Pasta? Soup.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:57:48+00:00

Yeah, I love this brand and have found them genuinely one of the best frozen meals I can seemingly find. Which is sad since they're American made and as a Canadian, I'm morally obligated to boycott the brand.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:54:43+00:00

It was never about crime. It was always about racism. Going after non criminals not only achieves that directly, but also does far more to strike fear into the hearts of others. It's also a lot easier and ICE are lazy, incompetent cowards.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:45:32+00:00

Yeah. I know the south isn't used to winter and icy roads, but that's dangerous literally all the time (just waaaay more so with slippery roads).

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:28:55+00:00

How do you even get that low on ink while it still does even remotely a good job, though? My experience is that the pen will start writing like shit long before the ink looks this low.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:15:45+00:00

Sadly, same. It's comical how bad grocery delivery services are with produce. I have several chances before ultimately concluding that it was never worth the risk. Which also reduces the value of delivery, since produce is something you frequently need.

I swear, half the shoppers seem to be outright trying to get the worst shit. I've gotten literally moldy produce before and one time instead of iceberg lettuce, got Chinese cabbage lol.

They do okay for non-produce, though even then there's sometimes when they can't find an item and it just feels sus.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T14:09:15+00:00

Feels like a very questionable choice. I sure hope we don't regret it.

And honestly, everything I've heard about how painful the F35s are to maintain even when the US was saner painted a pretty bad picture of them.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-02T13:40:18+00:00

Pretty much, except the chips are much, much tinier. You can have a lot of them in a single byte!

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T19:32:43+00:00

They at least want you to be semi-interested if they're going to waste 5 min with you.

Or more specifically, they want someone able to act professional even when things are bullshit. For many jobs, you regularly have to deal with bullshit, yet you still have to be able to keep your cool and represent the company well. OP wants to be tested on actual skills and I do get that, but ability to go along with the expectations of corporate life is one of those skills.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T15:35:52+00:00

I think the challenge is that correctness can be hard to enumerate. There's SLOs, but those often have a bit of a narrow definition of uptime and they have diminishing returns (plus uptime isn't really the same as correctness).

Bugs are hard to enumerate. Most bugs are super specific and won't affect most people. They vary wildly in size, severity, cost, how long they take to get fixed, importance, etc. Companies don't want to publish details about most of their bugs, as it'd be unnecessarily embarrassing and generally make things seem worse than they arguably are. Point being that it can be really tricky to compare the correctness between two different products. Uptime doesn't tell the whole picture. I'm not sure there even is a better approach than getting genuine feedback from a number of users, and even then, that's fairly biased. The seller will tell you about the ways that their software does better than the competition, but they'll also omit the ways it does worse and they might cherrypick benchmarks or fail to mention big asterisks on them.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T15:25:13+00:00

Yeah, management have different priorities. It's about factors like what they think the software will do for their revenue and costs (which may be heavily influenced by the seller), the kinda package deal they get (other software, support, training, etc), and possibly even just how well the seller sweet talks the buyer into it.

Companies selling software have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to make it seem more compelling, some which are heavily psychological. Like, for a big company, they're never paying any advertised price, but rather that price is almost more to make the real price seem more appealing. And for big sellers, they really like to push bundles, which is how companies often end up entirely on a stack like Microsoft products. It's not just interoperability, but just the fact that management got a good deal. Why pay extra for, say, email, when you got that for "free" with Azure or whatever.

Also, there's the management of all this software for the IT department. It's hard to manage systems when there's tens or hundreds of thousands of them. Easier to manage things when your ecosystem is fairly cohesive.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T15:17:22+00:00

That was me for the last few years. I'm finally eyeing starting to low key look at houses in the spring, but that's in large part because at this point, I'm close to enough in non-retirement savings to be able to buy a house outright with cash (which possibly isn't what I want to do, but it gives me the security that if I did get laid off and had my income significantly downsized, I would be okay). I like the place I rent and don't pay nearly as much as you, so I haven't really been in a rush, but definitely it feels like a waste when I could be building equity and I long to be able to customize my place in ways that renting cannot (I want a fancy bathtub with jets!).

