I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

• Use the right tools for the job
• Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
• A simple dish will take much longer than you think
• RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
• Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
• Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
• You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.

I’ve fought this battle so many times.

My most recent battle was being told to implement Scrum and agile practices. When the subject of standup NOT being a status update came up, and I forcibly told people to keep their updates brief, it was changed to a “Sync Meeting” that lasted over an hour. Apparently, despite delivering stuff faster, being able to track velocity and ensure we’re not overextending ourselves each “sprint”, and actually knowing what we’re delivering through actionable tasks - we’re not doing agile any more…

Out of interest, what do you do and where are you based? It’s a shitty place to work, but if you’re near an Amazon office and you do Amazony things I’m happy to send a reference your way.

It surprises me a little, because on some instances there seems to be a lot of power users/tech influencer types, but not a lot of engagement between smaller accounts. Active users is around 1 in 12, which is again higher than expected, so maybe it’s just me/Hackyderm?

Eh, to some extent, but we’ve got the foresight to accept these dishes as being British when you consider that the foods we eat aren’t authentic to those areas. Spag Bol isn’t being eaten in Italy, nor is Chicken Vindaloo in India.

We’ve got a long enough history that we can trace back when the Normans and Saxons came here, alongside the culture changes of Indian settlers, Jamaican workers, Irish, etc. That acceptance is not only why there’re a lot of distinctly British versions of different cultures’ food, but why many cities in the UK also serve decidedly authentic food at some of the best restaurants in the world - and that doesn’t even factor in how some cultures have fused over time.

Or a Kebab, absolutely fucking loaded with enough spice to blow your insides out the morning after.

The perception of Britain that most Americans have is that of the 40’s and 50’s. It’s hardly surprising that it’s completely fucking wrong.

I’ll die on this hill.

If you want an easy language for beginners, Ruby is a much better alternative. It’s like a simpler Python, and aside from a crazy loop syntax teaches clean programming principles better than most languages.

With that said, Rails IS a ghetto, and many of the kinds of companies that use Ruby as their main language are stuck in the past or are full of the biggest toolbags you’ll ever meet. DHH, in particular, built a reputation on being a programming contrarian, so much so that there’s a golden rule where if he says something, the opposite is probably the correct choice.

IMO more people should be critical of the systems and tools that they use instead of shitting on the tools that others choose to use.

We do assume too much of our tools, but many people here are guilty of assuming that other OS’s are broken in ways that do not reflect the average customer experience.

Several reasons:

• Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was “solved” years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
• Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
• The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don’t really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you’ll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It’s rather clique-y.
• Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn’t really anything worthwhile being posted.

Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can’t answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what’s the argument for using them?

The Pixels are probably the best high-end phone, but today the selection available is all bad enough that your choice comes down to “what features can I lose?”

Even the likes of OnePlus have been shit for years. A company that literally entered the market on releasing an affordable flagship with near-stock software. Their last great phone was the OnePlus 6, before they decided to start ditching features.

I had assumed that more companies would enter the market and take over, but that hasn’t happened. You still end up with no choice, whether it’s a poor screen, an awful camera, no storage, removed ports/jacks, no NFC support, or stupid little features that no one would actually give a shit about.

The strength of early Android was that you had flagship phones that had the best new features, and experimental releases that tried new things on a budget like barcode scanners, slide-out keyboards, a desktop OS, remote features, etc. This still exists, but you’re paying even more for the pleasure of testing something in the wild.

IMO, the world could use a new mobile OS, and one grounded in reality.

That thread is hardly accurate. Lemmy acts holier-than-thou about social media, so most people that do use Twitter or Facebook didn’t post because they’d be shit on or have memes created about how they use social media owned by evil robots.

Isn’t that incorrect? The costs incurred by the NHS in the UK are much lower than what a hospital would spend in the US, especially on drugs, where there is a single market with limited customers.

SleepTimer is as perfect an app as can be. It does one thing, and does it really well.

Working in Ruby did 10x more to help me write clean code than reading Clean Code ever did.

Many of the lessons drilled into me with Ruby (keep a consistent style, tests are cheap, keep your methods relatively small where possible, reduce nesting where possible) carry over nicely into other languages without needing to go through any OO bullshit.

IMO, the best lesson around Clean Code is this: you’re not clever, write obvious code that works with as few tricks as possible.

I switched from .local to .honk and I’m never looking back.

Wasn’t Alyx HL3?

Many people use the example of Steam to say “well, they’re doing things right”, because they offer a better service to everyone else.

My point is that Google could have welcomed competition and still stayed at the top. Instead, they created walls that welcomed this ruling, and damaged themselves and customers in the process.

Google gained their initial position fair and square. They had the better search engine, and despite the likes of Bing being actually pretty good they were never able to compete.

All Google had to do was to follow its initial mantra of “don’t be evil”. That’s literally all it needed to do. Sadly, they were evil, and these are the seeds of that evil. I maintain today that Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search would still be dominant if Google were to welcome third-parties to compete and take space on their devices.

This, IMO, is a case that is damaging to their CEO above anything else. It shows that over the last few years many of the steps taken that have alienated fans and employees have actually damaged the company too. The exec actions have damaged them, and as such the execs should pay the price or course-correct.

You’ve just made your first post regarding Arch. The cycle is complete.