Neither. Cutting down a healthy tree for a little ritual seems extremely wasteful to me. I don’t care much about Xmas so I don’t have a fake tree, either. I do have lights up in the apartment, but they’re up year round. I like the colors.

It’s the only MMO I felt was good. Feels like a real game. No level or gear grind.

I didn’t do the latest expansion yet but I’ve done all the others.

That’s how I read it as well. People who say there’s no ethical consumption, and then act like all wrongs are equally wrong so they might as well do the worst thing.

I remember a bunch of coworkers leaving during COVID and I was like “ok but what’re you going to do after? It’s fucking boring where you’re moving to.”

I’m a Republican

In 2025? Why on earth? No Republican policy is good. Their policies don’t align with their marketing.

He’s not even in office until January , so anyone sincerely saying that has an extra layer of idiocy.

I buy music. Drm free. I don’t want to rent it from Spotify. It’s Bandcamp Friday today btw, where the people making the music get a bigger cut.

People get mad when things make them feel bad. They don’t want to fix anything they just don’t want to feel bad.

Yeah if AI was actually good you wouldn’t need to mandate it. No one was like “everyone here must use Google search”.

On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.

On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.

On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.

Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.

Companies fill up with idiots and parasites. People who are adept at thriving in the role without actually producing value. Google is no exception.

Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?

The answer to all of those I think is no.

There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.

There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.

That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.

I saw her give a talk once. Someone asked her about the environment or climate change, and she said something like “There’s like 100 people responsible for most of the problem, and we know where they live.”

The crowd loved this answer. The guy moderating the event made nervous noises.

One of the first times I took the path train (it’s a light rail in NJ/NYC. Basically another subway line). I sit down, and an older guy in a suit sits down next to me. He’s got like a box in a plastic bag in his lap. No big deal.

This was in like 2002. He didn’t have a cell phone or earphones. Just sitting quietly, waiting for the train to leave.

He started to giggle. Little chuckles. And then escalated to full laughs. It rises and rises until he’s like cackling. And then he calms down, reverses all the way through giggles and back to silence. Never said a word.

I don’t know what was in the box. I didn’t ask. I assume he just got away with a killer heist.

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

A drink and food at a local spot. Wasn’t a black Friday sale or anything, but we stopped in.

Didn’t chase any sales or buy anything of note. Don’t need much.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

Saint Luigi preserve us.

I care about music. I look for new stuff I enjoy. I listen to albums. I think about the lyrics. I see bands live when they tour. Sometimes I make mixes with a theme.

I used to ask people sometimes if they made mixes, and if so where they fell on the spectrum of “these are some songs I like” and “each songs inclusion and ordering has been carefully considered”.

I don’t just hit shuffle or let an algorithm wander through music. Songs are like spells and different tunes evoke different feelings.

I don’t relate to people when they say they like “all kinds of music” or “I listen to a dozen new songs every day”. That’s just not enough time spent with those new songs to form any sort of bond, for me.

I only have a couple friends who have what I call an interoperable relationship with music. It’s not that we like the same music, but that the music we each like, we like in a mutually comprehensible way. Like I can say to my friend, "oh this song could go right next to that song because xyz ", and they’ll be like “oh that’s good. abc fits in with them, too”.

My other friends, talking about music, at most I get a “cool song, bro”.