by Adelaide Song on 2024-03-19.
Tags: morning pages
Not even having the local admin to install Neovim on my machine without external intervention has radicalized me.
I’ve mostly been stuck on the Windows partition of my home workstation—because it’s the one with all the games and I’ve been a lazy bastard for the past few—but returning to a fully-featured Nvchad setup reminds me just how fast I can go through its dark powers. Even taking into account the brief detours to refresh my memory with a cheeky Goog, it’s a notable speedup.
And this is for prose writing! Not even a case where you’d need to think on the level of blocks and lines, where Vim is set up to save you the most time.
The story of my career is small, microscopic frictions adding up to infinity. I suspect most engineers experience the exact same thing.
This is where I’m picking up the pages the next day; an admission of defeat, for sure, but also an admission that occasionally there is work to be done at this clownshow.
I do not expect this to be a consistent trend.
One of the most consistently frustrating things about being a B2B SaaS provider—and doesn’t that phrase just drain your body of every molecule of dopamine—is the complete lack of knowledge from either B as to what technology… does. It says something that I know more about what Tableau does than the entire government department that asked us to use the fucking thing.
Two guesses as to what’s being said, and the first doesn’t count.
The end result has been me having to paint a horse with lipstick in an attempt to convince state officials that it’s actually been a stripper the entire time. Really, I’m not sure who’s more culpable between the two sides: our management for completely failing to do requirements gathering until very recently, or theirs for not even having a sane set of requirements to gather. It’s kind of impressive how much these people lack any sense of permanence: you can answer any question they want, show them how each box they want is checked off, and they’ll still come back to you a week later about the exact same subject matter.
I’m reminded of Nat Bennett’s game of ‘bring me a rock’, except these people won’t even let you bring a bucket for collecting the rocks. God forbid you say the word ‘pickaxe’ or ‘earthmover’; you might kill someone in the boardroom.
Anatomy of a Fall […] is extremely fucking good and apart [sic] of my ongoing thesis that if you must marry an artist, do not let them be from the same field
—anonymous oomf
Yeah, but have you considered that it’s super fucking funny when my girlfriend sends me nightmare stories?
My job is enervating, in large part because I am the sole purveyor of anything technical in 99.95% of situations. The benefit of this is that I generally trust my own judgment enough to not do anything absolutely insane, although I will be the first to concede that I’m not doing anything great either. TDD is sort of a pipe-dream when you’re barely able to gather specs at all. Our office doesn’t run on Lean so much as it runs on rabbit starvation, and the only XP I interact with is the Windows variant.
Having said that, sometimes you read something so unhinged that the only thing more horrifying is the fact that you get where they’re coming from.
i made a bruteforce test that casts every number from 1 to 1 million in a 2-length autofixture string and validates the round. this works pretty well actually
Reader, this was somehow not the most distressing thing disclosed to me in that message, let alone that conversation.
im soooooo glad this is incredibly Not My Problem
You said it, sister. Maybe front-end is where it’s at after all.
Going from Python to Rust has been a great reminder of the fact that upfront speed usually doesn’t last. I miss having an actual type system, not one that just exists for the sake of PyCharm’s sad attempts to lint my chicken-scratch codebase; one where I don’t need to import an entire extra library just to provide the correct typing for a function.
Damn if the existing infrastructure doesn’t compel me, though. numpy and matplotlib are such killer apps that I can’t really imagine carrying out a lot of my projects anywhere but Python. The only alternatives I can imagine are even worse- could you imagine trying to crunch serious gradient descent problems in JavaScript? Absolutely not. We’re already skirting the edge of usable performance in Python.