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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Go to your Democratic party and demand change.

    Find a candidate that will stand on the basis of free healthcare, equal rights, the right to union, enforcing a higher minimum wage, enforcing paid sick leave and a minimum of 20 days holiday a year, and committing to lowering the cost of living.

    Once someone stands up for this, push them to the moon for the next four years. Tell anyone else NOT on this platform to fuck off.

    Essentially, America needs a Project 2029.



  • EnderMB@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlcarrot.py
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    6 days ago

    I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:

    • Use the right tools for the job
    • Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
    • A simple dish will take much longer than you think
    • RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
    • Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
    • Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
    • You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.


  • Haha no.

    A lot of people don’t realise how shit a war can be, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from it. Your local economy fucking TANKS, jobs disappear, workers disappear on the next plane out, and you’re left with a population that’s struggling on all fronts, trying to make a brave face.

    America is full of crazy disparity, but war doesn’t care. The one benefit is that the billionaire class would get fucking rinsed by the locals for every shiny trinket they have when suddenly food costs a fortune because your last shipment got shot up.


  • Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

    The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

    • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
    • I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
    • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

    The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

    My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.






  • Easy, because it’s often home to some extreme and often bizarre opinions. It often makes Reddit seem civil and intellectual.

    In the last month alone, I’ve seen:

    • Downvotes for suggesting that if you were to ask Big Tech to split, they’ll probably just split in a way that keeps them aligned, while cutting unprofitable chunks out.
    • Downvotes for suggesting that TikTok shouldn’t be banned for being “stupid”, given that most social media is stupid, and people often said that about the shit that many of us grew up with.
    • Just endless nonsense about how you cannot print with Windows, like at all, while Linux (never stating a distro) “just works”. It’s clear that so many people in the tech community on lemmy.world haven’t used Windows for years.
    • Crap about LLM’s and how providers like OpenAI are “dumb”, despite the fact that many use grounding and expert systems to guide towards correctness (literally what I work on in my job).
    • Being so US-centric AND contrarian that you regularly see posts around how “Europe is so much better for this”, when Europe is a fucking continent with separate countries and their own laws/customs.
    • Posts about how we can get “normies” to use Lemmy

    None of the above would happen on Reddit. They’re all signs of communities that are detached from reality, so much so that on Mastodon there are several posts from people that have called Lemmy (basically meaning the “main” instance) out as being toxic and unfriendly compared to other fediverse offerings.



  • Tomato pasta.

    Boil a pot of water, and add your pasta. In a separate pan/pot, throw some cherry tomatoes in with some olive oil and cook on a medium/high temp. The skin will char, and it breaks down the juice will come out. Add some.garlic (sliced, crushed, whatever suits), and after 30 seconds throw a splash of red wine in with a stock cube and let it reduce to a jammy consistency. As things get dry, add some of the pasta water to keep things jammy. Once the pasta is a minute from being done, throw it in with the sauce and cook until everything is done. Add some basil at this point if you want, and maybe some chilli. Lunch is done in 10 mins.

    Another fave is Tomato and Pepper Soup. Cut some big tomatoes, an onion, and a pepper (equal numbers of these), along with some garlic cloves in their skins, and put in a ceramic container to go into the oven for 30-45 mins. Once done, blitz in/with a blender until smooth (make sure the garlic is out of the skins first), add some stock, and finish with some cream, and you’re done. It’s much slower, but takes maybe 5 mins of effort.




  • I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.

    I’d go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they’re on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.

    With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla’s track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there’s no reason why if Google leaves they can’t just say “fine, we’re an advertising company now” and eat their lunch.


  • I’ve fought this battle so many times.

    My most recent battle was being told to implement Scrum and agile practices. When the subject of standup NOT being a status update came up, and I forcibly told people to keep their updates brief, it was changed to a “Sync Meeting” that lasted over an hour. Apparently, despite delivering stuff faster, being able to track velocity and ensure we’re not overextending ourselves each “sprint”, and actually knowing what we’re delivering through actionable tasks - we’re not doing agile any more…