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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.

I feel like this has truly earned a “bazinga!”

I never I realized I was so evil, nor so neutral.

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’m convinced it’s the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just… the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the “submit a ticket and we’ll assign it eventually” approach to all other interactions.

I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it’s because it is.

There’s infinite ways to organize code. In C# or Rust where this isn’t an option, you might use nested classes or traits hidden behind a module/namespace.

Good use cases are data structures with associated helper classes. For example, a collection/tree and an iterator/tree-walker for working with elements of the collection. Or for something like a smart memory allocator (an arena or slab allocator), you might use a friend-class to wrap elements returned from the allocator, representing their connection back to it (for freeing up when done or to manage the allocation structure in ie a heap or sorted tree).

As a senior at my last big company job, basically all I did was conduct meetings and do PRs. It’s such a grind.

My opinion now is that most PR is worthless anyway. Most people give, at best, a superficial skim for typos, lack of comments, or other low-hanging replies (that usually, really, a static checker or linter should be dealing with).

Reading the code base in little chunks like that doesn’t give you proper context for the changes you’re reading. Automated unit and integration tests would be better for catching issues like that, but of course then who is reviewing and verifying the tests? Who’s writing them for that matter?

Ideally, pair-programming or having extra people on projects to create knowledge redundancy would help. But companies want to replace juniors with AI now, so that’s not looking good. Senior devs and architects might know the major pieces of much of the code, but can they “load it into working memory” sufficiently to do a quality PR that will catch something the tests didn’t and QA wouldn’t? Not in my experience.

I think the best actually-implementable solution for most teams is to get rid of PR expectations and take a multi-pronged approach to replacing that process.

1. use tooling to check for and fix basic stuff. Use a linter, adopt a code standard, get a code formatting tool that forced adherence to the standard and run it on every PR.
2. Unit tests if you got them, start if you don’t. You don’t need 90% code coverage, just make sure critical paths are covered.
3. Turn one of your useless meetings into a code review session. Each week/sprint, one Very Important Code section is presented by the developer that works on it most or that last changed it. This helps the whole team learn the code base, gets more eyes on the important stuff regularly, and enforces not just a consistent style but a consistent approach to solving and documenting problems.
4. PR (and the github PR approval stuff or its equivalent for you) should be streamlined but preserved. Do have a second person approve changes before merging, just to double check that tests have finished and passed and all that. If your team is so busy that no one ever approves PRs then allow self-approval and be done with it. This will make regular code review very important for security and stability, since any dev could be misbehaving unseen, but these are the trade-offs you make when burning out your team is more important than quality.

Makes the error a little too frequent, but does obscure any performance penalty and is some truly evil genius work!

Dr Sabine Hossenfelder at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, said there was no evidence the FCC would reveal anything about dark matter or dark energy and was critical of the proposals.

“The truth is that the most likely thing such a machine would do is to just make better measurements of some constants in the standard model, and that’s it,” she said. “I do not think that the societal relevance is high enough to justify such a big investment.

“I fear that funding such an experiment will mean that a lot of smart people will waste their time on research that will not lead to any progress. The LHC had a good motivation. The FCC has not. Particle physicists have to accept that their time is over. This is the age of quantum physics.”

On the other hand, Sabine’s objection to the project makes me skeptical of my own doubts. If she’s against it, it must be a great idea!

I think Hossenfelder was bought some years ago by a conservative think tank. Or at least that would be one explanation for her abysmal takes. Maybe its just pure ego that makes a person act like this though?

I think it’s worthwhile science communication for them to be clearer about what is planned for testing. Some handwaves about “it will help us maybe find dark matter” is much less compelling to me than something concrete like “we have models which predict dark matter particles emerge at X TeV, this will test them.”

Not that I’m opposed to open discovery either. Maybe when you collide electrons at the higher energy, they turn into pure gravitons and we’ll find the GUT? But I like to think there’s some deliberation and intent behind a project that’s roadmapped to 2070, beyond just long term job security for some particle physicists.

Pretty neat! I guess I’m one of those naive folks who would have said that it’s obvious it goes in reverse. I also don’t see why this would be so hard to just test. Submerge a sprinkler, attach a pump to the hose, observe it moving in reverse as each arm sucks water up, right?

I “joke” all the time that the CIA ended their mind control programs because they succeeded and moved all if it into the private sector in advertising.

Tiny opossums that fuck themselves to death? I know what I want to play in my next life!

There’s like a whole thing with marathon and ultramarathon runners just shitting themselves while running. There’s something physiological that happens when you push the body that much. So I’m not so surprised that “pit stops” in the bushes were an issue that required a ruling.

Im salty about the smoking guy though: Justice for Chain-Smoking Chen! China has the world’s only living train and they treat him like this!

We kind of don’t?

One of the basic axioms (that is, assumptions) of cosmology and physics is that the rules are the same everywhere. We see a big ball of burning gas in the center of our system. We have observations of other bright lights that appear to also be balls of hot gas. Our continued observations fit with predictions we can make, predictions based on our observations and codification of the rules of physics and chemistry and so on. We assume that all these big balls of gas operate on the same principles.

There’s also a general assumption that the rules don’t change over time. That axiom doesn’t fit with what we can observe about the earliest universe, so there are many theories on why physics seemed to work differently in the very first moments of the universe. Likewise, other observations that don’t quite fit those assumptions have led to ideas like dark energy and various theories of quantum gravity.

If those assumptions were extremely wrong, say the universe outside our solar bubble actually obeys totally different laws, and our observations have been misinterpreted, then we’d have no way to know. We need some observation that contradicts our previous observations in order to formulate new theories on why. It’s similar to a simulation argument: maybe god aliens or time beings or super AI or Satan have engineered a fake universe to trick us, but without some true observation that grounds our theories in the repeatable, it’s pointless to speculate because almost anything could be true. We have to build theories on what is repeatedly observed.

I have to also admit, as an American i imagine a scone as a little triangular cake, so I laughed looking at those Popeye’s biscuits floating in the corner of the image.

Option 3: Upsetting all of the English speaking world by pronouncing it to rhyme with pony.

My partner and I were both fully boosted and both caught it in November. I’d been only been boosted for a week, her for 4 weeks. For whatever reason, her case was worse with about a week of fever, sore throat/sinuses, and all that. I never got a fever but was otherwise similar.

We’d both managed to avoid catching it at all before that, despite going on regularly and flying internationally a few times. We’ve just been good about masking and getting our shots.

I think this current strain must be extremely contagious. It sure was nice back when the government was tracking and reporting on this stuff.