My daughter to be happy.

Also, for her to manage a single night with solid sleep, so I’m not replying to threads about happiness on Lemmy at 5am. That would also be nice.

That’s not a bad spread. Should probably add that it’s back bacon, and not streaky bacon that the yanks eat.

I’ll die on this hill.

If you want an easy language for beginners, Ruby is a much better alternative. It’s like a simpler Python, and aside from a crazy loop syntax teaches clean programming principles better than most languages.

With that said, Rails IS a ghetto, and many of the kinds of companies that use Ruby as their main language are stuck in the past or are full of the biggest toolbags you’ll ever meet. DHH, in particular, built a reputation on being a programming contrarian, so much so that there’s a golden rule where if he says something, the opposite is probably the correct choice.

I imagine you get these questions all the time, but how did you get into stand-up, and how did you get the guts to get up on a stage and try to be funny?

I love the idea of stand-up comedy, but I’ve been to a few open mic nights and it almost always seems like drunk people showing off, people that are hilariously unfunny, or people in the crowd that try to shit on anyone remotely trying to entertain.

While I don’t agree, I used to spend a lot of time on /r/OnePunchMan. OPN is kinda a gag anime in that it plays on many stereotypes to comedic effect. One of the main characters is a woman that is very petite and didn’t grow up, and is also one of the most powerful heroes - alongside her sister who…did grow up.

The reason I mention it is because that sub is 90% suggestive fan art of the girl that the show literally points out looks like a child. It’s a trope on the “sexualised minor” thing, but they’re fucking falling for it again! When you call them out for noncing, they argue “she has adult features” or “she’s in her twenties”.

In-game currency and microtransactions are fine, as long as the app can pay out for the same service/item. If I can buy a sword for $5, I can also sell that sword to the app developer and get $5 back. If I can pay $1 to skip a level, I can redeem $1 for beating said level.

Well, they’re dead, so not much else outside of that.

It goes to show just how effective the brainwashing is, though. So many people were afraid of what is essentially science fiction. If we could inject nanobots into someone to control their mind and body, holy shit we’ve made one of the craziest scientific breakthroughs in a century! They were so afraid they ignored the fact that they were incredibly ill and tried to leave on the assumption that they had been attacked.

The COVID denial was strong in so many people. I remember some stories where people would go to the hospital with extremely low oxygen saturation, be told that they have COVID, and for them to go into a blind panic about getting microchipped or tortured by experimental government treatment, and immediately discharge themselves - only to drop dead pretty much immediately after they left.

Alongside the story for “donating to science”, by proxy that donation can also be extended to other industries, like the arts.

There have been several stories of people donating their bodies to science, with the provision that their skull be used for Hamlet, or other shows where a bone may be used as a prop. I believe there was a story around a Polish pianist dedicating his skull to solely be used for a production of Hamlet, with David Tennant using his skull in the show.

Combat Sports.

I got bored of the gym, so I decided to take BJJ. Grappling is really fucking hard, as in you have no clue what you’re doing, and no idea how to stop someone from fucking you up on the ground. It’s one of those sports that you can spend six months doing and barely get a feel of wtf is going on.

Two years later, I was somewhat capable, and got my blue belt. I then noticed that I was actually pretty good compared to the white belts. Things started to make sense, and while I got absolutely fucked up by everyone else, the positions made sense. I’m now a purple belt, and the other day I did an iminari roll and a rolling guillotine on a white belt during a spar, just because I could.

In the middle of this, I started doing MMA. Striking is also hard, especially when you mix with wrestling/grappling. I came in as the guy that was fucking useless with striking, but when we took 45 mins to do some grappling the coach was wondering why the new thirty-something idiot was tapping everyone. Eventually we found my level, and he gave me some solid pointers on how to work on my striking to bring it up to level with my grappling.

All in all, combat sports seem pretty scary, but getting into it is just a matter of turning up and giving it a try. You’ll feel like a useless idiot for months, but before you know it people will be asking you wtf you just did to them…right after you had had the same conversation with the person that’s better than you.

