Right hand to baby Jesus, I thought Kmart was basically no longer in operation, when did it become a programming language for nerds?

Disagree if you want, but I’ve felt this way and have been saying some variation of this (but perhaps not as eloquently) pretty much since November of 2024.

Granted, in the immediate wake of the election, even I didn’t think things would be this way, at least not so soon. As soon as he took office, anybody with half a brain cell could see, first-hand sans conjecture, just how much of a disaster we were in for. I was like, at this stage, we’re going to have to root for the hamberders to do their thing and in the mean time we’re going to have to turn the other cheek and accept those Trump voters who come to regret their vote. If there are enough of them, and they genuinely see an apology as a path out of the cult, there’s a better chance of turning things around.

My new corollary: If your online e-commerce site asks customers to add a tip, even if $0 / no tip is an option, I’m not buying shit from you.

And the icing on the cake? If we had 13 months, essentially every month could have the same number of days, 28.

The main problem I have with USB-C is that the “U” is a lie. Always has been to some extent, but seems like it’s particularly true with USB-C. This is closer to that meme that’s like “There are 12 competing standards. We created a new universal standard to replace them all.” Except instead of there now being 13 competing standards, USB-C is a fractured mess so instead it’s like there’s now 20 competing standards. This cord supports passthrough power, this one doesn’t, but even the one that does only supports 20W so you have to have a special one to deliver 65, and that USB-C power brick only gives 15W, so you have to buy a special one that does 80W, and this USB-C port on my phone doesn’t support the USB-C to Aux jack adapter I bought, so now I have to buy a different adapter. It goes on and on and on and frankly I’m old and tired.

It just seems like nothing works the way I expect it should these days, and I’m happy to be wrong, but I don’t think my expectations are that high.

I make an appointment at the driver’s license office for 10 a.m., I kind of expect to be seen around that time, especially since they tell you to show up at least 15 minutes before your scheduled appointment. Certainly, I don’t expect to have to wait 2 hours to be seen.

I go to the store to return an item that was missing parts, I don’t expect to be turned away completely because the “printer is down”. I have the receipt, can’t you just make a copy and refund the very small amount of money or let me exchange it?

I go to the bank to withdraw a few five and ten dollar bills, I don’t expect to be told “I don’t have enough”. I especially don’t appreciate being treated like I’m the first human in history to want specific denominations for a withdrawal.

I get told to return my internet equipment to any of your locations, only to be told you can’t accept that at your store. Why did the customer service person I talked to on the phone say any location, the company website have your location in the list of locations available when I filtered by “returns”, and my final bill state “return equipment to any location” if your location doesn’t accept returns?

I go to the doctor for a specific health concern (that unbeknownst to me is a red flag for a major problem), they give me a medicine that actually exacerbates said major problem without ever mentioning it or testing for it first. You’re the expert and professional, not me, and I guarantee if I’d asked about that major problem because I saw something about it online, you’d have made a snarky comment like “don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree” or similar.

And all of this, plus much, much more, in just the past month or so.

It seems like a lot of people are really quick to forget what the “rat race” is/was like AND many of them over estimate how well they handled it when they were in it. Unfortunately, my dad is one of the worst offenders so I have to deal with that kind of negativity more often than I’d like.

For my personal situation, it often helps to push back on the most egregious manipulation. When I was younger and more naive, I would let things go with no push back, and all the happened is the guilt trips became more frequent and more hostile. Once I started calling it out and correcting the details, it happened considerably less and I’m pretty sure he’s more apt to think twice before bringing those types of things up in front of me (though I know he still does it behind my back).

For example, I will remind my dad about things like “it was easier for you to visit your parents every week because they lived in the same town and not 2 hours away like you and I currently do” or “you were in your 20s and early 30s when you did this and that, but when you were my current age, you definitely didn’t have the time or energy for it”. Usually he’ll concede, at least for the moment.

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

On the other hand, way too often people are absolutely vile here and nobody sticks up for themselves or for others. Really a shame that r-word-it bullshit behavior is often times totally accepted and approved and even rewarded here.

Same way we test everything else on animals. It all starts with the mice.

I use VS Code and GitHub Co-pilot and develop in a variety of different languages and frameworks. I’ve got lots of experience with some, but I’m less knowledgeable on others.