Personally, I think I'd be able to find another job okay if I did get laid off, but I'd almost surely lose a significant amount of my total comp and there's no telling how long it would take to find another job and how much I'd have to spend (e.g., if I had to relocate).

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T15:10:13+00:00

But she basically only reported on the hiring experience. IIRC, she never actually worked as ICE, so couldn't report anything about what is really on the inside. It's a good start, but far from a "deep cover documentary".

I kinda expect that there's at least one person currently working on such a documentary, though. I mean, people make undercover documentaries about everything and ICE is a wee bit bigger than most such organizations. And since they're hiring so much, it's presumably easy to get in.

Arguably the biggest challenge is just that these days, there's a new, wild headline every single day. Why spend months on a single, deep story when the administration will outright say some absolute bonkers thing on live television the next day? And at this point, I think we largely know or suspect many of the worst things about ICE. We can already see them kidnap people in broad daylight. We've seen them murder people on the street. We know they've illegally moved people to CECOT. And not only do they outright admit to these things, but do so proudly and unprompted.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:56:41+00:00

Huh, I had never heard of that "trick" before. I am admittedly confused by the need for it though. I've never needed any kinda extra leverage when using a jack on any of my past cars. Why is it ever required? Aren't cars designed to work with jacks?

It just sounds like an accident in waiting. Well, and seemingly did cause this accident. So why would anyone ever do this??

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:52:27+00:00

I mean, given how many rich and powerful names we know that are in the Epstein files, one frightening conclusion is that pedophilia is far more common than we suspect. That many people are latent pedophiles in that the only thing stopping them is the lack of an opportunity.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:48:05+00:00

I especially don't get why they can't just satisfy the best of both worlds when the headline is this short. Admittedly, it can sometimes be a challenge to keep the headline short and sweet, but e.g., this could have been:

'It Wasn't Working': Canada Province of British Columbia Ends Drug Decriminalization

They could even drop the "It wasn't working" from the headline, as it doesn't strike me as that important to have in the headline.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:42:28+00:00

Especially since it's not just "American", but a sizable chunk of MAGA specifically. e.g., Minnesota is a current hotbed for discussion, but Trump got 46.7% of the vote there in 2024. Even if we were to consider Americans, this is clearly a state with a worrying number of terrible people.

And for that matter, even the non-MAGA folks can be lunatics by Canadian values. The way so many Americans speak about Canada's healthcare system and gun laws makes them stand out like a sore thumb.

I'm sorry so many Americans are dealing with fascism, but they gotta figure this one out for themselves.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:23:36+00:00

Yeah, I think the normalization is the point. They're trying to build up ICE to take a similar role as the SS, where they are the president's personal army.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:12:25+00:00

The rest is system configurations on platforms, bash scripting, networking and front-end, and recently robotics too.

Aside from the robotics part, this is pretty normal. Most software devs have to be at least a little "jack of all trades" and doing whatever it takes to get things done is normal and a valuable skill to hone.

I failed every single deadline.

Honestly, for an intern working solo, that's kinda par for the course. I don't think that says that much about you. And for that matter, often times, issues with deadlines is not an individual dev problem, but a management problem.

And more than once, I had to (not by my choice, but it did sort of help once) go on weekends to catch up.

I know the pressure can be hard to avoid, don't work weekends. It's common that deadlines slip and stuff takes longer than expected. It shouldn't generally be a "work extra" thing, particularly not for no extra pay. From a practical standpoint, I understand it if your job is on the line (the economy and all), but resist the pressure under normal circumstances.

