On this unfortunate day sales of cherry pie and piping hot coffee will both spike, in twin peaks of sadness.

“Very fine balls on both sides.”

For what it’s worth, I put milk in Earl Grey too. In fact I’m having some right now.

Forget the kids, don’t let Meemaw find out!

You know how in discussions people mention related things? This is one of those times, Sheldon.

Yeah but “These photos of Walmart customers will make you look twice!”

ChatGPT as a life coach.

I just watched a video by a prompt a guy wrote that writes good prompts. He adds his subject to the prompt-generating prompt, then uses its output as the actual prompt.

Must be talking about a dwarf Trump pays to wipe his ass.

Exactly - you see the little lock thing on the display and you’re like, aww shit I have to go find an employee, nevermind.

edit: Urban Anarchy idea - get some of those locks and randomly stick them on display cases!

It’s been said that indecisiveness and perfectionism are liberal weaknesses, and decisiveness and being willing to ignore imperfections for the sake of the team are conservative strengths. I think Michael Moore put it best… Liberals say, “What should we do about dinner? I don’t know… do you want to go out? I dunno, do you? Well, if you do. Okay, where should we go? I dunno, where do you wanna go?” A conservative slams his hand on the table and says, “Get in the car, we’re goin’ to the Sizzler!”

Headhunters are always looking for software devs. After talking to a contractor I worked with about the ins and outs of it, I just called up an agency and they immediately had me come in for an interview. Nowadays I imagine it’s mostly done online. Over the years I got gigs from multiple agencies. Eventually they started calling me up to ask if I was available or would be soon, which made finding a new job very simple. They do like to keep you going if you’re good, but when I finished a contract and moved to a different agency for the next one there never seemed to be any hard feelings. To some extent some of them try to do the we’re a family routine - and I think the local ones genuinely mean well - just don’t expect anything more than a paycheck from them.

One piece of advice is look for jobs where you don’t know absolutely everything, just most of it. This will give you something to learn on each job, which was actually my favorite thing. It also steadily expands your resume.

Lastly, I strongly advise finishing every job - don’t duck out of a contract because somebody calls you with another offer. I don’t think that’s good for someone’s reputation. Consider yourself unavailable. In fact, personally I found I was happier not even looking for another job until I actually finished my current one. The couple times when I got a new gig say a month in advance, I had a really hard time slogging through those last few weeks because the thought of starting the new thing was way more interesting. Contract work pays so well a few weeks of time off between gigs doesn’t matter. Just plan on some unpaid time so you don’t overspend. Anyway, I think it’s a great way to go and I wish you the best, and feel free to hit me up with more questions.

I know it’s not actual “intelligence” - and I complain about this terminology all the time - but for the sake of conversation I use the term AI. Even though all it’s really doing is remixing content it has been trained on to produce something convincingly like what a human can do, it’s often useful enough to replace human output. In practice that’s what’s significant - good enough to replace human labor and much cheaper. I have a software dev friend who uses Claude all the time in his work. During a recent in-person D&D game he had it generate a SQLLite database and scripts to help map some things we were dealing with - without even interrupting the game. I agree that people grossly overestimate AI, especially with wild theories that it’s about to take over the world or that it’s already self-aware - that’s just media-driven and movie-driven fantasy - but there are many routine parts of people’s jobs that the stuff we currently call “AI” can handle at least as reliably as a person.

If you’re brutally honest you’ll probably admit that you do most of your job on autopilot. Unless something interesting happens and you have to make a judgement call, the main thing is just getting through the day without screwing up. AI could almost do the routine parts already, and just nudge you as needed. It could probably do most office jobs that way. Employers will pretty soon realize they could run a 20-person department wtih AI and like 3 consultants to put out occasional fires. This will spread more and more to production jobs as industrial automation catches up. But what does an economy do with all the employees it suddenly doesn’t need? I know the cliche that the goal of capitalism is to make money without employees, but without a certain critical mass of people getting wages they can spend, oligarchs can’t rake in profits and governments can’t rake in taxes. So at that point how do we make the economy work? I think that’s a conversation we’ll be having sooner than we think, and it’s better if we have it before the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.

I’m all for normalizing relations with Cuba. The whole stopping communism thing is bullshit. If communism is a system doomed to fail, there shouldn’t be any reason to embargo it - treat Cuba like any other country and it will fail on its own, right? And I don’t even smoke cigars.

I’ve never been able to understand “employee engagement”. I became disengaged only a few years into my career, when it became very obvious that the whole corporate “we’re like family” pitch was pure bullshit. Yeah, like a family that kicks kids out the door when it has a couple bad quarters - a family that you’re supposed to love and go the extra mile for but don’t expect it to work the other way around.

As a software dev I became a contractor as soon as I learned about that way to make a living, and the few times I did accept full-time jobs it was with no expectation of anything but a paycheck. I don’t know how people actually believes the company sees them as anything more than a tool and a liability they don’t want. I figured out how much benefits are actually worth and how much more I could make hourly as a contractor, pay for my own insurance and afford unpaid time off. It’s really pretty simple math.

“But you have no job security!” LOL neither do you. Getting new contract jobs routinely took 2-3 weeks, no big deal. Clearly this is just one niche in the whole working world, and I consider myself lucky to have gone into a field where I could live that way. But honestly. believing the go-team-go bullshit really doesn’t make sense.

It’s really just a matter of habit and opinion. The only burger places near me are Jack in the Box and McDonalds, and if JitB burned I wouldn’t eat hamburgers anymore.

¿Por que no los dos?

I see extreme anti-carb mentality like teetotalling when the health goal is really just don’t be a drunkard.

But more to the point, did they get off your lawn?