BougieBirdie

I’m feeling similarly about Sinking City 2.

The realities of game development are already fraught with risk, and that’s before you add violence to the equation. It’s pretty sad thinking of the games that won’t ever get made

I like the whole “skeletons of animals without bones” thing. I’ve got an octopus, a spider, and a frog, haven’t seen a crab yet though.

(I know frogs have bones, I just like frogs)

Who’s at index zero?

If your organization is such a clusterfuck that you can’t figure out how to open a PDF, then I’m going to consider that a bullet dodged.

Dominos used to be the cheapest pizza in town. Then we got a Little Caesars that was much cheaper.

I was eating the cheapest pizza, so it’s Little Caesars for me. A couple years later they get shutdown for gross (heh) health code violations.

I no longer get Little Caesars, and that made me rethink getting the cheapest pizza. Now I prefer my local pizzeria.

So if the average nap is four seconds, the average period of wakefulness is five seconds.

What a life.

I think we’re in the start of it now, let’s gooooo

The surgeon deserves a little fun too

A lot of the criticism comes with AI results being wrong a lot of the time, while sounding convincingly correct. In software, things that appear to be correct but are subtly wrong leads to errors that can be difficult to decipher.

Imagine that your AI was trained on StackOverflow results. It learns from the questions as well as the answers, but the questions will often include snippets of code that just don’t work.

The workflow of using AI resembles something like the relationship between a junior and senior developer. The junior/AI generates code from a spec/prompt, and then the senior/prompter inspects the code for errors. If we remove the junior from the equation to replace with AI, then entry level developer jobs are slashed, and at the same time people aren’t getting the experience required to get to the senior level.

Generally speaking, programmers like to program (many do it just for fun), and many dislike review. AI removes the programming from the equation in favour of review.

Another argument would be that if I generate code that I have to take time to review and figure out what might be wrong with it, it might just be quicker and easier to write it correctly the first time

Business often doesn’t understand these subtleties. There’s a ton of money being shovelled into AI right now. Not only for developing new models, but for marketing AI as a solution to business problems. A greedy executive that’s only looking at the bottom line and doesn’t understand the solution might be eager to implement AI in order to cut jobs. Everyone suffers when jobs are eliminated this way, and the product rarely improves.

Not a specific command, but I learned recently you can just dump any executable script into ~/bin and run it from the terminal.

I suffer greatly from analysis paralysis, I have a very hard time making decisions especially if there’s many options. So I wrote a script that reads a text file full of tasks and just picks one. It took me like ten minutes to write and now I spend far more time doing stuff instead of doing nothing and feeling badly that I can’t decide what to do.

I say blow your free healthcare on something frivolous and fun.

See if they’ll swap your left kidney with your right one.

The friggin’ dogs in Resident Evil.

I have a kind of funny story about that. I was too young to be playing RE when it came out, but that didn’t stop me from sneaking it out of my dad’s collection of grownup games to try it anyway.

So there’s this well known jump scare, probably in the first fifteen minutes as you say where you’re running down a hallway and suddenly some dogs jump through these glass windows. I screamed, fumbled the controller, and was eaten by dogs. Might have been the first jump scare of my life.

So I hadn’t hit a save point, so you have to start the game over. So I decide to just leave the mansion through the front door instead of going out that way. And you get a cutscene where a dog jumps through the door and you have to wrestle it away.

I still haven’t played the game since.

But my wife and I are a big fan of the series, so eventually we decided to marathon them on the condition that she plays RE1. She’s playing the remake and goes into the room where the dogs jump through the windows and I’m holding my breath waiting for it to happen. Only it doesn’t.

So I’m a little disappointed, but I figure it’s a remake so maybe they’re switching things up a bit and going to put the jump scare somewhere else in the mansion.

Sooner or later you have to backtrack through that corridor though, and on like the third time going through this “safe” corridor the dogs jump through the window. She screams, fumbles the controller, and is eaten by dogs.

Seven-year-old me was vindicated that my adult wife also got punked and I’m not alone.

A hammer is beginner friendly, but learning to use a hammer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to build a house with it.

I genuinely thought erudite was a noun. Thanks, TIL

Well, I’m not a psychologist, so I suppose my interpretation might not be correct - the irony mounts.

But from the graphs you shared, it looks to me like the only people who underestimated themselves were the top performers. And from what I know firsthand with imposter syndrome, a competent person underestimates themselves.

I used hyperbole for effect, so I don’t think that if you believe you have zero competence in something because you actually have zero competence means that you’re secretly good at something. If you know nothing about plumbing, don’t try to install a toilet.

But if you’re working in the software factory then you don’t actually have zero competence, you probably have formal education and some experience. Having that feeling that you might not be good enough is a sign that you’re on the right track.

I’ll take a crack at this one. For what it’s worth, I think the first couple are just loanwords from another language which sometimes gets used incorrectly, and the last three are uncommon words in conversation. Know your audience.

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

“The victim met their demise vis a vis poodle attack”

“The victim met their demise by way of poodle attack.”

“Steve’s a real erudite.”

“Steve’s a real reader.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse”

“I don’t understand, can you elucidate on that?”

“I don’t understand, can you explain?”

I felt like that early in my career. I used to think that being a rockstar developer was a good thing, and I’d be happy to describe myself as one.

The thing is, a lot of rockstars are really just churning out heaps of unmaintainable code. They think they have a high degree of proficiency, they’re confident in their competence, but there’s a disconnect between what they think and what they produce.

It can be a sign of personal improvement to question yourself when you think you’re doing great. We owe it to ourselves to ask ourselves critically if we can be doing better. Because if we don’t, and we just assume we’re awesome, then we’ll happily churn out sub-awesome cruft.

The insidious thing is that self-criticism leads to self-doubt, and imposter syndrome can be quite paralyzing. But if you learn to control your criticism instead of allowing your criticism to control you, you can achieve higher heights than rockstardom.

Based on what I know of Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems you’re at your most competent when you feel like you’re at your least.

So if you’re feeling badly because you feel like you don’t know enough to do your job, take some time to remind yourself that other people who appear to be confident have no idea what they’re doing.

It’s fake-it-till-you-make-it all the way down.

“We can’t force our people to work, so let’s call on someone who can!”