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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Check the vanguard target retirement income fund (vtinx) and other similar funds. There was a dip in 2021 that absolutely destroyed a number of retirements, my patents included, despite being low risk options. Total bond index funds also suffered for some reason, and those are as low risk as you can get. Every other fund I have is doing great, but the ones that are supposed to be safe are not doing great.



  • I’ll back this up, and recommend people having a hard time look into Spell Labs on the steam workshop (and elsewhere) to help get further into the game. Once the game really clicks, it’s super satisfying. Even before then, the ridiculous wonder of all the things are great. It’s just as hard as it is amazing and that can be a turn off. There are other quality of life mods available in the workshop for people wanting to just enjoy the game, but the tutorial in Spell Labs is one of the biggest helps I got in unlocking progression.

    Noita Together sessions were the big thing that turned the game into an obsession for me.


  • Not quite, the Helene one is between 25% and 50% more zoomed in based on what I can see of the bump of Louisiana and the shape of Cuba. Still a striking comparison even with that accounted for.

    Edit: Oh wait, I misread the uncovered coast line on Cuba. I think that’s actually closer than I initially thought. They just have it panned and rotated a little.







  • There’s a health food craze in the US that stemmed out of rampant body shaming. Which might be largely because of American portion sizes. And they think that nutritional fat makes you fat. It doesn’t. Excessive calories make you fat. And even that has caveats, but it’s the best rule of thumb.

    When did we start splitting milk? I know part of it is to make cream and high fat stuff while repurposing the skimmed off grass water. ::Googles:: WWII as a means of selling the byproduct of butter. Okay. Then in the 50s physicians started calling it health food despite the fact that the fat is used in your body during the digestion of many fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E, and K, and thus skim milk is pretty close to the opposite of health food.


    And the money thing is kind of rampant. It’s a big reason why things with larger price tags, like Rolex watches, are thought to more impressive by Americans than equivalent or better watches. Rolexes do have a very high quality, but then the mark up on top makes it strictly something I do not respect, and others do not share that opinion with me. Same for a lot of things.


  • I’ve seen a few, but it’s still kind of controversial. That being said, there is a time and a place for agile where it works, but also there is a team composition and a style of agile which works and that style tends to piss off micromanaging middle managers, so it rarely is allowed.

    I had an article saved in my work slack before I left that company (for health reasons), but a currently popular one seems to be this one: https://johnfarrier.com/agile-failure-what-drives-268-higher-failure-rates/

    My take is based on years of interaction with companies and friends in other companies. The biggest problem isn’t necessarily Agile, but instead that agile is not intended for long term projects. Agile is fantastic in short turnaround interactions such as web dev, and because these short turnaround places have such easily visible results, managers take them to be gospel. Thus comes Corporate Agile: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524230754/https://bits.danielrothmann.com/corporate-agile Link is from the Internet archive because I can’t find his new site if he moved.

    Long story short, corporate agile is the agile the bosses want, as it allows them to be constantly involved with more and more “agile” meetings. You know. Meetings. The antithesis of Agile. The place productivity goes to die. I had to remind our bosses that Agile dictated that stand ups included the developers and the scrum master ONLY multiple times and pointed them to the agile training they gave me. Didn’t matter. They’re the boss. This is a pretty common breakdown in Agile. So, that turned daily standup into daily meeting, since the quick status updates now had to be broken down for the boss. Every. Single. Day.

    Agile at its most basic is intended to reduce meetings to once a week so the rest of the time can be spent developing. Every company I know starts including devs in at least 300% more meetings (even junior devs) after switching to Agile for at least 6 months. And on average, it takes half an hour for a programmer to return to the level of productivity they hit before any interruption. This is generally due to the limitations of working memory. (Many research papers on this if you want.)

    But to get back to the original point. Because agile concentrates on short immediately tangible and verifiable benefits, any progress that takes longer than a sprint isn’t allowed. (It actually is, with proper implementation, as Agile is supposed to be edited on a team by team basis to make things work, but companies want everyone on exactly the same page.) Guess what doesn’t have immediately tangible and verifiable benefits? That’s right, research. Guess what it’s still in a research phase? Aside from basically anything that isn’t in market yet, self driving technology is very much research driven. Lots of trial, error, and long development cycles. Longer than a sprint for sure. And anyone who says self driving is in market should try an exercise if finding one level 5 self driving car that hasn’t been recalled due to false marketing or safety concerns. The technology isn’t there yet. It could be getting there, but profits are getting in the way of progress.