calcifer

One failure mode of an expert is that your experience can make you gloss over things that might be obvious to fresh eyes. And too many experts are too proud to take advantage of non-expert perspectives from time to time.

I can't tell you how many times a junior has helped me find a nasty bug by simply being a fresh pair of eyes and not having as many assumptions in their heads.

One of my friends:

you know, I just find it weird that the tech industry is so excited by the concept of outsourcing their thinking.

And I just… yeah. That. They’re so excited to outsource thinking that they’re willing to ignore that the tech doesn’t actually do that. How odd.

There used to be such an interesting theme ecosystem for stuff. There used to be constantly interesting and innovative window-manager and DE themes. WinAmp existed.

And not just themes. Music players had visualizers, and an active community producing new and interesting ones. There used to constantly be new screensavers pushing the capabilities of new hardware/OS facilities/etc.

These things are just... gone. Stagnant, or completely removed.

I love it when someone I mentor does cool stuff. One of the newly-minted senior devs got the standard stupid “productive people should be maximizing productivity” speech in a 1:1, where the manager heavily implied that future promotion would be blocked if they didn’t get even more productive

RE: @gloriouscow@oldbytes.space

Thanks I hate it

Oh right. This is why I took a break from management: managers are drama generators.

I’m temp managing a team while the permanent leader is on parental leave, and I’m already regretting agreeing to this.

My temporary peers are engaging in fact-free finger-pointing about an issue while the problem remains unsolved. Tomorrow I am apparently going to have to teach people the “solve it first, address accountability after the retro, if indicated” thing. Sigh.

The tension between

• your media is better when you respect and trust your audience

and

• a large portion of your audience actually need their hand held

Interviewed a therapist today whose immediate response to me mentioning I’m not religious was “do you think you might be a sociopath?”

Welp, at least I know right away I guess. Scratch that one off the list.

Most FPS games follow a path of “get more extreme weapons so you can fight ever harder enemies”.

I want the reverse. You start well-armed. Your shit breaks; you run out of specialized ammo with no more to be had. You’re thinning the enemy ranks as you go but your job get harder and you constantly have to worry that if you pull out a bigger gun, you’ll not have it when you really need it.

I don’t usually take work calls outside work hours, but I do trust a few people enough to give them a path to get hold of me in an emergency.

Happened tonight because a co-worker I supported for promotion had some Not Ok Words with someone, which is way out of character; and the person that reached out is like “they’re gonna fire her and it’s giving bad vibes”.

I feel like the under appreciated companion to “touch grass” is “spend time face to face with people”. It’s definitely less pithy.

But spending time in the same physical space with people is important for our brains. It’s literally a physiological need, even if you’re a huge introvert.

It is best if you have some kind of bond with them (even if it’s just community or acquaintance).

Well heck this could be a grindr alternative

Great genre of internet comment: people genuinely unaware that a great many Pokémon are modeled at least a little after real animals, who have seen a posted photo of said real animal, and are very excited that the real animal “looks like a Pokémon”

I had described a behavior from my spouse as “bullying”. My therapist said they weren’t sure about that, and asked if there were other behaviors I feel that way about. Sure.

So they asked me to make a list of bullying behaviors. Shared ahead and we talked about it in session today.

“Ok that’s mostly not bullying, but it does seem an awful lot like abuse”. Huh. I may have needed to hear that.

Co-parent is out of town, so I’ve been able to get the house clean and put banana bread in the oven and get the kids’ rooms tidied and vacuumed so they can do their Weekly Remote D&D

Kids have been excellent helpers! Definitely starting to be more attentive to what needs to be done and just doing it.

I’m winding up almost all my fiction reading at the same time. And I want to read some really good sci-fi or science-fantasy, preferably set in a high-tech world. But I am absolutely spoiled for choice.

Recommend me something?

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@sargoth@mastodon.social @mark@mastodon.ocert.at

1. When events are unfolding, especially if they are complex, a lot of propaganda enters the stream. You are not well-positioned to separate the propaganda from the genuine, in most cases, in the moment. It is not a failure to be patient and wait for reliable information

My employer makes AI optional for devs (“we’ll pay for Claude Code if you want it, but you have to ask and we’ll expect return on it”). Adoption is around 40%; which means I’ve now been asked to spend some time building guidelines and job aids for use.

🧵1/4