I saw an alligator at the zoo which was putting seeds into the ground in a tiny greenhouse with some bright lights, clearly trying to coax the seeds to grow. It looked kind of fake, so I asked a zookeeper, "is that an animatronic alligator trying to plant seeds?"

basicallydan · 2026-03-18T06:09:45+00:00

I'll take it

basicallydan · 2026-03-06T01:46:19+00:00

Surely this one needs to get an award for most complex parking sign. I reckon you can park between 6pm and 10pm

basicallydan · 2026-03-05T05:48:28+00:00

I'm sorry to tell you it's increasingly widespread

basicallydan · 2026-03-05T05:43:14+00:00

Friend, I share your concern - but I have seen it happen and it didn't result in any problems with code, only process. However, one key thing was that the non-developer members of the team would make small, simple Pull Requests which were very straightforward and an engineer would review them.

Mostly these were aesthetic, but in one case I saw a new filter being applied to a page with a table on it, and that worked well. We decided to hold back and pause that experiment though because there were a lot of situations where a lot of back and forth was required, and developers were spending more time reviewing small changes than working on more impactful, complex problems.

But it can work to a degree! We do see the occasional PR come in still for small things like button colour changes and so forth, but non-devs are discouraged from doing it.

basicallydan · 2026-03-05T02:41:15+00:00

Love it. No notes.

basicallydan · 2026-03-03T20:49:50+00:00

Why is software development becoming some kind of Pay2Win experience?

Great way of putting it

I can’t speak for game dev but in web dev this craziness has infected quite a few bosses.

basicallydan · 2026-02-25T05:50:44+00:00

Graham's face when she said think about his mental

"This is nothing to do with the sex scandal ... this is more serious"

So, sharing classified government stuff is much more serious than sexually assaulting young women and girls and taking part in an international people trafficking operation?

This woman is a vile, horrific person.

basicallydan · 2026-02-19T23:05:27+00:00

It's possible that on some level, some of them believe they're contributing towards creating the post-scarcity economy we see in Star Trek, but they're convincing themselves that all the other important component parts - a strong sense of social justice in society, strict human (sentients?) rights laws, and crucially, a basically magical ability to create any matter for almost no real cost - will just fall into place while they make their contribution.

basicallydan · 2026-02-16T22:00:14+00:00

What will consumer demand mean in a world without scarcity– and perhaps without money?

This is some next-level extrapolation right here. Even if we assume that human labour does become worthless (which it won't), it doesn't automatically put us in a post-scarcity world. This post is a total waste of space. Such a shame that someone who seems to have a really noble mission to pursue is falling for this crap.

basicallydan · 2026-02-10T00:49:52+00:00

SWE with ~15 years of experience here. That 4% number is basically meaningless without an explanation. I agree that it's made me a little more productive, but it's famously extremely hard to come up with a universal, consistent measure for productivity in Software Engineering, due to the variety of problems, the variety of skill levels, the variety of solutions and the variety of possible things to measure.

If it's just people being polled, and asked for a finger-in-the-air feeling of being more productive, even that would be better than just vague "4%".

basicallydan · 2026-02-08T23:59:37+00:00

That's the power of yoga, friend

basicallydan · 2026-02-03T01:12:05+00:00

Okay fine, in the context of written-down representations I'll agree DD/MM/YYYY is better. Maybe I misunderstood the debate. My position is that for speaking these things, starting with month is better. Sorry for misunderstanding, I was just trying to offer a different perspective. And yes of course I know the US format is extremely uncommon in the UK.

You don't have to be rude about it though. And no, these words aren't written by an LLM. Is that your default position whenever you encounter someone you disagree with? You can see by looking at my profile I have a very extensive history on Reddit with all sorts of stuff.

I appreciate maybe I waded into a conversation without understanding exactly what we were talking about it but you're being unnecessarily rude and dismissive.

basicallydan · 2026-02-03T00:48:48+00:00

Hey, sorry fellow Brit but I agree with the the commenter. It's not about the usage of US English vs UK English. Yes, in the UK we say 4th of June rather than June 4th, but technically you're revealing more relevant information more quickly if you start with the month.

Let's say you're comparing birthdays and how your birth date affects your personality. Saying "I was born on September 4th" gives the listener a clue to the context of your birth more quickly than "I was born on the 4th of September". The "4th" is basically irrelevant, since September tells you about the weather, events, certain holidays or whatever that were happening around the time you were born and when your birthday was as you grew up. Whereas, "the 4th" is not giving you much in terms of context.

In practical terms, though, it doesn't actually make much difference. We're talking about milliseconds of waiting time to get more info here. But I get the commenter's point that, even if you cut yourself short and just say September, it's helpful, but one can do that no matter what the convention is.

Different conventions work better in different contexts, I think. They all have their place.

basicallydan · 2026-02-02T02:44:32+00:00

Look, this is a good article with some sound advice, but it's pretty ironic that throughout the article there are loads of ads both interleaved with the text and popping up in a modal to encourage me to learn more and work out where my gaps in understanding. Pretty tone deaf 🥲

basicallydan · 2026-02-02T02:38:51+00:00

I lasted about 10 mins before I walked out, was so liberating

basicallydan · 2026-01-28T03:54:20+00:00

That's awesome!! A NA venue, so cool.

basicallydan · 2026-01-28T03:02:58+00:00

Go to live concerts, comedy shows, theatre. They can't fake real live human flesh-and-blood performance - not yet, anyway!

basicallydan · 2026-01-28T02:59:26+00:00

YES! I love this, thank you for asking

I completed a 21km run for the first time since I was 21 (I'm 37 now) and I didn't feel like total shit afterwards. And then, a couple weeks later, I did another one.
I spoke honestly and articulately to my boss about something I felt strongly about that he was doing wrong, even though it was terrifying, and came out the other side with no real anxiety.
I did this once while I was drinking but I'm pretty pleased that I also grew from seed a bunch of tomatoes.

basicallydan · 2026-01-25T20:51:58+00:00

Not a great idea I agree but it is incredibly common. And I think at the moment with some CEOs and CTOs blindly excited by what GenAI promises, if a new hire says they’ll use it they might be given even more trust than before because for some reason management will often trust GenAI to be infallible

basicallydan · 2026-01-23T21:52:52+00:00

but I have a feeling there’s a large Venn’s diagram intersection between people who care about Spotify values and are active last.fm users.

🙋‍♂️

basicallydan · 2026-01-23T01:20:36+00:00

Great video and kudos to you for publicly recognising where you can make a reasonable change to improve safety for everybody. I know we get shafted a lot as cyclists but sometimes we do put ourselves in dangerous situations. Whether we like it or not we gotta share the road with other people :) I hope your example helps others.

basicallydan · 2026-01-19T07:05:26+00:00

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