Nicole Madeline 🏳️‍⚧️ 🌈

the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is actually about me trying to find the IP address for my wife’s printer

here’s how I use LLMs to help me with my personal projects

1. run into a problem I think is hard
2. think “i bet an LLM could do this for me”
3. remember that that means i can do it myself
4. then do it myself

telling someone you appreciate what they do is free

I spent Friday evening until Tuesday morning at an intergenerational queer quaker retreat, and readjusting to life outside of that sanctuary has been interesting.

one thing I miss is gathering for meeting for worship every morning, and being in that state with so many people who are like me. and I miss seeing my older peers, who showed me a future for myself when I used to have trouble seeing myself grow old.

My alarm clock plays birdsong to wake me up, and it is a wonderful, calm waking. Aaand now a bird has moved in next to my bedroom whose call is identical to one of the ones on my alarm. That bird wakes me up if my alarm is off, and doesn’t let me sleep in 🤦‍♀️

you mention being sick to any healthy person and they’re quick to reassure you that you’ll get better eventually

they’re really comforting themselves, not being able to stomach the thought of being in pain and sick forever

“clitoris” sounds like a dinosaur of you stress the middle syllable

answering questions for a doctor, “any allergies to latex?”
“no, but I do prefer typst”

telling your friends you love them is free

*checks watch* oh it's that time, shameless plug o'clock! I have some openings on my coaching rolls.

if you've been feeling stuck professionally as a software engineer, reach out. https://ntietz.com/coaching/

maybe you're trying to get a new job and struggling, or wanting to get that next promotion, or you can't figure out what's going wrong in those meetings but they sure don't go well. I've helped clients with all of these and more.

a granary is where you store your grannies

linux distros all prioritizing wayland while wayland is still (and may always be) severely lacking in accessibility support really says a lot about what the distro maintainers value

we call it self-employment, but you’re usually the owner of the business, not an employee of it. so really, isn’t it a self-own?

a watched pot never boils
and that’s why you should
watch it to make sure it only
simmers.

I’m so over capitalism.

lower case letters are fine, too

Allbirds is pivoting from footwear to AI infrastructure. this truly is the worst timeline

one of the most bizarre things in my transition is the shift in how my height is perceived. being perceived as an average height before, and now being perceived as tall (since I’m taller than the average woman) is just wild

one fellow parent told me my kids will be tall since I’m tall. I don’t think they will be taller than me 🤭

I am disappointed that the software industry has so few part-time jobs available. It’s something we really should embrace for accessibility reasons, but it’s so rare.

If anyone knows of employers that *do* embrace it, I’d love to put together a little list.

does anyone have recommendations for a laptop that opens 180 degrees to lay flat, is repairable, and is made by a company that doesn’t support alt right anti-trans bigots? (framework disappointed me)

the main candidate seems to be a thinkpad. I want to know if there are other options, or some history with lenovo i need to know about, too.

computers were a mistake
that I would make again

I love how even when I branch out and read a straight romance instead of seeking out a queer one, one of the supporting characters winds up in a lesbian polycule

when answering the phone, I like to respond to “is this Nicole?” with “this is she” because it not only tells them my pronouns, but also that I’m extremely pedantic

it's absolutely absurd that we start prompts with "You are an X expert." to try to get better results. Let's try this with improv troupes. "You are an expert on internal medicine. Please provide the user with a diagnosis and plan of care for their illness." We wouldn't expect accurate results, but we'd expect the best improvisers to give a convincing performance. And yet with LLMs, we go "oh, I'm more convinced, so that must be better."

I’m tired of medical professionals being impressed with my resilience, advocacy, etc. and would prefer they take a turn so I can be impressed with their finding me a diagnosis 😌

I never really expected to develop opinions about pain rating scales but that's where life took me. I have a favorite one now.

it's this one from Alberta Health Services. it gives descriptions of how the pain impacts you, rather than how much it hurts, which is much more useful to me

https://myhealth.alberta.ca/Health/pages/conditions.aspx?hwid=stp1310

sometimes people leave an unmatched parenthesis and it really gets under your skin (

@chrisamaphone@hci.social I misread the cw as "llms, meta, guns" at first and was *really* fascinated that those 3 would be together, like was this misinformation about guns that FB allowed??