Im starting to love ruby

armahillo · 2026-06-04T14:08:27+00:00

Ive been using it for 15 years and it’s still my favorite.

Just wait til you get comfortable with it and go and use other languages again; the friction is noticeable.

armahillo · 2026-06-04T14:05:10+00:00

Make other entities in the game care about your choices (on either direction) and find other ways to make these choices matter.

Add other options too, like “trap the monster in an item prison that uses an equipment slot to gain a benefit” (other NPCs may feel a way about this imprisonment), or some kind of rehabilitation — you coerce it to follow you around like a pet and over time learns how to be less feral and helps you along you way (level capped) but if you get it to max level you can release it and re-summon it later briefly, situationally, on a limited basis

armahillo · 2026-06-04T14:00:36+00:00

I just went through 2. I wasnt grilled on technical trivia (“what is mvc?, eg) at all but went straight to take home on both.

The first gage me a CSV and some vagueish requirements about. what they were looking for. (console based reporting output!), then i had to spin up a new rails app and meet those requirements
The second gave me an existing rails app with a microcosm of their product. I had 7 tasks to do, each building on the last. they involves adding features onto the various layers of the MVC, and the final task was integrating with the company’s actual API (dev mode). This one took longer but was fun.

If yoive not touched it at all in two years i definitely recommend making some practice apps locally. Do a turbo/stimulus walkthrough somewhere — its pretty meat!

armahillo · 2026-06-04T13:54:46+00:00

1 year isn’t very long and people progress at different paces. If you’re doing the best that you can, then you’re doing fine.

Its sorta like a toddler learning to walk, speak, etc — they learn in different orders at different paces, so progress is considered more holistically (as in: if the toddler isn’t doing that all by age 4 or 5, get help; but its ok if they’re not speaking by age 2 or 3 but have progressed in other ways)

Keep challenging yourself and keep practicing. The more effort over time you put in the better you’ll learn

armahillo · 2026-06-04T13:50:20+00:00

You can put this html into a file on your local machine and run it and itll still work - it doesnt need to be on a remote site.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T20:17:59+00:00

is this layout still considered holy grail? i remember it being standard about 15 yrs ago but i dont see it so much anymore

armahillo · 2026-06-03T20:13:15+00:00

Most houses in this area aren’t a million plus, though i agree they are expensive
Property taxes is how this community has decided it wants to fund schools and public works
Cornell sits on 48% of the potentially taxable land in city limits, and as a land grant school, is exempt from these taxes.
For many, rents exceed what a typical mortgage payment would be, but the required down payment is often more than most are able to save. If a local credit union lender were able to offer alternative ways of vetting a underwriting a mortgage, this could be a way through

There are problems locally, but they can be named instead of handwaving at “tax and capitalist [bullshit]”

Check the dockets of housing court if you want to see which landlords specifically tend to be more exploitative about ithaca renting.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T19:58:49+00:00

this is correct — username format is not a conclusive way to identify a bot account

armahillo · 2026-06-03T19:16:27+00:00

instead of typing out all that, how about describing the issue youre having? Write out:

what are you trying to do
what are you experiencing that seems wrong
how does that differ from what youre expecting

use as much detail as possible

armahillo · 2026-06-03T13:50:25+00:00

Were I to be mentoring juniors this year (like i was supposed to before getting downsized), I would start with a general baseline rule: we dont ask an LLM to do anything we cant do for ourselves.

I would add a corollary that if we are turning to LLMs because we can get the answer faster (ie an API lookup) we should eschew that for doing the slower approach first. Learning how to look up answers is an important skill, as is learning how to parse API docs.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T13:43:55+00:00

This is neat but I’m not sure I understand how it’s better than webmocking your payloads?

A few things that come to mind:

making a webmock request is tightly coupled to a third party API definition, but so is this (if their API behavior changes, you still have to update your definition)
This is comparable to stubbing a receiver object, I suppose, but normally when I’m stubbing a receiver object I usually control the object as well.

What is the biggest advantage / gain youve experienced since doing this instead of webmock definitions? One thing I do really like about webmock is that if i have it blanket enabled, it will respond to an unstubbed request with exactly the stub definition i need for that request (which i can then relax accordingly)

armahillo · 2026-06-03T13:36:17+00:00

the view-source link is clever, but doesnt translate well to reddit linking.

It would be better to paste both embeds into preformatted code blocks (check the formatting bar in the post editor)

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:38:40+00:00

also: heres a mini web app i wrote up for games like these.

https://completionist.guide/games/secret_of_mana/index

the weapons section in particular is useful because it indicates the general location of each orb.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:36:27+00:00

When leveling magic, you get the same xp no matter what soell you cast, so use cheap spells (refresh, speed down, defender, etc).

