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

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  • Okay… I even came with receipts on this one. Am I just annoying? What’s with the downvote, even on ones where people are suggesting target date funds? The fund will bounce, it’s just a huge dip for one that was supposed to be, according to professionals, safe for retirement use. So sure, I can see the downvote as disagreeing with sensationalism, but I was contesting the suggestion that no funds dropped in that time. If it’s because I got spammy, sure… I assume most people don’t reread the other comments after the first time they go through, but I can stop.

    For reference, target date funds are still usually good, but total stock index is always better in a ten year period, so whether they are actually worth it is questionable.











  • 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.



  • Using sex terms (as in “fucked up” or “that sucks”) to indicate violence (as in preventing normal action or imposing deprivation inducing results, philosophical violence, not colloquial) is a meme as old as time. It’s more of a dysphemistic treadmill thing than anything. People are okay with being oppressed when talked about in normal terms like “walled garden” but talking about sex at all is taboo in a lot of places (for no good reason). (I am asexual (mostly) and I find this paradoxical aspect of the largely sexual public (in the US) to be massively a detriment to society.)

    So no, using anal here isn’t being homophobic. Not including it in the dysphemistic treadmill would be. My boyfriend has used this term before and he’s hella gay.

    Edit: for reference, I’m exaggerating a bit. Buying into a walled garden is fine if that’s what you’re into. Just know that you don’t own the hardware or software you bought, instead you paid to get temporary access to services provided by it. For more information, see the war on right to repair.


  • 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.



  • It’s a very hard game. I really got into it playing with the Noita Together mod, and the Spell Labs mod when I was playing solo, to really figure out the game. Then once I felt I had a good grasp, I beat it, did the sun quest, eventually beat 33 orb Kolmi… Lost all my progress and had to do it again.

    If you can’t tell, I love Noita, but I fell in love with the wand building first. Spell Labs has excellent tutorials on improving your wand builds too. But I now have modded the game, so I’m not a casual player of it either.


  • 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.


  • Realistically. Trains will revolutionize road transport of goods and people if the train industry properly maintained their rails, operated above board (unlike the one that had the chemical spill in Ohio and other issues), and expands a bit. The largest expense in good transport is long haul and no one wants to drive long haul. Last mile will probably need trucks and drivers for at least 3 to 5 more decades. And taxi services have similar challenges to last mile delivery. Personal self driving systems need even more consideration than taxi services, and will likely take five to ten years after taxi services become recognized as safe.