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I have seen the infamous Metro Trains JSON PID

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Angel at Edmonton

Another version of this photo taken at Edmonton Green. The bus station has canopy covers that resemble angel wings. So here's Andreya posing as an angel with a big bus roundel halo above her.

#photography

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Read this out loud.
If you know the original source of this, please let me know so I can give credit!
This entry was edited (Sunday, September 15, 2024, 2:26 PM)

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I know it's only a date and in fact it's quite a nice warm day out there, but I'm kind of sad that it's the first day of meterological Autumn. It feels as if I've lost the summer somehow amidst tiredness and sadness, and not been able to make the most of it for all sorts of random reasons. Worldcon was a massive highlight and perhaps I've got a bit of comedown from that and am feeling sad because I'm still fighting post-Covid tiredness. I dunno. Maybe it's just depression or hormones.
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I wrote about "Past Tense, parts 1 & 2", aka the Bell Riots episodes, from Star Trek Deep Space 9, and how their version of San Francisco in late August 2024 compares to the one we're living through today: cohost.org/vectorpoem/post/711…

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Me in the 1990s: This Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok" is ridiculous. These aliens could never travel the galaxy on metaphors.

Me in a 1:1 with my manager just now: Pam, at Dunder Mifflin, her pictures identical.

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Well, this is a thing. Brazil has banned Twitter, imposing a fine of R$50000 per day for accessing it. noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnotic…
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The ruination of Twitter is hitting crowdfunding projects hard. Which is lousy because that's where so much innovative and interesting writing can be found these days. Do take a look, support if you choose to, and boost the signal, please and thank you.

Over on my blog, details of the latest ZNBLLC Kickstarter
to give you 3 new great anthologies AMPYRIUM: MERCHANT WAR, SKULL X BONES and WERE-2

julietemckenna.com/its-znb-kic…

#writing

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This is great and actually explains a few things that I sort of knew but often figured out by trial and error.

I especially like "[USB] has the huge upside that you can generally plug a USB device into your computer without having to spend a lot of time thinking about the details of the interconnect.

Fortunately, USB-C, Thunderbolt, and Lightning have come along to fix that."

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In May this year, Peter Hendy pressured my now-former employer Systra to sack me by threatening them.

Why did he do this? Because I'd highlighted safety and accessibility issues at Euston station. He is unfit for office and should resign.
politico.eu/article/uk-rail-mi…

Whenever Government says it’s doing something for hard working people I want to scream “what are you doing for idle layabouts?”

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I became a councillor to change people’s lives. It left me drained, bewildered and burned out | Kimberly McIntosh

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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in reply to Zoë O'Connell

@Zoë O'Connell In an ideal world the party would be a valuable resource and support mechanism for helping campaigners and councillors deal with the load. In practice it can be the source of a lot of the pressure. Perhaps unthinkingly, perhaps because the sort of people drawn to public service are the sort of people who find it hard to say no to just one more thing.
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you may not like it but this is what peak language model performance looks like aiweirdness.com/new-paint-colo…

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I just asked a chatbot to provide a third-person narrative of a chef making a specific sauce, to see how it would gender the chef. The chef was male.

You got that right... even ChatGPT fails the Béchamel test.

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in reply to Zoë O'Connell

The last two paragraphs contain this:

A soft sigh escaped Evelyn’s lips as she inhaled the subtle, comforting aroma of butter and flour blending with the richness of the milk....

Evelyn’s gaze lingered on the chef’s hands as they worked with practiced ease, never hurried, always deliberate. He tasted the sauce, nodded in quiet satisfaction, and Evelyn knew—without a word being spoken—that the Béchamel had been brought to perfection.

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Ya know what? I'm gonna toot my own horn today On Here Specifically.

I have already received at least a dozen thankful comments/replies for letting people know they can slow down door closers. A lot of people have been living with irritating bangs in apartment buildings and whatnot.

