HamsterRage
@HamsterRage@lemmy.ca
- Comment on I this a firm and polite way to tell an opinionated coworker to stop pushing his agenda I don't care about? 1 month ago:
There’s two kinds of issues: instance and pattern. The first time or two, it’s instance. You deal with those with specificity. Something like, “I would prefer not to talk about this subject with you, please stop”.
If it persists, then it’s a pattern problem. You deal with the pattern, not the instance. “I’ve asked you not to talk about subjects like this in the pant, but you haven’t stopped. This makes me feel like you don’t respect my boundaries and it’s making it difficult for me to work with you. Why are you doing this to me?”.
You can escalate from there, and this might involve management involvement but at least you’ll have the clarity of having made the situation clear before it gets there.
Honestly though, unless the coworker is actually deranged, they’ll be mortified when they find out they are making you uncomfortable and they’ll stop right away.
- Comment on What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say? 1 month ago:
I think that a good starting place to explain the concept to people would be to describe a Travesty Generator. I remember playing with one of those back in the 1980’s. If you fed it a snippet of Shakespeare, what it churned out sounded remarkably like Shakespeare, even if it created brand “new” words.
The results were goofy, but fun because it still almost made sense.
The most disappointing source text I ever put in was TS Eliot. The output was just about as much rubbish as the original text.
- Comment on More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs 2 months ago:
Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.
So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.
We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.
And the physical SIMs stay active. No my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.
In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.
The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.
The “Troubles” in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.
Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.
15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.
Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.
24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing “Tiny Talent Time” on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn’t any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn’t traumatize you, nothing will).
You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.
Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.
F*CK me. “No experience”. Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.
Kids always think that they know more than their parents…until they don’t.
- Comment on The most important goal in designing software is understandability 4 months ago:
So write it properly from the get-go. You can get 90% of the way by naming things properly and following the Single Responsibility Principle.
- Comment on Truly inspirational 5 months ago:
Stone only makes sense for people used to pounds, shillings and pence. For instance, “This costs 3 pound, 4 shilling and 8”, and, “I weight 12 stone, 6 pounds and 3 ounces”.
- Comment on Let's take a quick look at how software was built in the MS-DOS era: Borland Pascal 7. 7 months ago:
If I remember correctly, Objects were introduced in Turbo Pascal 5.5, not version 7.
- Comment on How do you call in English 8 months ago:
“Row headers” seems wrong to me. Maybe “row labels”?
- Comment on Over 65 years ago this month, researchers ran the first FORTRAN program 8 months ago:
FORTRAN IV was the first language I learned to program in. Punch cards!!!
- Comment on Does "Selfhosted" mean you actually have a server at home? 9 months ago:
Well, there are specific hardware configurations that are designed to be servers. They probably don’t have graphics cards but do have multiple CPUs, and are often configured to run many active processes at the same time.
But for the most part, “server” is more related to the OS configuration. No GUI, strip out all the software you don’t need, like browsers, and leave just the software you need to do the job that the server is going to do.
As to updates, this also becomes much simpler since you don’t have a lot of the crap that has vulnerabilities. I helped manage comuter department with about 30 servers, many of which were running Windows (gag!). One of the jobs was to go through the huge list of Microsoft patches every few months. The vast majority of which, “require a user to browse to a certain website” in order to activate. Since we simply didn’t have anyone using browsers on them, we could ignore those patches until we did a big “catch up” patch once a year or so.
Our Unix servers, HP-UX or AIX, simply didn’t have the same kind of patches coming out. Some of them ran for years without a reboot.
- Comment on The future of back-end development 10 months ago:
Kotlin is a very easy transition, and it sorts out a ton of issues that you find in Java. Certainly easier than moving to Rust.
- Comment on Trying to get release and testing in sync 11 months ago:
It seems to me that you’re problem is that your definition of “freeze” seems to allow fixes for QA issues. So, not a freeze at all if the idea is to give QA a chance to have a clean testing framework on Wednesday.
I see two alternatives:
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Make Tuesday a true freeze. Any defects found by QA drop that feature out of the Thursday release.
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Stop “throwing features over the wall” to QA. Make the QA testers/process part of the development team/process. Features are considered “done” and ready for submission to production only once tested. Freeze on Thursday morning with only integration testing to be done before release.
In truth, both approaches yield the same results. If programmers have to get it right by Tuesday, then they’ll need to work more closely with QA during development. Eventually, the Wednesday testing becomes little more than a rubber stamp and they’ll push to move the freeze back to Wednesday.
Most importantly it seems that in this situation the “definition of done”, has to be more than just “coding completed”.
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