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novax81

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Andrew Quackenbos. LAMP developer, currently doing eCommerce, mostly Magento. Learning some JS MVCs for the hell of it. East coast.

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In fairness to the algorithm, Autism, ADHD, and OCD have significant core presentation overlap, and often get talked about in the same spaces online. There's probably a high relation in their searches for the topics.

Doesn't stop the Youtube algorithm from easily being the worst of the major social media sites though.

I've written about some hierarchical manager system with some friends when exploring how to use AI for larger set tasks. While the easy answer is simply using something with much larger context - `Claude` is amazing with an API key if you're on the waitlist - we definitely followed the same idea of splitting up the context into individual groups.

We had some success actually with layering another AI into the mix - having one AI look at a summary version of the context as a whole, and decide which pieces of context to assign to each manager. This of course requires a sidestep into another database of some kind to store the "master context" (AKA the full conversation, so you likely already have it in some form of storage), and of course a lot more calls to the AI which overall increases latency quite a bit.

1. Use an AI to provide a short summary of each piece of logical context and map it by access ID 2. Use another AI to determine which pieces contain the most useful additional context to the piece of the task being evaluated 3. Build the context from the generated ID list and pass to individual task manager AI

Based on the comments (I'm also unfamiliar with emacs), you may also want to look into Obsidian. It keeps a local vault of files with some file structure magic to basically let you both easily jot down notes for later and find them (tag/header searching, etc) but also link them together (select some text -> extract into new note, and it backlinks, etc). For a bit I tried to get into being a "power user" of it, using scripts to collect things, add interactive widgets, bla bla. But at the end of the day, I've found it much more enjoyable to use in a very general way, linking documents together (I keep a personal writing vault, and a separate work vault) and giving myself ways to mash through ideas when typing makes more sense.

I've been exploring this concept a lot myself. It's more than just the physical (im)permanence of the output. It's how every letter is a purposeful, even the mistakes. Every mark reflects something about the subject, the creator, or both. The work itself may be recognized as art in some form - poetry, essay, etc - but the physical work is also art unto itself, if you consider art as the output of emotions into a form that can be shared.

As a web developer, I'll be perfectly honest in expressing shock that anyone would assume it wasn't being recorded. Even in far less important spaces, basically every click and keystroke is sent to some analytics service, and if you block it on the client, there's generally a server-side gatherer to pass on what it can. If you ever submit anything to any modern website, it is a somewhat safe assumption that it is recorded somewhere.

This applies a little less if you're in a country affected by GDPR, but even then - request that data some time, it's so much more than some people realize.

Man I hate this line of thought because I completely fall into it too, haha. For a really, really long period of life, I had just awful dental hygiene practices. Honestly don't even want to describe it because it makes me a little disgusted with myself (ironically, in a way). But, I also never had dental issues. Ate whatever, drank whatever, didn't care.

Then a few years ago I get my shit together more and start a daily routine. A few months in, I finally visit a dentist for, I swear, the first time in a decade. I'm expecting them to find the motherload of disease in there, but nope. They tell me everything looks fine, except for a tiny bit of gingivitis. Take some x-rays and I'm on my way. 6 months later, worst head pain of my life turns out to be a deep one that needs a root canal. Now I've got a bunch of fillings, a crown, etc.

I still brush daily and my mouth feels like shit if I go without for a few days. I know in all logical ways, it's just a string of luck and coincidence. But damn does the conspiracy part of the brain start spinning up on my anecdotal experiences... lol.

It's harder to get people to switch browsers nowadays. When Chrome first came out as a breath of fresh air (IE was IE, Firefox was better but a bit "heavy", Opera was... Opera), normal users would just nod and agree if you recommended a switch, and even as a power user, I only had to migrate a handful of extensions and behaviors over. At this point, browsers (particularly Chrome and Safari on their respective platforms) have ingrained themselves into their users daily routine. Things like bookmarks and some habits transfer pretty quickly, but casual users won't care enough about this (until they're impacted more).

I lost my brother-in-law a few years ago, and it was awkward and painful to continue seeing his name in places like Steam [You both play this game] and other media. I had a damn near heart attack when my father-in-law turned on his computer to collect some things before putting it away, and he auto-signed-in to every service we both used.

I think it will be intriguing to see if this new world of interconnectivity and constant reminders of those who are no longer with us will aid or hinder trauma recovery.

The amount of "Not knowing what people are doing" in large companies is rather alarming. I used to work at a company with about 700 employees just in the building I was in, and had turned in my two-weeks-notice due to the low amount of responsibility/work I was being given (bad management). During my last two weeks I of course had even less work, literally just one task to take care of and it would only take me about an hour. So I sortof just chilled and got my things in order for a few days, deciding to log into the server and take care of the job on Thursday.

So, Thursday comes and I try to get on the server... no response. A little more testing and the server looks like a dead box. I ring up IT and ask them to look into it, getting an email a few minutes later stating that the machine had a crash on Sunday night (4 days ago) and just hadn't been properly rebooted. As I logged in to do what I had intended to, it dawned on me that the department right next to mine had literally no other tasks right then except to be testing software on this server. Yet I, who had been putting off doing the work for 4 days, was the first to find out the server hadn't been working all week.

This sort of stuff is what makes small companies where your contributions matter feel even more rewarding.

Flat UI colors 13 years ago

As someone who struggles with good color selection, this is amazing. Thanks.

How I Fired Myself 13 years ago

The difference between working with bad bosses and good bosses really shows itself when there's a disaster going on.

A mere few months into my current job, I ran an SQL query that updated some rows without properly checking one of the subqueries. Long story short - I fucked up an entire attribute table on a production machine (client insisted they didn't need a dev clone). I literally just broke down and started panicking, sure that I'd just lost my new job and wouldn't even have a reference to run on for a new one.

After a few minutes of me freaking out, my boss just says: "You fucked up. I've fucked up before, probably worse than this. Let's go fix it." And that was it. We fixed it (made it even better than it was, as we fixed the issue I was working on in the process), and instead of feeling like an outcast who didn't belong, I learned something and became a better dev for it.