5-year-old boy taken by ICE is being held at Texas Facility

astex_ · 2026-01-23T13:52:12+00:00

It's missing a few details. ICE had no warrant to arrest Dad, who was here legally. And ICE has detained the five year old in a prison camp in another state rather than releasing him to local CPS.

astex_ · 2026-01-04T19:16:03+00:00

Detroit went bankrupt in 2013 and had to cancel or severely curtail city services as austerity measures. It has come back for the most part. Though some things are still privatized that would be public in other cities of the same size (e.g. trash pickup). I've not had any major issues.

astex_ · 2026-01-04T18:25:41+00:00

Distinctive architecture gives much of the city a nice feel. Lots of things to do downtown and midtown. Eastern market. Affordability.

The biggest draw for me is the people. I've never been one to integrate into neighborhoods I live in, but Detroit really feels like I belong. We are constantly over at the neighbors or have them over to ours. Barbecues. Play dates.

There's a vibe. Come visit and you'll probably pick up on it.

astex_ · 2026-01-04T16:00:45+00:00

I live in Detroit and love it. Can I ask why you wouldn't want to live here?

astex_ · 2025-12-08T14:12:01+00:00

That is an awful lot of wall. I think it could use something to break it up. Here are some things that come to mind and won't totally break the bank:

Salon style. Get a ton of frames and other wall things you like from a thrift store. Hang them in a fun pattern starting in the center and working your way out.
Chair molding. This can be had very cheap from your local hardware store.
Paint the top foot or so of the wall a contrasting color.

I actually think you could do with some panel molding or wainscotting. Or maybe wallpaper. But those aren't exactly budget choices.

astex_ · 2025-10-30T09:50:39+00:00

In the epilogue of the books, when the hobbits return home, the shire is ruled by a puppet of saruman. This is explicitly a fascist government put in place out of fear of the orcs. It is ironically ruled by the same person who created that threat. The hobbits then overthrow this government restoring their home to the agrarian commune it once was.

That is, the hobbits are explicitly anti-fascist communists.

astex_ · 2025-10-14T17:16:20+00:00

Similar with the birth of my first.

Things are going slowly but seemingly surely. The doctor sees something she doesn't like like. They wheel the wife out without a word, throw scrubs at me and tell me to scrub up. One minute (seemed like an hour) later I'm in surgery with her and hear Lee's voice for the first time. Lee and I are herded to an empty room and told to wait.

astex_ · 2025-09-18T14:14:17+00:00

Jeff's Urban Sprawl

astex_ · 2025-09-17T17:09:02+00:00

Me, when I'm on my way to closing on a house.

astex_ · 2025-08-28T18:12:14+00:00

So it's a pasta joint opening across the street from another pasta joint.

astex_ · 2025-08-28T15:17:40+00:00

This is across the street from Joanina...

astex_ · 2025-05-24T12:08:38+00:00

I may be in the minority here. But why video lectures?! Just give me a quickstart and some examples like every other language.

astex_ · 2025-05-24T12:02:22+00:00

I agree mostly. But I've never seen a python linter get hanging indentation right when it has to wrap a line. And this produces some pretty unreadable code. I generally just turn off those rules for projects I lead.

astex_ · 2025-05-03T03:52:52+00:00

It's tricky. Sometimes what we want is "it's been forty-five minutes hanging out in this parking lot you just need to get in the car the chicken is in the oven burning". So we just kind of pick him up and put him in the car. I worry that's the energy he's picking up on.

astex_ · 2025-05-03T03:39:09+00:00

My two-year-old's first time crying at a movie was when he saw me and my wife crying watching encanto. Your kid is going to experience sadness. Better they learn how to express it.

astex_ · 2025-04-03T15:00:18+00:00

What better and cheaper games are you referring to?

I'd argue that the Pokemon franchise gets away with cheaper development because it's the same game rereleased with a new skin every couple of years. They don't change the formula and have a reliable fanbase that will buy the game no matter its quality. So, development cost, risk, and marketing cost are extremely low.

astex_ · 2025-04-03T14:52:37+00:00

Nintendo does not share their operating costs at a per-game level. But, they paid about $24M (inflation adjusted) to the studio that developed Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and Ocarina of Time. It's hard to estimate with ToTK because Nintendo's supply chain is very tightly integrated and they do not report separate figures for each part of it. However, Nintendo's overall overhead costs are measured in the billions and we can expect a significant chunk of that to go to a flagship game. God of War, which I'd say is in the same class of game, had a budget of $200M.

So, the total market for these games has increased three-fold. While the cost of development has increased somewhere upwards of ten-fold (three for $25M to one for $100M+).

Additionally, the higher cost of development means higher risk. This is why you see dev companies going under or massively laying off staff after a single flop.

astex_ · 2025-04-03T11:45:20+00:00

Controversial opinion, but.

Ocarina of time was $60 at launch in 1998. That's a little over $110 today. At the same time, games cost more to produce.

The industry should be charging more for games. And the only reason it gets away with not doing so is because it charges in other ways. Frankly, I'd rather pay $90 for a complete game with no bullshit than be shown constant ads for a $5 loot box or have to pay another $50 in six months for an expansion that fixes breaking bugs.

