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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Someone shared this on Mastodon so I’ll just repost my thoughts from there. (Bonus for Lemmy, I was forced to squeeze all my thoughts into 500 characters, so this is the most succinct I’ve been on this site!)


    Pretty incredible how little people seem to understand these. For one thing, every method other than waterfall is a subtype of agile methodology. The major distinction is that waterfall has a series of phases from design through building, testing, and delivery that attempts to plan the whole project up front. Agile methods focus on smaller iteration cycles with frequent, partial deliverables.

    Something like kanban is designed for continuous delivery: we want to go to mars weekly.

    LEAN development is a scam though, that one is accurate.






  • Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

    I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

    “Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.


  • Valtonen says that this has made the CPU the weakest link in computing in recent years.

    This is contrary to everything I know as a programmer currently. CPU is fast and excess cores still go underutilized because efficient paralell programming is a capital H Hard problem.

    The weakest link in computing is RAM, which is why CPUs have 3 layers of caches, to try and optimize the most use out of the bottleneck memory BUS. Whole software architectures are modeled around optimizing cache efficiency.

    I’m not sure I understand how just adding a more cores as a coprocesssor (not even a floating-point optimized unit which GPUs already are) will boost performance so much. Unless the thing can magically schedule single-threaded apps as parallel.

    Even then, it feels like market momentum is already behind TPUs and “ai-enhancement” boards as the next required daughter boards after GPUs.




  • You seem like a person who wants to try and do well and be a good manager. So be very careful of burnout, because the constant tension between doing what is right for your team and meeting upper-management expectations can drive you crazy. It did me anyway, which is why I don’t manage anymore.

    Take regular vacations and actually disconnect from work when you do. Try to do the same for at least 1 or 2 weekends per month. Being organized is important and helps with the job and the burnout, but there’s a thin line between “keeping notes in Obsidian keeps me focused” and “my entire 2nd job is now maintaining Jira tickets.”

    Organization is for you, keep it for you, and don’t let your organizing become a part of your “public api” or else it’ll become another avenue for status updates that you’re obliged to maintain. Turning your notes and private charts into data for upper management is why you compile special reports, just for them.



  • I made a static site with Hexo a few years back. I thankfully didn’t make any “Get started with Hexo” posts but I did only really use it for a few months. I think that puts me in the cluster with the “switch from Jekyll to Hugo” people. Now it just sits there, absorbing some money every two years for the “personal website tax”.

    Shame too, I constantly think I need to get back to it. Hexo is nice, popular with Chinese users I think. I don’t recall now why I liked it over Jekyll or Hugo, but I’ve always loved an underdog. Once I got the hang of using it, it was very customizable and fun to work with.



  • I, like most of the millenial lemmings it seems, am not shocked about this. I remember what Dubya said as president, the daily evils. I would have never thought it could get worse and then we got Trump, and I think it all does echoes out from 9/11. If there are future historians, 9/11 is going to be the pivot that this entire century stumbles over, probably leading directly to WW3 any day now.

    But when I see articles like this, (in the Atlantic ofc, always this one or the NYT) my nostrils fill up with the smell of consent being manufactured. Has the shadow council decided that we shall war with the Saudis now? With Russia and China just flat-out taking land now, has the US decided to extend it’s “protection” more directly over a few strategic areas?



  • I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

    Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

    The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.