So, having the AI assist with languages I am very familiar with is basically a way to save time and preserve my mental energy. For languages and frameworks I’m less experienced with, it speeds things up because I’m not having to constantly search how-tos and forums for guidance. And for languages/frameworks I have limited or no experience with, it can be a helpful learning tool that speeds up how long it takes to get ramped up.

With this set-up, if I start writing a line of code and then pause for a moment, co-pilot kicks in and tries to autocomplete that line, sometimes even suggests the entire block of code. It’s really good at recognizing simple patterns and common boilerplate stuff. It’s less good at figuring out more complex stuff, though.

However, I find that if I start out by writing a comment that explains what I’m trying to accomplish, and to some degree how to accomplish it before I start writing one of those more complex blocks/lines, the AI has a much higher success rate in returning helpful, functioning code. So, basically yes, I write the comment to describe code I haven’t written, and I’ll let the AI take over from there.

This works for code, raw database queries, configuration files, and even for writing tests. I’m not an expert at building out Docker configurations for local development or configuring auto-deployment on whatever random system is being used for a project, but I can often get those things up and running just by describing in comments what I need and what I’m trying to accomplish.

The VS Code co-pilot extension also has some context menu items that let you ask questions and/or ask for suggestions, which comes in handy for some things, but for me, typing out my intentions in comments and then letting the auto-complete kick in as I’m starting a line of code is faster, more efficient, and seems to work better.

Granted, co-pilot also likes to try to auto-complete comments, so that’s sometimes funny just to read what it “thinks” I’m trying to do. And most of the time, I do remove my comments that were specifically to guide co-pilot on what I wanted it to do if they’re super redundant. And, at the end of the day, not everything co-pilot suggests is production-worthy, functional, nor does what I actually described. In fact, a lot of it is not, so you should expect to go back and fine tune things at a minimum. It’s just that overall, it’s good enough that even with all the supervision and revisions I have to make, it’s still a net positive, for now.

I know some folks are joking about and dunking on this, but in modern times, I have justification. Call me lazy, but I have found myself writing out these comments and then letting the AI take over to at least give me a sketch of an implementation. Works reasonably well and saves me a lot of time and effort. Mostly I don’t bother to remove them, though I usually edit them a bit.

On the other hand, there are factions within my colleagues who steadfastly insist that commenting is unnecessary and to some degree even potentially harmful, and that if you feel the need to comment your code, it means your code should be improved so that it’s obvious what it is doing without the need for comments.

I definitely miss the cached pages. I found that I was using the feature very frequently. Maybe it’s just the relative obscurity of some of my hobbies and interests, but a lot of the information online that shows up in search engines seems to come from old forums. Often times those old forums are no longer around or have migrated to new software (obliterating the old URLs and old posts as well).

I saw something the other day where they were interviewing some people from a republican group in North Carolina. Their response was basically that it’s a non-issue for them. Even if every awful thing about him is true, they said they aren’t electing saints, they’re electing politicians.

Not going to lie, I kind of wonder if Anna Kilgore named her cat Miss Sassy in honor of Lindsey Graham.

When you think of it, so many of them are immigrants. They don’t belong in our suburbs. They don’t belong in our homes. They should go back to the desert where they belong. But no, instead they’re pricking us with their thorns and I shudder to think what they’re doing to our pets and the wildlife.

My credit card offers virtual credit card numbers AND the ability to auto-lock the virtual numbers so you can set a date and after that the number will not accept new charges.

I make sure to use a virtual card number for everything subscription based, then I immediately set the auto-lock feature to expire in a few days (give the initial charge time to clear but still plenty of time before the subscription would otherwise renew).

Some subscription services make it super tough to cancel. This method fixes that issue for the most part. Some subscription services terminate immediately once you cancel the subscription, even if you still have “time left” otherwise. This way you don’t really have to formally unsubscribe. It’s easy peasy pumpkin breezy as the common folk like to say.

When someone asks a thing like this on Lemmy, look up the same thread on Reddit (guaranteed to find it was recently also posted there) and copy-pasta some of the top posts. Guaranteed worthless internet up arrows.

Well one thing’s for sure, it’s not a good thing. No ma’am, it’s not a good thing at all.

I recently joined WTF and based on the list of the instances this place is federated with, my assumption is that’s the basis for the WTF name. So, maybe something like this could be useful for choosing an instance that’s not 1/2 filled with bat shit insane posts by default rather than requiring significant and immediate curation (i.e. blocking stupid shit like hexbear and ml).

Encryption.