And thanks to watching a YouTube video, their life is now better. I didn't sell anything to them, I just decided to share some knowledge in my own (hopefully entertaining) way.

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Via @ottocr.at on Bluesky:

Putin, after 10 days of Kursk catastrophe, summons Stalin’s ghost:
Stalin: “What’s happened?”
Putin: “Nazis are at Kursk! My army is beaten! What should I do?”
Stalin: “Do like me 1943. Send best Ukrainian troops to the front, and ask the US for arms!”

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in reply to Simon Tatham

Great article, thanks for writing it!

Though I'd like to ask about an edge case: what do you do if it's a senior dev reviewing a junior dev's patch?

Does that count as permanent or temporary authority?

Is "I want you to learn" a legitimate purpose of it, or an "other goal" ?

Is that an okay situation to criticize based on design principles, or what features should go in the code at all?

in reply to Wolf480pl

@wolf480pl I think in that situation the senior dev's responsibility is to use a light touch. Certainly teaching is one of the purposes of a code review in that case, but don't try to teach too much in one go, and don't insist on iterating until the patch is every bit as good as your own would be - only good *enough*. The junior dev will reach your skill level when they have all your experience; trying to rush it won't improve things.
in reply to Simon Tatham

this is a great list of anti patterns, fortunately we have tools and processes to help with many of them!

Like: make it clear which changes are deal breakers and which aren’t - some projects use the “nit” word.

Batch up the review comments and submit in one go when all the changes have been reviewed.

Use code suggestions so the submitter can easily apply small changes.

Normalise putting non breaking changes in a follow up PR.

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My books Dreadnought (amazon.com/Dreadnought-Nemesis…) and Sovereign (amazon.com/gp/product/B087YR8X…) are both $1.99 on Amazon today. If you've been waiting to see what the fuss is about, now is a great time to pick them both up. The third book is coming soon!

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New cool brand ideas for bathtub brewers:

  • ESTRADIOL…. FOR MEN – MILITARY GRADE – XTREME PURITY (Picture of Usain Bolt operating a rotary saw)
  • My Happy Little Testosterone 💮 For Women 🤗 (vial is soft wrapped in hand-knit pastel satchel)
This entry was edited (Sunday, August 18, 2024, 10:38 AM)

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Final* update on my Visualising the #Hugos thing: now has a proper web page at zoeimogen.github.io/hugo-sanke… which includes all the nomination graphs as well as final round voting.

Camestros Felapton has some more statistics covering the awards too, over at camestrosfelapton.wordpress.co…

*I may add second/third place runoffs at some point as well as previous years but all the copy-pasting has become a bit tedious for now.

in reply to prograft

@prograft Yes, I've already done the pre-passdown data for 2nd through 4th place (See github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank… for example) but the resulting graph (github.com/zoeimogen/hugo-sank…) is (in my opinion) misleading without the first round transfers so didn't put it on the main web page.

Reading the Hugo-Winning "A City on Mars", which refers to a provision in the Colombian constitution declaring Colombian sovereignty over a piece of geostationary orbit. Here's that provision. constituteproject.org/constitu…
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In meeting reviewing bugs from our backend testing system.

<Me> This is the class of bugs I was talking about last week. This whole codepath is dead and not used by anyone. We're testing functionality we don't care about. NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT.

<coworkers> So.... that's you volunteering to delete this?

<me> (Realizing my hype level) Yeah! Got that Red Diff Energy, baby!

I need that on a Tee shirt.

Red Diff Energy
Let's delete some code

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in reply to SaraMG, last of her name 🇵🇹

One of my favorite release notes was from Open TTD 14.0: "It took us 2,000 commits to get from 13.4 to 14.0, we touched 140,000 lines of code and removed 74,000 of them. This was all done by over 60 contributors." openttd.org/news/2024/04/13/op…
This entry was edited (Thursday, August 15, 2024, 7:38 PM)