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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • I’m getting flashbacks of the management team at the Home Depot I worked at briefly in my college years. Worst job I’ve ever had. Management treated us in with absolute disdain, honestly shameful to talk to other people in that manner regardless of the situation.

    For someone in a supervisory / managerial role to post a notice like this, it’s a sure sign things are completely rotten all the way to the top. I feel sorry for the folks that truly feel like they need that job.


  • Of the most obvious times I’m aware of, they’re mostly boring. But, I’d love to know if there were any near death situations worthy of inclusion in a Final Destination movie. Like I’m at the zoo, leaning on the rails in front of the lions and the joints of the protective bars are corroded but a split second before the bar holding my weight broke loose and I plunged 25 feet into the lion pit, another little kid blurted out “Mommy why is that lion trying to climb on top of the other lion are they wrestling?” which broke my focus causing me to shift my weight off the bar, thus saving my life.



  • And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.


  • Welcome to what it’s like being a practicing member of the LGBTQ+ community in the USA.

    Although usually in my neck of the woods they phrase it as “I don’t believe in…” For example, I don’t believe in gay marriage, I don’t believe a man should lie with another man, I don’t believe in Halloween.

    I mean seriously, you don’t believe in Halloween or gay people? It does explain a lot, but I can’t even take people seriously when they say shit like that.


  • Type 2 runs rampant on both sides of my family. I’ve had symptoms since I was a kid, and have been tested almost every year as an adult. However, my test results have always been in the healthy range, so I guess I’m not diabetic, at least not yet.

    It’s strange to read through the comments and see all the symptoms and recognize them in myself.

    Granted, I think the only diagnostic tool most care providers in the USA look at is the A1C number. I’ve asked many questions over the years: could my symptoms be caused by something else, is it possible that A1C numbers might not be a reliable indicator for some people, and things like that. Basically get told not to worry about it.

    Either way, I still get tested each year.


  • My nose is more sensitive than average to certain types of foul smells mostly in the poop and rotting organic material categories but also things like mouse / rodent urine, skunks, and cigarette smoke. Oh joy.

    Mostly it makes me feel like I’m going crazy because I smell these things when nobody else seems to notice leading me to wonder if I’m just hallucinating the smell. But sometimes I put it to good use by being the early warning system of skunks in the area and sometimes I’m the first to notice when the milk is starting to go bad.




  • Have you noticed the new way of promoting horrible food by telling you it has lots of protein

    Kind of, but it’s definitely nothing new in my part of the world at least. And I’m guessing you weren’t around in the USA for the Atkins craze (or just didn’t notice) when grocery shelves and fridges/freezers were littered with high fat, high protein versions of just about every ultra processed food item you can imagine with giant call outs on the front about how much protein they had (and then fat content only disclosed via the nutrition label).

    The behavior that makes my eyes roll are the foods that emphasize their protein content despite the product not being a particularly good nor dense source of it. For instance, a 50g cereal bar with a spiel on the front along the lines of “3 grams of protein in every serving”. Okay, so like, okay? And? I probably get more protein every night from the spiders I swallow in my sleep.




  • On a trip to San Francisco, the quintessential “gay mecca” of the USA I was on a bus making my way over towards Haight area (then planning to go visit Castro street aka the actual gayest part of San Francisco) there were a group of men on the bus going on a bigoted rant specifically about homosexual men ruining the country and going to hell and all that fun stuff on the LGBTQ+ agenda.

    Like, I’d expect to hear that kind of stuff in the middle of Oklahoma’s rural hellscape (sans the bus part). But in San Francisco of all places?


  • Lemmy.zip has/had a mismatch between frontend and backend validation on usernames. When the frontend allows something that the backend rejects, you get some random “InvalidName” pop-up on form submission.

    I tried several different variations of my preferred user name, but I couldn’t figure out what was violating backend validation, so finally I settled on InvalidName. Which triggered a server error (500 error or timeout or something, I don’t recall).

    But finally, one glorious moment in time, the lemmy.zip server accepted InvalidName2 without choking, and the rest is history.


  • Groceries. It’s a long, boring story why I needed to shop for groceries yesterday morning, but that’s what I did. At Walmart.

    The place was a bit busier than on a typical weekday night, but nothing like I was thinking it would be. I was surprised, but pleasantly so. I guess a shitty economy, weeks of black friday sales, upcoming cyber monday, lack of decent discounts, and the shift to online shopping have reduced the crowding in stores on that one specific day.

    Last night I looked around a bit online just out of curiosity. The sales and discounts were pitiful.

    The only stuff that caught my attention were gaming related items, but nothing was compelling enough to actually purchase. The games are still on sale for a few more games, so plenty of time to change my mind. And for the controller, I figure I’ll wait and see what the pricing is on the new Steam controller. There was a part of me that considered buying the PS5 controller now while it’s on sale and returning it if/when the Steam controller comes out if I like that better. But then the color I wanted most was more expensive than the rest, so I said fuck it.


  • Being unemployed is very high the list of why I cut back, and my unemployment is directly caused by the Trump administration. Nearly everybody I know that is fully employed, across all kinds of different careers and industries, has had cutbacks/layoffs at work with threat of more to come, so they’re all very cautious about spending in general (not just holidays). Even self-employed folks in what are typically solid trades seem to be struggling more than I would have expected.

    Personally, I’ve decided I’m not traveling to see family this year and I’m not buying any gifts, aside from a few toys for younger relatives. Since I don’t know how much longer I’ll be unemployed or if I’ll be able to find something with comparable pay and benefits to what I had, it doesn’t make sense to spend on gas, vehicle maintenance, stamps, etc for the foreseeable future.

    As an aside, I ended up at Walmart this morning on Black Friday, though I wasn’t going for any of the sales stuff. I was dreading it. While I’m sure it was busier than a typical Friday morning, it was an “I’ve seen it busier on a random Tuesday night in April” kind of situation. I know that the situation at one Walmart I was in for 30 minutes or less on Black Friday doesn’t count for squat and there are a plethora of reasonable explanations as to why it didn’t seem particularly busy, but it does fit suspiciously into the general theme of a struggling economy with lots more people than normal cutting back due to concerns about their economic outlook. It will be interesting to see the official data, though with this administration it’s not like that will be particularly accurate or trustworthy.

    Funny enough, on the way to the store I had a flashback to the days leading up to the 2024 election when the super basic yard signs were all over the place around here with slogans like “Trump low prices, Kamala high prices”. Of course, I knew it was absurd even back then, but now it just seems all the more ridiculous as I look back through my grocery expenditures and realize that even with all the cutbacks I’ve made this year, I’m still spending more while getting a lot less.




  • At the moment, I can’t even think of anything I miss that would still be there in my home town. The place has changed so much that the only thing it shares with the town I grew up in is its name. So, in a contemporary sense, I’d have to say I don’t miss much anymore.

    If I could go back in time, I’d love to take another walk through the woods I used to play in when I was a kid. They’re gone now, cut down for a factory that’s no longer in business.

    Also, I think it would be neat to go do my grocery shopping and run into my aunt and cousins or an old friend I haven’t seen in awhile. It was a small town, so it was almost guaranteed if you were shopping in town, you’d run into people you know and like.