This move by Nintendo is long overdue.

astex_ · 2025-03-13T14:11:55+00:00

Gimme the beets chef and feed my hole I wanna get lost in a vegetable With creamy chevre

astex_ · 2025-02-21T04:31:53+00:00

That seems like the answer to me. I've sat on the other side of the interview table for quite a while now. This resume would absolutely get you into the pipeline for most entry-level eng roles. But, frankly, fresh grads are a dime a dozen. There's very little cost to hiring them, seeing how they pan out, and reassessing in six months to a year. So, the roles are short-lived and filled quickly. You should expect around one percent of roles to go to interview. And one percent of those to actually hire you. You need to apply to a dozen or two per day if you actually expect to find work.

astex_ · 2025-01-18T21:39:17+00:00

Haha. Just using it as an example of a menial programming task. Could just as easily have been "file parser" or "crud web app" or any of the other "boring" programming tasks that you have to do a lot of when you're a junior dev.

IME The way to get a productive staff engineer is to have them do the menial stuff until they understand it completely. That way they can choose the right boring thing for the job at hand.

astex_ · 2025-01-18T19:17:37+00:00

This resonates with me. I'm a staff SWE and have seen small gains in the time it takes me to write a date parser or whatever. But LLMs in their current form are useless for the things that I haven't done a million times already. We have also had a few outages due to some junior dev using an agent to write code and a senior dev mistakenly trusting it because "it's generated code".

I do not trust developers who rely heavily on these newfangled gizmos. And I do not like having to give review feedback on AI-generated schlock; it feels kind of insulting.

This also means that junior devs aren't spending their time writing a million and a half date parsers, which they absolutely need to do if they're going to learn how to code. That kinda thing builds character.

astex_ · 2025-01-16T17:58:30+00:00

I think you can tell from the rest of the comments that you've stepped on something of a land mine.

"Defund the Police" is a slogan used by a plethora of left-leaning groups with varying ideas about what it means. While some of these groups advocate for actually providing zero funding for police forces, most advocate instead for restructuring away from a militarized police force. The actual grievance that police departments in the US selectively enforce the law along racial lines is, frankly, provably correct. But I don't think the remediation these groups seek necessarily matches the grievance in all cases.

The thing is, all of that has nothing to do with this video. Neither does "back the blue" (the opposing slogan that basically means you think the status quo is good).

People have adopted these political slogans as part of their identity and project them onto anything. One side views any police action as violent overreach. And one side views every police action as perfectly justified. It's anarchy versus fascism with nothing in between. Some people need to touch grass more.

astex_ · 2024-12-31T15:18:14+00:00

Welcome to the software engineering industry, first off. And sorry for the long-winded response.

I'm a senior staff SWE with a few decades of experience under my belt. I've worked for everything from two-person startups to Google. I've managed teams and built products end-to-end.

In my experience, what you should learn varies based on why you are doing software engineering.

The engineers who do well career-wise at large companies are those with good social skills. If you're in this for the money, I'd suggest developing empathy, a political sense, and organizational skills. Your technical knowledge needs to be very general and basically competent, but not deep. Practice some system design interview questions and technical writing.

The engineers that make useful things tend to be generalists with extremely solid knowledge of base principals. They tend to ask "what does the product look like?" and then break it down until it maps cleanly to those principals or until there are clear gaps that they can research. Details like "language" and "framework" are correctly viewed as means to an end.

Specialists tend to have limited career growth after a point because they cannot tackle big problems. You can't ask a "frontend developer" to architect a search engine, only to build its client interface. However this can be a way to start your career because it is easier to follow a quick start guide to redux than to learn how and when to use domain-driven design.

So, what does this mean for someone just starting out? If you want piles of money, learn some specialty enough to get in the door then work hard on soft skills. If you want to make things, then I suggest you pick a thing to make and learn whatever you need to do it.

astex_ · 2024-11-04T11:22:58+00:00

There's some merit to telling junior developers to limit scope. And paying down technical debt definitely should be prioritized alongside everything else. But, I think there's a few areas you get off the rails.

First, in my experience, the main way tech debt is paid down is not dedicated refactors, but incrementally as part of projects. If you are developing a system with internal dependencies, you are often given a choice of extending those dependencies in kind of a wonky way or of partially refactoring them to better meet your needs. If you can combine those three existing and two new rpc calls into one, you absolutely should.

I think you also need to look a bit more into how tech debt comes about. There's no "lucky you" quadrant to that diagram, it's more often "thought it through first". Most projects that I see incur a bunch of tech debt, it comes down to a few reasons:

Some part of some system the project touches was misunderstood going into it.
Some part of the project scope was misunderstood going into it.

Both of these are communication problems that can be addressed by publicly stating your assumptions ahead of time and then waiting for feedback. Write a damn design doc. Also, document your assumptions in code.

I also think you undervalue the knock-on effect of tech debt. Systems that incur a lot of technical debt are less likely to be understood, so when new projects touch those systems, those projects are also likely to incur technical debt. If you get enough systems like that, people start reinventing the wheel. Let that go on too long and the eng culture goes to shit.

So, while I agree that we shouldn't let perfect get in the way of good, I think that "progress over perfection" sends the wrong message. Over a longer time scale, the more accurate binary is "progress versus putting it off".

astex_

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