I’m just a guy, my dudes.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Hear hear! The government should completely get out of marriage and leave it to religion, or completely go in on encouraging marriage (actually domestic partnerships) between whoever if we think it’s going to be good for communities. Before Obergefell I would’ve said marriage is old, let religions have it. Encouraging people to take part in their community, have close ties with benefits like hospital visitation, tax breaks, etc should all be domestic partnership based, and we should’ve made everyone get domestic partnered - marriage should have conferred no civic benefits. As is, we have a weird hybrid religious and civic thing called marriage but at least everyone has access now.

    But yeah as far as encouraging families we should do the same incentive wise with having kids and immigration to help with our birth rate problems, and continue trying to make home ownership more affordable (and more varied - looking at you missing middle housing) and encouraging it to again, incentivize investing in local communities. Civic policy like this stuff gets jumbled and we should be more clear about what we want to incentivize and why.


  • I am shocked I had to scroll this far to find someone saying this stuff exists. Literally look around on Lemmy, check the comment section of the Washington Post, like half of TikTok, a huge portion of twitter, etc. All of it full of angry radical liberals, actual communists, people crying for guillotines, deriding uneducated hicks and rednecks. Mocking all christians instead of just the fundamentalists, constantly deriding white men for existing, even just dumb infantile names (e.g. Repug-licans). Literally last night at my local college, some portion of protestors started calling for lynching college administrators. Now I’m not saying pro-palestinian protests are full of those people, just like the average liberal would be pretty ok with universal healthcare but miiiight not favor seizing the means of production or banning landlords. But even though these people are a minority, they’re just like the crazy right wingers - they are loud, and paint with the same wide brush that hardcore conservatives do, just using a different color.

    And I want to be clear, this isn’t some enlightened centrism bullshit where I’m saying “both sides suck.” I am actually very, very left wing (though on Lemmy sometimes it seems like that makes me a moderate because I’m not calling for guillotining the rich, but I digress), and I probably agree with 90% of the angry people’s actual policy views. But at least anger and vitriol wise, and even a tiny portion of radical policy-wise, the fringe of “both sides” do kind of suck. Not everyone who is angry fits that profile (certainly I get angry thinking about climate change, but I’m not out there telling everyone who drives a truck they’re evil). But many people like that absolutely exist, and OP not seeing them likely is a result of our fractured echo chamber world, certainly not because they aren’t there and angry.


  • It’s not even just that they’re at the margins, it’s also a math problem. One bad actor can sexually harass hundreds, perhaps even thousands of women over the course of many years. Now make that thousands of men, and see how it’s very reasonable that 1 in 2 women or whatever it is have been sexually harassed or assaulted - and that can still be less than 1% of the male population doing it. Anyone who doubts women get harassed or even assaulted often needs to have their head examined. There is a guy in my neighborhood currently who has not been caught who is following women while in his car. The neighborhood listservs are awash with women who have noticed this guy. There was another guy who was groping women on the trail who affected multiple women before they caught him.

    And this is not just sex crimes. Recently, they arrested a group of car thieves/car jackers in my area. The four of them were responsible for over two hundred car thefts, and possibly up to three hundred additional unaccounted for crimes. And that’s for a very visible crime like stealing a car - imagine the numbers for something like groping someone on a crowded train or bus.

    This is why people who say stuff like, “just teach men not to rape” are as insane as saying “just teach minorities not to steal cars”. It is a tiny portion of the population having an outsized influence because they can harm multiple people. When you start blaming a group for the actions of a tiny portion of that group, you’re just lost.

    I mean sure, call out crime in general when you see it, but I have seen this type of harassment probably a dozen times in my life. And it happens all around, dozens of times a day.


  • Totally agree police departments need better candidates but that intelligence thing is not true at all. The one case that started that rumor was just a police department doing age discrimination against a candidate, and covering their asses in the lawsuit by using intelligence because it’s not a protected class. It was never about intelligence - it was age discrimination.

    What police departments need is better training, a smaller mandate (i.e., mental health professionals need to be called to those types of events), and a big enough cultural change that normal people at least consider doing the job, like firefighters.


  • Also they clearly didn’t take this guy seriously since he was yelling, “They want to kill me!” before they even touched him. They probably thought he was crying wolf. Better training would mean they wouldn’t have used an illegal hold and killed him, they’d probably have taken him seriously if they knew the dangers at that particular moment in time…plus with better training over a long enough period of time people wouldn’t be as scared of the cops in the first place so there wouldn’t be any miscommunication. It’s still clearly the fault of modern policing but you can understand why it happened at least. Super tragic.



  • drphungky@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev...
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    2 months ago

    SAS so I could get more work. Plus it’s crazy fast and great for statistics and economics, which is my field. It’s also easier to learn for non programmers than Python. It’s a great language, and its only real fault is terrible naming constraints. It sucks to be the guy pushing for more C# and Python because no one knows SAS, but at this point the cost is just prohibitive.



  • YAML might be more readable than JSON, but it’s absolutely not easier to work with, either to write from scratch or troubleshoot. And honestly, for my purposes that doesn’t even make it easier to read. It’s easier to read if I’m showing it to my wife because there are fewer semicolons. As soon as you want to do anything with the information you’ve read, it’s garbage. YAML sucks, and I’ll just link to a much better rant than I can ever come up with: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

    Second off, if you’d been using Zwave in Home Assistant for many years, you’d know they’ve changed their integration (no wait! It’s an add-on now! No wait, it’s also an integration still too!) multiple times, including breaking changes. That’s what I’m talking about. Of course I know Zwave is a protocol - it’s a protocol that Hubitat supports better. They also support Zigbee better (yes I use both). Admittedly part of that is built in hardware, but also it’s a better UI, a consistent UI, and not just… changing how things work so old hardware doesn’t work anymore.

    I dunno man, we can disagree on HA’s choices but maybe make sure you even know what you’re talking about before being a dick for no reason. Then again, you opened with being a dick about me being the problem because I “can’t grasp YAML” when I said I don’t like it so I don’t even know why I’m engaging. Just piss off.


  • drphungky@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe little smart home platform that could
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    2 months ago

    I’d argue it’s a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I’m glad they’ve been hiding it more and more over the years but it’s still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Hubitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his Zwave stuff from scratch). It’s also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations, and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just… It’s a mess from UX POV. It’s also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.

    Now of course I’m not trying to say it’s bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can’t beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There’s almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you’re persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It’s also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they’re amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn’t one of its many, many pros.


  • I fell backwards into programming and did it for years before ever needing or encountering a mod operator. It never really came up in statistical programming (SAS) and since I wasn’t a CS major I don’t think I even learned about it until taking online programming classes for fun. But I know I was a pretty damn good SAS programmer. I never had any issues solving any problems in my field programmatically, but I took a few leet code tests and was completely puzzled before taking said CS classes. The algorithms and common problems just never remotely came up. I never found fizzbuzz particularly relevant in statistics and data CRUD.

    Now maybe since SAS is procedural and not OO you’d say it doesn’t have typical “programming language features”, but I could easily see that experience being common in all kinda of business side programming like R, VBA, maybe JavaScript or Python, etc.

    …but anyway obviously I’m not saying its not a good thing for a dev shop to interview on, and if they want someone classically trained then it’s probably a perfect question. My quibble is just that you might need to widen your definition of who programs.