Detective Costeau hasn’t figured it out yet, you haven’t even met him yet, he’s still sleeping off his last bender. Kim, on the other hand, already had your pronouns in his notes alongside a comprehensive psych eval

young men have been told that white men are the worst thing to be.

Ok, but try not being a man and see if people think that’s any better…

That’s been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I’m not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.

I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that’s not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.

ooh I fell in love with Taking Water by Billy Strings a day or two ago and it’s been in my head since

As much as I pretend to be one, I’m not really a fighter. I think this war may not need me to be one. The time to respond has already begun, and while front-line protests aren’t my strong suit, supporting protestors in my community is the place for me right now. If a greater conflict escalates, I’m probably not like doing the active fighting, but I can sure as shit help with supply lines as well as helping people who need to recover in the backlines. If I ever need to be in a fight I intend to be prepared, but there’s a lot more to do in a war than fight. And by the time anything like that would happen, I hope to have a resilient community around me who can support each other through hell. The fight’s already begun to an extent, and it’s important to remember that our best place may be “back-of-house” so to speak.

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.

Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.

So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.

Ultimately I think any conversation that boils down to who is or isn’t LGBT+ is a bit reductive. It’s not like every person in that broad grouping is completely valid as they are - there’s lots of abusive and dangerous queer people, just like any other group. It’s not like we endorse every LGBT+ person’s behavior uncritically, nor are we asking for anyone else to do so.

That’s kinda why I prefer “queer” as a broad label. It’s less about whether what you are fits into the acronym and is therefore valid. If someone identifies as queer, the question becomes - how so? And if someone spews some obviously abusive nonsense in response, we don’t have to support them, but if they experience attraction to people they know they can’t safely engage with (and don’t), my thinking would turn empathetic pretty quickly.

like most of these things, depends on context I think. being a furry is technically something different and not inherently sexual, however furries are treated as such and also overlap a lot with other queer communities. so there’s lots of solidarity to find there. same goes for lots of neurodivergent folks too.

To be fair, Bluesky does have “blocklists” maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven’t run into any issues yet, but that’s just me.

I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren’t discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.

I forgor 💀

carrying a crab around in your pocket is unfortunately not a zero-cost abstraction

my dnd party is fighting a bunch of crabs right now and the crabs are winning. thank you for this

This is an emotionally difficult subject that stems from deeply held personal beliefs about the meaning of life, parental relationships, and the responsibilities associated with them. Castigating blanket judgements and reading evil intent into people’s choices helps no one.

I’m truly happy you have a good relationship with your mom and have a desire to take care of her when she gets older. I once planned to do the same, and still mourn not being able to have that kind of relationship with mine. She did sacrifice a lot to raise me and gave it her best effort and honestly did great in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately, at some point this idea of “gratitude” became a way to exert control over my life. At some point, it became less about respecting the gift of life, and more about holding me accountable for a debt I never asked for and guilting me into following a path she felt would reflect well on her. I’m sad to say, but there’s absolutely no way this would work out if I tried to take care of her later in life. Expecting direct control over my life due to the debt from just existing would not lead to a stable environment and she is therefore much better off with professionals.

This is not an unempathetic or easy decision, but it’s the best one. Because sometimes relationships are hard and painful and don’t work out like how “family values” tell you they’re supposed to go and all the gratitude in the world can’t fix toxic relationships. People are more complicated than that.

I needed to read this, thank you!! Been healing from some related fallout with my birth family, and figuring out what that means for me and my life going forward. I now recognize the damage one can potentially do by finding their life’s meaning through their kids. Not only does it make the child emotionally responsible for the parent, it also leads to inevitable blowout when expectations aren’t met.

I have no desire to repeat that damage and can’t conceive anyway so kids no longer factor into my life. It’s opened a number of other wonderful and fulfilling opportunities, but the FOMO and fear of isolation when I get older definitely gets to me sometimes. I’m the youngest person I know by a lot… gonna need to fix that in the next 40 years or so or life’s going to get real depressing. I want to, in some small way, help build the world that comes after me, and rescinding parenthood means figuring out what the hell that even means now, and that’s terrifying. Maybe I’ll teach someday, or something.

In the US at least, it really depends on adopting infants vs. foster care. Most adopt infants, and there’s generally more prospective parents than infants. Foster care tends to be more challenging, so there’s less parents willing to adopt them.

as always, c++ lets us do better in breathtakingly elegant fashion:

#\
i\
n\
c\
l\
u\
d\
e\
 \ 
<\
i\
o\
s\
t\
r\
e\
a\
m\
>

finishing out hello world is left as an exercise to the reader, but the advantages and superior performance of this format should be obvious

It always depends but tbh I hope you feel free to use whatever terminology you find useful to describe yourself! and I think there’s no valor that can be stolen, identity is what you make for yourself. It’s always a joy to learn someone I know is queer in any form. Lots of us have had times where we’ve doubted how we describe ourselves too and gatekeeping labels doesn’t tend to help anyone. You will come across people who do here and there, I did myself, but in my super objective opinion they’re annoying, smell bad, and stifle people just trying to figure themselves out. Labels are just tools for further conversation and more people using queer labels is a good thing.

+1 to this for sure. Applies for gender identity too. Speaking just for myself, the longer it’s been since I transitioned the less my actual labeled identity has mattered, to the point that these days I just say “nonbinary” and move on. It’s what makes a lot of the “what is a woman” rhetoric baffling, given the label and definition matters so little in day to day life.

My bf comes off pretty much straight, but he describes himself as pansexual and attracted to feminine people. It’s cool to see him engage with the queer community despite being more or less able to “pass” as cishet if he wanted to, and his nebulous labeling was really helpful in settling my nerves as a newly-out trans woman. Less worrying about whether or not I was woman enough, more just hearing him say he likes me and that’s that.