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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • Ttereal tellers is ttattElonkows nothing about AI. Anyone involved in the field knows all of the big names because we read their papers, listen to their lectures, and talk about their models. He then goes on to be dismissive of work he’s not even close to understanding. It’s blatant ignorance, and Elon is used to just being able to power through his ignorance by either BSing his way past people who know no more than him or firing anyone who is actually qualified and as a result disagrees with him.


  • Slay and serve are part of the drag/queer community lexicon that were made popular (iirc) in the NY ballroom scene. No one cares when 6th graders use them or if they stop.

    If you watch queer media or hang out with The Gays, you’ll hear them all the time. They’re a bit campy, but not cringe.


  • At some point, sound mixing just went to shit. My partner was in the industry working in post-production and agrees with me. The sfx are loud and the dialogue is not - thus all of the smart tvs and settop devices supporting features like “Dialogue Boost.”

    I used to notice it a lot with poorly managed concerts - the singer’s mic would get drowned out by the instruments. I guess all the people who were responsible for that moved to LA.

    But now I have a soundbar and two HomePods as speakers, and still turn on subs. And that might have something to do with the number of concerts.




  • Manager at a FAANG here. It sounds like you’ve been mostly talking to people at small companies who use terms like “code ninja.” I have no idea what they’re looking for, and I honestly doubt they do, either.

    What I’m looking for is someone who can help me solve the problems that I have and that will be coming up. A candidate should be able to answer some basic questions about the programming language(s) they claim to know if they’re relevant to what I need (sometimes people will simply list everything they’ve heard of in an attempt to game resume scanners). They should be able to whiteboard an algorithm (like an elevator controller) on the fly and explain their thinking on it. They should be able to walk me through their resume work history and explain the projects they listed, as well as detailing their roles. I want to know who made the decisions on the project - the tech, architecture, implementation, and so on. I want to know what the candidate did, and what they’d do differently knowing what they now know. If they lost publications, I’m going to do the same (and I might skim at least the abstract). Basically I’m looking for someone I can be working with for at least the next five years, and who can continue to learn and grow.

    Oh, and don’t list emacs (or in one notable case, “emax”) as a technical skill.


  • In the US, there is no law or regulation. It’s decided company by company. We usually distinguish between vacation days and sick days, and the number of hours for each accumulate throughout the year based on the number of hours worked, with more senior employees having a higher ratio (meaning they accumulate hours faster). The total number of hours are generally capped (eg, they can’t go above 240), but they do carry over year to year. Some companies (and I believe this is required in some states, like California) must pay out the remaining vacation hours when the employee leaves the company, so that if you leave with 120 hours of vacation on the books, you get three weeks vacation pay in addition to any additional severance package. That does not hold for accumulated sick leave. These are both considered “paid time off” (PTO) because employees are paid their salary/hourly pay. When I left my last position, I did so with 240 hours of vacation that they had to pay out, which was in addition to my hiring bonus and moving allowance at my new employer. It came in handy.

    Other companies do what’s called “unlimited paid time off.” This means there’s no pre-existing cap and that vacation and sick time get bundled together. It’s all at the manager’s discretion. Depending on the company, though, it can be a disadvantage. Corporate culture can be such that people are discouraged from taking time off, and there’s no vacation pay out if you leave, because you don’t have set hours on the books. Americans in general take long weekend or week-long vacations, sometimes up to two weeks. Depending on the role (and the nature of the vacation), they’ll still work some hours, because that’s often the cultural expectation.

    The worst jobs - and this means the majority of service jobs - allow for either zero PTO hours, or will routinely deny employee requests to use them. The above applies to corporate jobs (eg engineers and designers), union jobs, and government work. The person making your pizza or telling you where the shoe department is probably doesn’t get those “benefits,” and if they do, they have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops (including facing the wrath of their manager) to exercise them.

    I’d like the US to have legislation to force minimum levels of PTO, and I’d like to have the culture change so one can say “I’m going to be in Greece for four weeks but will call you when I get back” rather than saying “I have stage three liver cancer and will be getting my organs replaced but I can make the meeting at ten.”


  • Manager at a FAANG here. Three days of sick leave (per year I’m guessing) is fucking insanely low. Just a flu will take someone out for a week easily. If you force them to come in or else take unpaid time off/risk being fired you’re going to a) get someone who is marginally productive at best and b) likely to get more coworkers sick, causing a bigger slowdown and costing the company more money. You also come off like the person who writes the memo that 40% of sick time is taken on a Monday or a Friday.

    You’re Colin Robinson, the energy vampire of your office.


  • I voted Green in 2012 because a) Barack Obama was given a 99% chance of winning my state very close to the election and b) I thought I could “send a message” to the Democratic Party that they should move further left.

    I did so with full knowledge that not only was Jill Stein in no position to win a single elector and that in addition she was a horrible candidate who would be literally the worst president in the entire history of the United States (this was before Trump, but I’m still going to go with that for the purposes of this discussion). I did so knowing it was a protest vote while claiming it wasn’t a protest vote but a vote of conscience.

    Jill Stein and GPUSA are a bunch of corrupt fucks who only run because they take in republicans money because they regularly scrape off a 3-4% of the otherwise democratic vote, which in some districts and state can swing the entire election.

    So o cast my GP vote, the total GP vote was completely in line with historical trends, Obama won my state and the presidency (thankfully), and no signal was sent, except that the republicans could rely on that.

    I’m sure the Dems do something similar with the libertarian vote. I’ve even been tempted to donate (now that I have some money to donate) to libertarian candidates in elections where scraping off a point or two could tip things towards the D (which I confess is something I favor, being part of Team Rainbow). I haven’t dug into it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that racist son of a Bircher Ron Paul didn’t help hand the election to Clinton. If so, fucking yay. I don’t love Bill, but we sure as fuck didn’t need more Ronald Reaganing.

    I think everyone should treat people advocating for a GPUSA or other protest vote as a Republican stalking horse, period. Whether they’re intentionally doing it or naively turning themselves into a broadcast node doesn’t matter - I’m not judging. I’m just saying that they’re effectively campaigning for a fascist, and should be treated as one.





  • “Literally” has been used to mean “figuratively” since at least the 18 th century. Descriptivists (and actual linguists) have no problem with this. It’s a hang up of people who don’t actually study language but just want to tell other people what to do to make themselves feel superior. It was used in the figurative sense by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others.





  • People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

    Um, yes?

    I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.

    In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”

    Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?


  • Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

    But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.


  • If the Discordians are finally rising, count me in.

    Now, the Gods they threw a party in one thousand-odd B.C. They invited every goddess 'cept Discordia, all but She So She rolled a golden apple, thereby starting a melee

    Her apple corps is strong!

    Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Her apple corps is strong!

    Though the Romans dubbed her Eris and the Brits called her Strife She is still the same Discordia Chaos’ spawn, and Murphy’s wife And the mortal who ignores Her courts the peril of his life

    Her apple corps is strong!

    Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Her apple corps is strong!

    She’s the Goddess of Uncertanity the Mother of all Doubt But Her influence is one thing physics cannot do without In the halls of academia, the quantum theorists shout Her apple corps is strong!

    Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Her apple corps is strong!

    She’s the strangest of attractors and a fractious, fractal minx There is madness to Her method and a twist to how She thinks Lorenz, Mandelbrot, and Julia could not divine Her kinks Her apple corps is strong!

    Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Her apple corps is strong!

    I have seen the works of Eris in our citadels and camps For the world, now more than ever, seems to bear Her special stamp Which is why I think Discordians will soon emerge the champs Our apple corps is strong!

    Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Grand and gory, hail Discordia! Our apple corps is strong!