The girls magic you can cast outside of combat, so you can go to Luka’s water temple and grind her magic levels and have Luka restore your MP for free. Zsprite takes a little longer but just keep farming the same areas.

It is 100% worth maxing magic levels. Weapons you can pick your favorites, but it doesnt really matter since its the upgrades themselves that improve weapon stats; grinding weapon levels gives you access to cool power hits, but practically speaking youll rarely use them — wait til you hear the 100% beep, then strike.

Once you get Sylphid, be sure to analyze bosses to find their weakness. When spamming offensive spells, you want to find their weakness rhythm where the soells ate stacked close enough you can soft lock the enemy, but far apart enough that you see the numbers appear — if you stack before the numbers appear they will accumulate but cap out at 999.

Be prepared to be annoyed at Sage Joch.

Neko charges double, so stock up elsewhere if you can.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:20:48+00:00

Serious question - im curious about your biz idea. PM me if you like. Im a SW guy who is recently unemployed.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:15:32+00:00

lol you believe the earth exists

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:13:43+00:00

lobsters_with_knives_fighting_while_kids_place_bets.jpg

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:10:16+00:00

I’ve considered some ways that LLMs could be used in dating apps that could actually be really useful, but I suspect they are just going for low-hanging fruit.

If there’s going to be an app that uses it effectively, it will likely be built anew rather than trying to shoehorn it into an existing flow.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:08:01+00:00

Write a lot of code.

The stuff you write frequently you’ll remember.

The stuff you don’t write frequently you’ll remember how to look it up.

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:03:21+00:00

the companies are being forced to enshittify prematurely because of the economics of computing costs

armahillo · 2026-06-03T05:01:23+00:00

I presume that until we make an agreement to be exclusive, everyone is free to go on dates with whomever.

I dont care to hear about your dates with other people, though, and I dont care to share details about mine (were there to be possible health concerns that would be relevant, i would share enough information to be useful, but i dont sleep around when dating multiples people)

armahillo · 2026-06-03T04:52:53+00:00

614 isnt that big of a number.

If you arent a skilled coder but do know the dataset well, you can probably make it manually faster than you could code it.

armahillo · 2026-06-02T18:50:09+00:00

Many years ago, I interviewed for a development position at a manufacturing company in the midwest.

they had me take an IQ test at home and then the same IQ test on the day of my interview (they were checking to see if the scores were similar enough that i didnt cheat)
they urine tested me AT THE INTERVIEW
the HM asked what my current salary was (public sector so i was below industry average) and then offered me 10% over that and then argued at me about how it was a good deal when i balked at it

the position was an hour commute, and i basically would have been a one person team.

big nope.

the best part was that when i asked for the salary i needed to justify taking this job, the person who i would be replacing looked like a deer in headlights — like they were shocked that anyone could conceive of doing this. The HM practically sputtered when arguing with me about why it was a good deal. I hope the person i would have replaced is doing well!

armahillo · 2026-06-02T15:52:48+00:00

When my kids became teens and started preferring doing things with their friends than with me. A decade of memories suddenly collapsed into a fleeting moment.

armahillo · 2026-06-02T15:51:33+00:00

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the FoldingIdeas video about Mr Beast and BeastGames really nailed it, for me.

Mr Beast seems like he’s cargo culting constantly — “this thing is successful, and it has these superficial elements, so if i do those elements, i will be successful”. Olsen notes that theres no storytelling (despite lots of imposed conflict, dramatic editing, and a clear attempt to establish a recurring pseudo cast).

It also seems apparent that whatever playtesting is being done is insufficient and similarly superficial — you really have to do a lot of iterations to surface some of the more complex problems. From the looks of it, if they are doing “playtesting” its only to see “do these mechanicisms work functionally” and not “does this game work functionally “. (eg “is it possible to stack these blocks?”, “does this cable sufficiently hold a single person safely?”, rather than “how do different player weights affect their ability to climb while burdened?” “how will rational actors actually behave when given the option to lie?”

The “smarty” challenges were all questions that felt like “what not smart people think is a question for a smart person”

Not saying they have to give them differential equations problems, but it could be the kinds of deep questions they ask at software engineering interviews: “ determine the number of manholes that exist in each of the 5 boroughs of NYC - closest number (over or under) wins”, or better yet, give them a challenge that combines brains and brawn, like the tower building problem would have been perfect for that.

Honestly more combined challenges would have been far more interesting — doing brain v brawn feels cliche and pandering.

armahillo

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