tmnstr85

The NES adaptor gives me flashbacks to my childhood. PS1 and PS2 mods had the same vibe. What a great era.

2nd

Are they fully blind or can they see some things? There is a new line of thought called Cortical Visual Impairment. Its important to know the difference. Regardless, I find that holding my Childs hand is without a doubt the most reassuring thing I can give her in an unknown place. Your son will find his way, with love. Praying for your family.

When I was 11, I had the incredible opportunity to join him in the recording booth during one of his voice-overs for Bell South. I stuttered badly at the time, but he was incredibly kind and understanding. He took 30 minutes out of his day to sit with a kid he didn't even know and talk about the art of speech—it was life-changing. I’ll never forget that day.

A few months later, we received two large 3x3' posters in the mail. Blown-up photos of us working together that day. In the lower right-hand corner of each, he had signed them, "May the force be with you! JEJ / To my friend, Best Wishes, JEJ (AKA Mustafa)."

What an awesome guy. I just pulled those pictures out, and 29 years later, I’m still filled with awe and immense gratitude.

Good to see windows XP still doing its job in the electrical control room!

PowerShell was (and still is) the go to for me in any M$FT shop. People like to group VBA and PowerShell together but I am amazed by the vibrancy of the PowerShell community and the deep history it holds. PowerShell releases are frequent and I'm excited about what I continue to see and hear being developed.

This brings me right back to June of 2009, as the markets started to spoil and the derivative markets fells to shambles. A few hapless souls in Baltimore would be tasked with manning 2 standing 12 hour shifts for as many weeks as it would take to properly reconcile what could only be described as a tsunami of unreconciled data for a single large custody player in the sub-prime markets. It took about 4 months, and went through several phases of rebalance but we got it done. As I look across the landscape of LLM, the word "context" screams back at me. I think the processing power involved to make all the poor choices necessary to find the right choices and wonder how that could've been done without a teams of people thinking about the same problem from many perspectives.

I am going through something right now mentally as a middle aged man and being alone every day starting at 8:30am and only coming home to the same 3 people (who i love unconditionally) is kind of driving me mad. My professional life prior to covid had me weaving the halls of an office I knew and many of the people there were very special to me. To have none of that these days leaves my mind to be pre-occupied by things hard to escape. I'm ready for a change but I don't know if that involves going back to a 9 to 5 with a commute. I really like the top post on here about creating community and understanding its an investment. I hope others benefit from this as well.

The PowerShell Podcast had Doug Finke on back in mid February of this year, he made a great point at the end of the discussion.

Don't be afraid to drive in another lane. Take the opportunity when you see it.

In a previous life, I had a management who told me to, "stay in my lane" and this led to a series of events where I ultimately left. Anybody who tries to keep you down or limit you ability to learn and think needs to be avoided. Those who foster this type of growth need to be held close.

I had my boss and the CTO (both Black) tell me I was no longer "part of their culture". This was after mid year reviews where attendance at DEI events was the center of discussion.

There is a thin line between personal and professional when dealing with DEI, and it is a tough line to walk. I agree that two things can be true at once.

I also believe that every individual has the ability to break cycles of hate and prejudice, regardless of what we have experienced and encountered. If we are to have hope in the human race, I pray the ability to choose peace is what saves us all.

Get out. The same thing happened to me and my mental health has yet to recover. There is nothing you can do about it. This is the oligarchy of capitalism, the HR team, sorry the "Human Capital Management" team is only there to execute the bidding of the management hierarchy. The sooner you leave, the sooner you heal.

Thanks for sharing. I think plenty of people get into these situations. They are tough to recognize, and even harder to act upon. I respect your thought about recovery, its been almost a year since I left my scenario, I've had to learn slowly how to forgive myself for not being able to get back up to 110%. You'll get there at some point but all those years in a bad situation do take a toll, be patient with yourself and celebrate every step of progress. (like the .5 lbs I lost this week!)

I graduated in May of 2008 and only managed my way into the bowels of a large bank due to the fact I had interned there over the summer and spring. This big bank was allowed under state law to pay us "premium pay", it was 50% of what we usually made after 40 hours, we were grinding 70 hours in 12 hour shift due to how badly the recon was after the crisis. By October of 2009, I had watched 4 or 5 colleagues with 25 year careers get carried off the floor due to the shock of losing their jobs. This stuck with me as I prepared for secondary school and decided to go with a master in applied technology, I was the only white kid in the program. Since then I've slowly accepted that I have a skill set that will keep me employed for years to come. Will it fill my pockets with the riches, not really, but it will keep me from getting the type of eviction notices I found on my dad's rental as a teen. Everything is relative - for those who do get laid off, I feel for you and want you to know that this too, shall pass.

