Jeff D @sasquapossum - Tumblr Blog

Gender WTForia.

stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.

supreme-leader-stoat

judgejudyofficial

everybody say thank you Marcus Aurelius

sasquapossum

A lot of people seem to have strong opinions about not having opinions.

mr-jaybird

pictured: nerd to nerd friendship

sasquapossum

When I was in the hospital the night after my surgery last year, my room-mate and I didn't talk at all for the first several hours. Then he hesitantly came around the curtain. He said he'd overheard me talking about earbuds (on the phone with my wife) and asked if I could give some advice or recommendations for his son. Oh, the way I was rubbing my (metaphorical) hands. 🤣 Dude, you have no idea what you just asked for.

Skills I never really wanted to develop, but had to anyway: assembling flat-pack furniture without directions.

Well, I'm an idiot. As I mentioned in my last post (next for you), I was already feeling a bit emotionally fragile because of Empty Nest Syndrome. So what did I do? I played sad music. While I was cooking. An extra-tricky recipe, at that. I don't think I cried into the food, but I did have to rush things a bit so I could get out of the kitchen and lie down. Ah, the special taste of misery. As I said: idiot.

Long-time friends know I'm no fan of generative AI (to put it mildly) but I found something that I'm willing to make an exception for.

This hit all the buttons for me - strong female vocals mixed with piano and strings above heavy guitar, bass, and drums. I'm also going through a bit of an empty-nest crisis right now, feeling rather superfluous and all that, so When I'm Gone It Will Be Forever immediately had me in tears. Also recommend Until the Dawn, The Distant Call, and Dreaming Of A Miracle. I don't think any musical composition of this length has had such an emotional affect on me since The Wall four and a half decades ago. It's interesting that it ends with a warning about machines — "those who don't need songs" and then the last piece is purely instrumental. And this line (I think from Gentle Is The Rain) is going to stay with me for a long time.

Love was never something I could buy with sacrifice.

Ow. Did I mention the empty-nest thing? I don't know if the lyrics are AI, but whoever/whatever wrote that one hit the nail on the head.

#Youtube

gefdreamsofthesea

I tried gouda that was aged for three years today, just a tiny piece.

Imagine a very old cheddar and an almost caramel taste?

Very good, but intense for such a small piece.

sasquapossum

One of the best meals I ever had was at one of my wife's college reunions. No lunch was provided that day, so we hit the farmers market. We walked away with some aged gouda and some good bread, and all three of us went feral on it. So good. I spent years trying to find another gouda like that. Parrano is one such, but is hard to find at least on this side of the Atlantic. Boar's Head Caramella comes close, and is available many more places. Yes, it's intense, it can even be overwhelming sometimes, but in the right circumstances it's sublime.

wiisagi-maiingan

"You can't trust what doctors say because they're getting PAID to say that!! Instead you should trust me, a random influencer online, for all your health needs. Now buy these powders, I make commission. Check out my tiktok store full of random 'medicines' that you need to buy. Join my course, it's only $800 plus the $300 one-on-one consultation where I tell you that doctors are poisoning you and you need to buy my powders. But don't trust doctors, they're making a profit!!!!"

wiisagi-maiingan

This gets to me so much as the child of someone who has fallen deep into the anti-science and anti-doctor shit, the absolute lack of awareness of how the people peddling specific "alternative medicines" ARE SELLING AND PROFITING FROM THEM even while saying that licensed medical professionals can't be trusted because they MIGHT be getting paid by a pharmaceutical company! It's just absurd.

sasquapossum

Two things can be true at the same time.

Doctors (and other medical professionals) need to get a lot better about listening to patients, especially patients who are not cis male and/or not white.

Wellness influencers are far worse.

I can't stand olives, but I'd still rather eat an olive than a piece of shit.

burgerdotcom

reblogs were off

sasquapossum

Same principle applies to billionaires BTW.

kosmogrl

don’t take my defeatism too seriously I will always begin again and again no matter what

kosmogrl

I might sound miserable most of the time but at my core I’m a very hopeful person

sasquapossum

OK, Sisyphus.

depsidase

haunted-hideaway

I’m glad that OP:

1) Figured this out.

2) Shared so others can learn from their mistake.

uncleasad

[Image ID: reddit post on r/ChatGPT from u/Ambitious-Garbage-73; the first paragraph is the post title.

I mass deleted 3 months of Al generated code last week. Here is what I learned. Three months of building a side project almost entirely with Al assistance. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, the works. Shipped fast, felt productive, everything seemed fine. Then I needed to add a feature that touched most of the codebase. And I realized I could not do it. Not because it was hard, but because I did not actually understand how my own project worked. The Al had generated clean looking code with consistent patterns, but the patterns were not mine. I could not trace the logic from memory. I could not explain to someone else why a function was structured the way it was. Every time I tried to modify something I had to re-read everything like it was someone else's code. Because it was. So l deleted about 70% of it and rewrote it from scratch. Took two weeks. The result is simpler, half the lines of code, and I actually understand every piece of it.

/end ID]

feathery-dreamer

Always happy to see someone move away from "vibe coding".

This is the issue with relying on LLMs to replace human work, instead of using them as a tool to help. It's the "jock forces nerd to do homework for him" cliché, except the program fetches lines from multiple sources.

sasquapossum

Former software engineer with 30+ years of experience here, across many specialties but especially data storage where correctness is at an even higher premium than usual. This is the biggest problem with AI coding: not the "green field" initial development but the much larger piece that's ongoing improvement and bug fixing. As one person put it, AI will complete the first 70% quickly, but you still need a human to do the other 200%. 🤣 Tons of duplicated code, obscure code, subtle bugs, "technical debt" as we call it, that will plague you for years vs. the weeks or months of initial coding.

I know people who have used AI successfully for coding. They're all very senior, at a level that will be even harder to achieve when everyone uses AI from Day One. The common pattern is that they use it for the boilerplate that connects their system to others, or for tests, or monitoring, or other "peripheral" pieces. All good. But the core code? The code that differentiates their project from every other? No way. Even the people who build the AI code assistants don't use them to write the most critical parts. That would be stupid.

papasmoke

I just want you all to know i am planning to drive across the country to steal this street sign and hang it over my toilet

sasquapossum

Very disappointed to find out that "Charlie Kirk Way" is not a dead end.

#missed opportunity

When life mountains your boots, gives you put on and hike.

#dont dead open inside

ghost-mantis

Truck drivers in Michigan have for years smashed into an undersized bridge called The Big Penny. Normal warning signs have not deterred drivers from wedging dozens of trucks into its hungry maw.

So they put eyes and teeth on the bridge, in part as a further deterrent.

It has not worked…

sasquapossum

We used to have one of these in Ann Arbor, too. Now I live near Boston, where Storrow Drive is possibly the most famous of them all. That one has multiple sets of aggressively flashing lights, plus a sign hung at the same exact height as the bridge. It even says if you hit the sign you'll hit the bridge too. Nonetheless, every single year we get several "Storrowings" as we call them. Here's a picture I took a few years ago, of what is actually a pretty mild case.