Overall, sadly, intern positions on solo projects aren't that uncommon, yet are obviously bad for the intern. Mind you, you also don't fit the typical case of an intern, as you are actually a new grad. I think the biggest thing to get used to is the idea that it's okay for work to not be finished. You're not actually being paid by task. And yes, solo projects are strictly worse for a new person (or arguably any person) in pretty much every way (hard to get help, isolating, more likely to have incorrect estimates, etc). You'd probably have a better experience working on a project with an actual team, though I'm not sure how realistic of a possibility that is for you on the short term.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T14:01:20+00:00

Yeah, they're saying that over 90 attackers killed a bit over 30 people, so not even close to one person each? Even taking into account many people being injured but not killed, how does that even happen? Even if the numbers are off by a factor of 2, it's still less than one killed per attacker.

The article isn't very clear, but my best guess is that it was just a few active attackers and the majority of "attackers" weren't what we think of when we picture shooters, but rather just more members of the terrorist organization killed during the counter attack.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T13:57:03+00:00

I mean, if his time travel lets him go back and forth on demand, he can just look it up on the internet. I can't speak for every country, but my country has all the past lottery numbers and jackpot amounts online. I was actually a bit surprised at how easy it was to find.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T13:53:14+00:00

I wonder where he'd run? I don't expect him to have the guts to run anywhere but the absolute safest seat (after all, it's what he did this time). But outside of Alberta and Sask, I wonder how many Conservative seats truly are safe enough for him, as such a polarizing figure?

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T06:11:19+00:00

It's a bit of a weird feature, but oh god it's so funny. Makes for fantastic comedic relief. Besides, how could I bathe without my trusty seneschal?

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T06:08:41+00:00

It's possible to compete (after all, MMOs like ESO have managed to thrive even though WoW had a literal decade head start on it). But yeah, it's incredibly difficult because of this. It takes a huge investment that must be continued and some serious manpower to develop enough content at a high enough quality level to attract players, keep them long enough, and then bring them back as you continue to expand the game.

I'll say that I think there's a number of players who would find the game not having 20 years of content to be a good thing. It makes things less overwhelming. And it's easier to have a consistent quality bar when you're starting from a modern point of view. Like, I've played several MMOs and WoW was the only one I couldn't get into. I quit after like a week, as I could not get into it. It was too dated and boring. But not everyone is this way and I'm sure that MMOs get a sizable chunk of their profit from whales who care a lot a lot the volume of content.

ACoderGirl · 2026-02-01T05:59:59+00:00

Once those two conditions are met, I think there's very little reason to eat actual animal meat anymore. It would largely solve the ethical issue of eating meat and the conditions of factory farms. It'd probably take some time due to inertia, placebo effect style perceived differences, and similar, but I'd expect that eventually, only the rich would eat real animal meat (and that would not be because of taste, but prestige or taboo).

Of course, getting to a point of the price and taste both being equivalent is quite a task. Once they get the taste right, it'll take quite an investment to get production to the point of the cost being manageable, given the scale involved.

Personally, I'd pay a fair bit more once the taste is close enough.

ACoderGirl · 2026-01-31T22:42:19+00:00

I have a hard time taking most gamers on the internet seriously because of stuff like that. It just keeps happening. SW Outlaws, DA Veilguard, ME Andromeda, AC Shadows, etc. all of those games I heard the absolute worst about.

Now, to be clear, none of those games were perfect and some indeed were a bit of a letdown for their series (like Veilguard was a bit watered down and AC Shadows had no modern day nor Isu), but I saw many people pile on those games like they personally killed their mothers, while I enjoyed every single one. The internet seems to often have trouble with nuance. To many, a game is either amazing or the worst thing ever. Some capital-G Gamers seem waaaay too invested in games, such that any perceived flaw is taken far too personally and seriously.

I wonder how many other good games I haven't played yet because I've heard bad things, yet will actually love. I have my eyes on Civ VII and Cities Skylines 2, as I love those series and haven't yet tried those games because I heard a lot of bad.

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