tube.”

It used to be a railroad town, but the railroad pulled out and left economic carnage in its wake. Meanwhile, Omaha, just across the river, is comparatively very affluent with skilled jobs in tech, so Bluffs is kindof “the slums” (casualties of the worst end of capitalism.) and Omaha is all gentrified and hip, which rubs salt in the wound, and those who are still in Bluffs are the ones who lacked the wherewithal (luck, credit (social, financial, or otherwise), mental health, etc) to move to Omaha. Last time I was in Bluffs (and that was even before I knew the rail background story) it really felt like there was just a pall over the whole place. The strangers you saw at the grocery store or whatever just seemed “down and out” in an undefinable way. The local government seems some combination of corrupt and incompetent and the few folks I know of who still live in Bluffs there are racists and MAGA nuts and grifters and (I say this with love) deeply mentally ill. It’s a disturbingly strange and depressing place.

Bah! Ok, yeah. That’s super annoying. Hopefully they move uncharacteristically fast for you.

You sure deleting your cookies wouldn’t fix it?

Very possible it wouldn’t, but it’d be the first thing I’d try.

Necropost much?

Some of these are more than just one sentence, sorry.

“I just do what I’m told. That’s why I’m paid the big bucks.”

“Yeah, I quit <previous position> because the management wouldn’t step in to help me with <problem>, so the team was just completely run by the biggest personalities.”

“They don’t pay me enough to be on call outside business hours.”

“Yeah, I never turn my camera on in Zoom meetings.” (Particularly good if you have a remote position. Triggers scrum people because “Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication”.)

“Oh yeah, all the tickets where I work are super detailed. Really helps avoid distractions like having to go talk to the person who filed the ticket.” (Have you heard agile people “working software over comprehensive documentation” or “a ticket is a placeholder for a conversation”?)

“Why? Oh, I don’t know why they wanted me to do <such-and-such feature>. I just did it because they asked me to.”

“How is the business supposed to plan without the dev team coming up with an estimate in days up front?”

“Yeah, we’ve gotten better with our daily scrum meetings. They’re only like an hour now-a-days.”

“Yeah, we do demos every sprint. They go a lot better now that product doesn’t attend any more.”

“Yeah, <name of most senior dev> is the person who always works on the sprint goal. Everyone else works on whatever they’re a SME in.”

“Yeah, we missed the Big Deadline™. It was <intern>'s fault.”

“I think it would be better for the company to outsource its IT department.”

“Our JIRA board columns and swim lanes are standardized across the department ever since the JIRA Enforcement department took that over.”

And this next bit is just me editorializing. I personally have mixed feelings about agile in general. I’ve seen it completely disregarded to great peril, and I’ve also seen it taken extremely seriously in ways that actively cause problems. (Problems bad enough to be dealbreakers that prompted me to leave that particular employment position.) I also have great respect for the agile coach at that place, but there were definitely things he did that pissed me off too.

So, in the debate of agile vs. not-agile, I guess I think what’s best is for everyone to just appoint me supreme dictator for life so I can teach them all the right way to do things. 🫡

They knew.

Just today, I happen to have looked into what exactly keratin is. (The stuff that makes up your hair and finger nails.) It’s solid protein, made all the more solid (and all the less water-soluble) by the presence of the sulfer-containing amino acid cysteine. And fingernails have more of it than hair. Who knew?

Just like there was no agreement the last dozen times he said they’d reached an agreement. I’m beginning to think the man may not be entirely on the level.

(/s)

Because white folks already stole everything else from Native Americans.

For sure. But I’ve seen a lot more sins committed in the name of reusing code than in the name of minimizing dependencies.

Pretty infrequently.

And yet, not infrequently enough.

“A little copying is better than a little dependency.”

I’d think if your dog is too hot, you’d be better off making it a chili dog.

In my efficient capitalism?

(/s)

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

Sometimes the babies eat the mom too. Yes I speak from… I guess second-hand experience. First-hand would imply I was a matricidal cannibal hamster.

LLMs aren’t capable of doing any better. The only reason you or anyone might think they are is because of aggressive marketinggrifting by the very few people in a position to profit by convincing the world LLMs are basically the main ship computer from Star Trek when in fact they’re more like ELIZA.

As a super Dune nerd, Erasmus.

From DC: Larfleeze and Volthoom tied. Oh! The Anti-Monitor too.

From Supernatural (the TV series), Crowley is amazing.

BSG: Dr. Gaius Baltar.

I may soon be forced in a not-constructive-discharge kind of way out of my current job. If so, I’ll strongly consider setting this image as my profile image on my work accounts (work chat, wiki, Jira, etc) for the notice period.

I hate when apps say “3 years ago” or whatever and don’t make it easy to see more specifically when. Just put it in an on-hover popup please. (Lemmy-UI does this just fine, but there are plenty of sites out there that don’t.)