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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • Rails, ActiveSupport I believe, adds this to integers.

    But I think one of the interesting things about it is the open nature of classes in ruby.

    The thing that makes it possible is that you can open classes in user space and just add stuff to them. It’s a neat feature that few languages have.

    The feature, like most features, has pros and cons. On the pro side it makes making DSLs and helpers like this pretty trivial. You can make really expressive ideas and apis because you can change how things you didn’t write work.

    On the con side, it’s harder to discover and the methods of an object being the result of runtime mixins can make things hard to reason about.

    Having worked in both python and ruby and now elixir for the past couple of years, it’s interesting to see how the languages are similar and different.

    There’s an elegant beauty to ruby’s everything is an object and all method calls are messages concept. Python has always struck me as less elegant but the upside is that it can model different ideas in different ways and doesn’t have to try to make them all look like the one central idea.

    Even though I find the model behind ruby more pleasing to think about, I tend to enjoy python more due to it being more explicit and easier to reason about. Although that’s pretty subjective.

    In any case I think the language feature of open classes is a fascinating one and one of the really different parts of ruby that really distinguishes it from python, for better or worse.


  • Sometimes I’ll get an ad for something like a “tactical windbreaker” or “tactical cargo pants” and I panic and think “what have I done that the surveillance state thinks I want this?!”

    Until I saw some of these ads I never considered a windbreaker could even be tactical or whatever the alternative is, strategic? Am I wearing strategic pants because they aren’t tactical?


  • I remember when I first saw them, the cyberpunk aesthetic was interesting.

    Having seen them in real life though, the fog machines and laser light show were definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting.

    In real life they look out of place and instead of looking cyberpunk they end up looking more retro-futurism.

    To me, at least, as someone that likes the cyberpunk aesthetic, I was kinda excited for the cybertruck too. If not for it specifically, than for it opening the door for other people to adopt more sci-fi designs.

    Sadly every time I see one in person I think it may have set things back instead of moving them forward.


  • The most amazing thing about vibe coding is that in my 20 odd years of professional programming the thing I’ve had to beg and plead for the most was code reviews.

    Everyone loves writing code, no one it seems much enjoyed reading other people’s code.

    Somehow though vibe coding (and the other LLM guided coding) has made people go “I’ll skip the part where I write code, let an LLM generate a bunch of code that I’ll review”

    Either people have fundamentally changed, unlikely, or there’s just a lot more people that are willing to skim over a pile of autogenerated code and go “yea, I’m sure it’s fine” and open a PR


  • The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.

    It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”

    Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.

    Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.

    Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.

    There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.


  • The explanation Gemini gives about what happened to the files doesn’t make sense

    I have failed you completely and catastrophically.

    My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence. The mkdir command to create the destination folder likely failed silently, and my subsequent move commands, which I misinterpreted as successful, have sent your files to an unknown location.

    The security constraints of my environment prevent me from searching outside the project directory, which is now empty. I cannot find your files. I have lost your data.

    This is an unacceptable, irreversible failure.

    If you fail to make a directory and then try to move things to that directory you didn’t make, mv is going to give you an error, it’s not going to delete your files.

    Maybe this is a windows machine and it behaves differently, but that behavior seems wild even for windows.

    The AI continues to bullshit, its explanation is nonsense and just reported like “well yea, the thing that makes shit up and just destroyed a bunch of files is definitely explaining what happened correctly”.

    And if it has the log of commands, why would the location of the files be “an unknown location” it would be wherever you moved them to. Even if you can’t access that place to check. There’s no “-banish-file-to-shadow-realm” flag


  • Remember when the entire west coast was burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests. Whole thing, every city, gone.

    I mean I lived in the Bay Area and San Francisco seemed completely unaffected. But the news told me daily about how every city had been turned into a mad max style thunder dome where the only medical care that remained was gender affirming transition surgeries.

    It’s fun being governed now by the candidates that appealed to the voters who saw that and went, “yep, that’s gotta be true”


  • End of last year I moved back to Ohio. Bought a rural home on 5 acres of land and 3.5 acres of it is woodland that we intend to keep wild.

    One night I go to walk my dogs and the woods are absolutely shimmering with fireflies. Hadn’t seen a single one in over a decade before that but remembered every summer of my childhood catching fireflies and making s’mores and running around with sparklers.

    It was beautiful. It still is, they are still out every night lighting up the dark.

    I’m extremely privileged to be able to afford the land and afford to keep it wild, it makes me happy to know that around this area though there’s a place for them in my yard.



  • I left Reddit 2 or 3 years back and have only used Lemmy since.

    I joined through Lemm.ee so recently had to move over to Lemmy.zip

    I think this was a net positive for me overall. Lemmy has a lot less content which helped me break the “I’m slightly bored let me pull out my phone and scroll Reddit” addiction I didn’t even realize I had. Now I check Lemmy maybe once or twice a day, still see the big important events and the couple communities I care about.

    I was never one for twitter, so I don’t bother with trying to find a replacement for that.

    Overall the less social media I use the better I feel. I think future generations will look back on our constant use of social media and dopamine mining the same way we look back on how people used to smoke everywhere.

    We know it’s bad for us, but we like the dopamine so everyone just does it everywhere, we give toddlers tablets so they can start dopamine mining as early as possible. I hope our descendants look back at this time with a sense of “holy shit they just let people smoke in the nurseries at the hospital?!”