Global Gladiators

It’s basically capitalism as a game, but for the Genesis/Mega Drive era it was a surprisingly fun game. When I was a kid I played this before I even knew what McDonalds was, and many people I know thought I was crazy when I talked about a game I played where you collected the Golden Arches while being guided by Ronald McDonald on an environmental quest.

Someone I don’t really know all that well, last spoke at school, has an autistic niece. She lost her toy and was distraught, so her aunt put up a post on Facebook to say it was discontinued, and to ask if someone could locate a second hand one somewhere. I’m not really sure why, but I felt bad for her and thought that maybe I’ll use my Google-fu to help.

I did a reverse image lookup, found the original manufacturer, looked up one of the main execs, found their contact details against their personal domain, and asked them if they could help out. They said they’d be happy to help, and I said as a gesture of good will that I’d pay for the new toy - perhaps several so that she’ll always have one if it were to break.

After speaking to the owner, I had paid for several toys for an autistic girl I had never met - probably around £500 worth. The exec went a step further and flew to the UK to give her and her aunt the toys, probably for some good press. I never told the aunt it was me, and I told the exec to keep it between us. They put out a press release where I was referred to as a “mystery hero”, and said that for her they would resume that line of toys, with her receiving a custom version with her name attached. To their credit, he said her aunt and mother kept asking who the person was so they could thank me, but they stayed firm and said that it was up to me to reveal myself.

So, for £500 I made an autistic girl and her family happy, and got a nice photo of the workers with a note that said “thank you”. That money was supposed to go towards car repairs, but I decided that a month of walking and leftovers for lunch to make someone happy was worth it.

It was OnePlus. The OnePlus 1 was the best phone on the market at the time, and lasted beautifully. The same was true for the OnePlus 6, which lasted up until I got the Pixel 8.

It was the last time that OnePlus and Oppo made great phones without compromise, because right after laughing at Google for ditching the headphone jack they did the same thing! They had some success, and sadly, started compromising.

Even today, I miss features from my OP6. The screen gestures are a feature I would pay extra for on my Pixel. Today, I genuinely cannot think of a good company releasing Android phones. For years, picking an Android phone has been an exercise in calculating how many features you can afford to live without for an extortionate price.

One of the two bosses didn’t turn up for work one Friday. On the weekend, we all received a call that he had died.

Monday was horrible. We had new starters that came into an office full of people crying, and people from our HQ joining to set people up with any counselling.

The worst part? We had deadlines to meet, and clients didn’t give a fuck that the person responsible had died. One large client outright said to me on the phone on that first Monday “that’s sad and all, but I don’t really give a fuck, have it done by end of day”. To HQ’s credit, after I had told them they asked me to stop what I was doing (had already delivered the work) and our CEO called them and told them we were to terminate our contract with them. One woman I worked with, a Project Manager, was repeatedly brought to tears by clients checking on work or trying to sort out meetings with a guy that was in a morgue. I was able to power through, up until the day of his funeral when we all went to the pub after and saw his children playing without a care in the world.

Initially, it brought us all closer together, but within three months people started to leave - and by the end of the year the HQ decided to just close the office entirely, firing everyone that was still there.

I hate to say it, looking back, but this gave me without question one of the best answers for behavioural interviews in tech, since I ultimately ended up having to help deliver everything and onboard people in a stressful scenario. Knowing the guy, it’s what he would have wanted.

It’s a symptom of shareholder-driven development.

Many companies pushing AI have had huge layoffs, and haven’t launched anything worthwhile in years. Many of these companies have a metric fuck-ton of data, and already do some kind of AI (they probably have had LLM’s for years too). This way, they can spend money and make it look like they’re doing groundbreaking stuff to ensure shareholders are happy.

They’ll continue to do stealth layoffs of people outside of AI, until the hype dies down, and they’ll move to the next grift - after laying off all of their AI folks.

My kingdom for the ability to play this on the Switch or PS5…

I watched a guy eat a meal while driving a van.

In itself that’s not crazy, but it is when you’re holding a knife and fork, and you’ve got a plate of…something on your car dashboard.

Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.

Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.

IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.