This is the best. What a great API!

i've got a refurbed evoo with a Ryzen 5, it cost 225$ from walmart, it'll run anything, linux, win11 - you name it. I use every port on the laptop when i'm at my desk, its super lightweight and the battery life is admirable. my point here is that its all about the users preference, if you want something totally plug and play, you're going to have to pay for it and then you will still probably have issues. i've got an old gaming rig that i've transformed into a proxmox host, between the laptop and being able to connect to any of the VMs, I find that I have everything i need to stay productive, keep my data safe and not be limited by hardware or cloud costs.

Here's the final cut - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXce26k-leU

Fun story - '94 there was a deodorant ad with Charles Barkley where he plays an "explorer". In the first two seconds of the commercial, you can hear the grinding of stone doors (think Indiana Jones).

How did the jingle house create such a noise you ask?

Two toilet tank tops from the bathroom, rubbing together. A perfect match!

This story made my day. Thank you!

White, straight, male, 37 with two kids. One who is severely disabled and under the age of 5. In the past couple of years, its become clear to me that I will probably become a caretaker to my daughter at some point in my life. The prospects of keeping a full time job, in my field are quickly changing - I am no longer desired. Doing this in a financial services setting is especially stark because there's no empathy. Its been really rough the past couple of years. I am trying to find my peace with the idea that I've done a good job, I did everything I was supposed to do, but there were forces outside my control that will dictate the future. My wife just made partner at her firm, and I was told by a c level executive, of color, that I'm "no longer part of where the firm culture is headed". I see this issue every day, it gets harder as we get older. As we head towards 2024, that sentiment on the other side of the fence gains momentum from this type of isolation, regardless of race. It will be interesting to see how many men vote in 2024 vs. previous elections.

Our assumption is that you already have 20 years of experience in a language that is only 10 years old. Please submit a resume, retype everything in the resume into our form and then cry in defeat after the form crashes on the employers website.

PS... this map is really cool

Where does Snowflake go on this map?

My 2nd daughter was flagged during our 20 week for something having to do with the way her skull was forming and they wanted to do a series of genetic test. They charged us through the wazoo and everything came back negative. She arrived 3.5 weeks early and contracted bacterial meningitis shortly after birth. We found her code blue in the crib. She ended up having a bilateral craniotomy to relieve the empyema that had formed. CP, CVI, global TBI - every day is hell on earth. This was 2019, so the nightmare of the last few years started early for our family. We've had a number of medical professionals drop hints at the fact there might be something wrong from a rare disorder perspective but we're in a league of our own and that is hindsight - the damage and trauma are non-stop. Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in the same hell I live in every day.

GuideStar is the veteran in this space. I agree that doing this based on web scrapes and robots.txt is probably going to be pretty tough to get quality results. GuideStar always sells there product on the premise that they're vetting the financial statements of non-profits of best results. The real money might be on figuring out a way to scale reading and classifying non-profit financials - then see if you can quality control using a set of patterns.

Imagine what happens when it doesn't go right with children and you're in this situation. I have a daughter who caught bacterial meningitis at birth and had to have a brain surgery to solve the infection. Her existence is tragic, she is with us but she is going to have a lifetime of challenges and we've already been through the ringer. Now ever day is like waking up with a mortal wound, and to have other kids who need our help and support, its not rewarding. Add in a job where the culture is toxic and you're being persecuted for doing your job well. its not worth it... none of its worth it.

I think the real issue arises with equity or the option for equity. Suddenly you're in a much more influential position because if you build the next unicorn internally, its going to take everyone to the moon. That equity needs to be proportional to your input to the stack. That's what i'm hearing from all the "well you can't do this in a small company!" comments.

What often happens when companies start to mature- from small to medium - the equity stops making sense. At the beginning the engineers were in the business meetings, now others are taking credit for the engineers work and you find yourself in a back room being told there's a jira list of defect and bugs to work through. Meanwhile, you wrote the source. That's where the significant hazard mentioned above plays a really wacky role in your mental health.

I'm at the point where I'm just realizing how toxic my situation has been for YEARS. And I'm ready for the change...

Either side of the coin, it's still pretty wild to watch it happen. We live on a point in Baltimore harbor and had the perfect storm of both water being pushed up the harbor, big tides and sheets of rain. By the time the tide came in the second time, we started seeing water pushing up through the sump pumps in our basements. The pressure from the water table underneath our home was so great that water was pushing it's way through the floors. This was the first time we've ever seen this happen down here, this is an area with significant history. I would not be surprised if this became common place in the future.

The old... anything but reviewing the execution plan approach... throw more vCPU's at it! Thank god for query store.

child phone you say? how about landing this bad boy on the desk at work and patching all your calls through it. only thing that would make it better is if it had a speaker for conference calls.

I can't help but think this is the perfect way for an out of touch manager to justify staying out of touch. Maybe I'm not thinking of the right use case but personal interactions are something that are sorely missed in this day and age. Still a cool product!