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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I enjoy the food and the recipes have a pretty good variety. They tout the fact that you can keep the recipes and make them again with ingredients you get the old fashioned way, but there’s always that one obscure ingredient (of which you only need a little) that makes it tricky. They expect you’ll have some ingredients on hand, like butter (lots of butter, actually…)

    And of course, with the preparation of dividing things out, extra packaging, shipping, etc… It does get expensive. That’s a large part of what held me back from getting it routinely. I also remember some pricing/customer service shenanigans that were annoying but can’t remember what.

    But when my daughter was in NICU long-term (doing well now!) a friend abroad got us a gift card or whatever to help us with meals. It was pretty nice for that unique time.


  • Oh, please. People who have never left their home in their entire life probably wouldn’t. Why would someone who stopped leaving their house lose their favorite? I haven’t lived in my hometown in 20 years, but I still have a favorite park from there. My vegan friend once said she misses lobster. Someone who lost their hearing could still have a favorite song.

    Just because life circumstances change, doesn’t mean they have no memory of how things used to be.








  • Being already married and stuff aside, as a straight cisgender male I would honestly have a hard time with it. Like, my parents’ neighbor is a trans woman and I’d be lying if I denied noticing her (covered) boobs when she was hanging out in the back yard. But if I’m going to have a romantic relationship with someone, there are physical traits that attract me and others that don’t… And I would need to be attracted to my partner, both with what’s typically visible in public and what isn’t.

    It’s nothing personal, and I truly hope their new body (whatever that may be) works for them and they find the love they want. It’s just not what I’m after.

    To use the cliche as a tl;dr, it’s not you, it’s me.



  • With COTS products like Microsoft Office, it’s different because the government is just a customer, not the owner of the development.

    That’s the point I’m trying to make though. I’m a contractor, and that’s super common in government because they don’t pay their own a whole lot. The government is my company’s customer. Why can’t we be the owner of the development and that would justify it being closed source? If we can, the same could apply to anyone else and the whole conversation is moot because of a contractor loophole (which you’d have to be careful in closing to avoid closing yourself off to COTS products)


  • There’s a line to be drawn. For one thing, some stuff has obvious sensitivity that needs to be considered (national security and such). But aside from that… I’m a software developer who works as a contractor for the government. My product is used for and exclusively by the agency I work for, and they paid for it. Its contents would bore people to tears, but aside from that, should it be open sourced when complete? I can’t think of any reason why not.

    Now, let’s think about other software the government pays for. Stuff like Microsoft Office and other COTS (commercial off the shelf) products. The government pays for that too, should they be required to make all their source code public in order to have the government as a customer? How do you draw the line in a way that doesn’t leave a loophole for people like me, if I didn’t want my source to be opened?


  • I’m very much against AI slop and hate how it’s the most prominent use in day to day life.

    With that said, I work for a small government contracting company. We are careful about what we bid on, and of course it’s not a sure bet that we’ll get it. There is a lot of boilerplate stuff in these proposals. When I was on the bench, my boss asked me to help find some AI tools to help with proposal writing.

    Honestly? I can see it being used in cases like this. I wish there weren’t so much fluff needed in these things, but that’s the hand we’re dealt. It’s not necessarily worth hiring another proposal writer for what we do, and I certainly wouldn’t use its output as-is without knowing what you’re proposing, but to get some decent starting verbiage, section by section, to be adjusted after? Yeah, I can see that being useful.


  • If it counts, I encountered a Java file that, unbeknownst to me at the time, was duplicated across two different places. The project was essentially abandoned for years, and the file was one that didn’t change much so I left it alone for a year or so.

    Eventually I had to add a method to it. Compiled just fine, runtime threw a no such method error. Turned out Eclipse was using one, but when Maven did its build it used the old duplicate I didn’t know existed.

    Took me a while to find that one!