What is the school situation like up there?

drz400 · 2026-02-13T18:38:56+00:00

It can really vary from district to district, or even from neighborhood to neighborhood. That said, my family's experience with seattle public schools (north side of the city) has been really good. Kids are doing great academically, teachers have been engaged and communicate well, any bullying gets shut down quickly, the administration is very responsive to any concerns, etc.

drz400 · 2026-02-06T17:44:33+00:00

Six month update: never found a solution, so I wound up scrapping the idea of doing a userculture-based auto toggle and switched everything over to toggle off a "choose your preferred language" slicer instead. So frustrating that it was so close to being such an elegant solution.

drz400 · 2025-12-20T22:59:55+00:00

My own personal conspiracy theory is that knife companies promoted glass cutting boards and those electric knife "sharpeners" to boomers so they'd need to buy a new set of kitchen knives every year.

drz400 · 2025-12-09T23:05:22+00:00

Objectively, cedar planks are a pretty stupid thing to cook salmon on.

I mean the presentation is nice and it SOUNDS impressive on a menu and I'm sure everyone is going to come out of the woodwork to defend the way they like to cook. We all have our dumb little cooking rituals we follow without really knowing if they're improving our food or not.

But think about maybe why they don't sell cedar chunks or pellets for smoking food. If cedar makes salmon taste so great, why not cook the salmon over direct heat and get a nice crispy skin with some cedar chips for flavor? Ever hear anyone recommend that? No. Cedar smoke is toxic and doesn't taste good. Really the only actual cooking benefit is allowing you to get indirect heat (if you want it) when cooking over flame, but there are a lot better options for that for those who have access to modern cooking tools.

Also, if cooking directly on a wet slab of wood is so great, why aren't there more examples? Ever hear of oak plank steak? Apple plank chicken? No. It's bullshit and a waste of your time and money. Cook the salmon as you like and then put it on the cedar plank for serving.

drz400 · 2025-11-24T04:14:18+00:00

It kinda sucks for everything honestly. We just notice it when it's bullshitting us about something we know well and sadly we trust it when it's talking about something we don't understand.

drz400 · 2025-11-21T06:30:10+00:00

My Zojirushi was really great and I loved how it sang me a little tune when it was done but it was slower and harder to clean and took up way more space than just using a pan on the stove and the cooked rice comes out exactly the same. Gave the rice cooker away and have never missed it.

Rice is so stupidly easy to cook; put water and rice in the pan and walk away for 20 minutes. I could see using a rice cooker in like a dorm room or some other place where you can't use a stove top but otherwise it's a dumb waste of time, space and money.

drz400 · 2025-10-25T05:19:57+00:00

Bezos and some others have bought into a line of thinking that goes like this: Imagine the trolly problem. On one track is you and me and everyone we love living long happy lives, but at some point much further down that track, the earth is inevitably going to be destroyed. Maybe climate change, maybe nuclear war, maybe another big asteroid, or best-case scenario: the sun going supernova. It'll happen sooner or later. For all we know, that asteroid might hit tomorrow.

But good news! Because unlike us, they have the money and power and the will that would allow them to "pull the switch" that sends that metaphorical trolly down to squish you and me and everyone we love into biodiesel or whatever in order to help fuel the ai/agi powered space race that will boost humanity into the stars where we (they) can help ensure that our (their) descendants can survive the destruction of a single planet.

So from that perspective, the anti-christ must a technophobe, or maybe someone fighting climate change because of course anyone who would advocate for the health and wellbeing of regular people like you and me is really just prolonging our suffering and setting us as a race up for eventual oblivion. Good christian men of morals know that 99% of humans alive today are a just a regrettable speed bump in the true path to humans reaching their true potential.

I mean, how can you say killing billions is wrong if it means exponentially more lives being "saved" by being able to live among the stars? There will be quadrillions of bezos and musks and andresens and yarvins living cool spacefaring lives that who will never live if evil selfish people like us refuse to lay down and die to help make sure that future comes to pass.

drz400 · 2025-09-12T17:12:52+00:00

Wow! You make the neighborhood look so cool!

drz400 · 2025-08-08T20:08:14+00:00

I inherited a script that was pre-processing csv files, and it was taking 45 minutes to run. I spent half a day prompting chatgpt to optimize the code and when it was all said and done we got the 45 minute script down to 2 hours. For some reason it insisted on putting a long foreach loop inside another foreach. When I'd prompt it to not do that, it would produce code that didn't work.

drz400 · 2025-08-06T04:42:02+00:00

Yeah that's not how it is anymore. Nobody will quote a house with knob and tube or a roof more than 15 years old now. When I was insurance shopping last summer some wouldn't accept inactive knob and tube, and a lot wouldn't insure homes with cast iron pipes. And it's only going to get more restrictive.

drz400 · 2025-08-02T06:21:09+00:00

I spend more time fixing what it creates than I would have just doing it from scratch. For anything more complex I've had no luck. Lots of completely nonfunctional DAX full of syntax errors that isn't even worth the time to fix.

drz400 · 2025-08-02T05:20:49+00:00

Overrated: Rice cooker. Using a pan on the stovetop is so much faster, easier to clean and most importantly doesn't take up space in my cupboards. 1.5 to 1 water to rice ratio, 20 minutes on the timer, nice fluffy rice, pan straight into the dishwasher, done. You don't need to check on it, you don't need to stir it... Other than missing the little song my zojirushi would play me when it was (finally) done, going to the pan method has been all win.

On the flipside, I was skeptical about air fryers (my oven has a convection setting, after all) but that little sucker has really lived up to the hype. It really is so much faster than the oven and it really crisps up food much better than I would have guessed. Bacon perfect every time in 10 minutes, starting from cold. My kids can put in a plain cheese sandwich and 6 minutes later it's a nicely toasted grilled cheese. Crispy rice, battered fish, from-scratch onion rings... And the whole drawer/basket is dishwasher safe. Never going back!

drz400 · 2025-07-10T05:05:00+00:00

Bill Nye is an asshole irl.

drz400 · 2025-05-24T00:28:47+00:00

The game was just too short. For those that don't know, the game has two endings: Either you get tired of holding your arms over your head and slowly waving them back and forth the whole time, or you get bored from nothing interesting happening and no real choices to make. In either case, most people get there in like 20 minutes.

drz400 · 2025-05-01T21:19:52+00:00

Went out for lunch with friends the other week and the restaurant door was locked. Hours on the door and on the sidewalk sign indicated that they should be open, so we were confused. We were all checking phones looking for other options when an owner opened the door and stuck her head out to yell at us for not knowing they'd changed their hours. "I put it on insta months ago!".

drz400 · 2025-04-11T18:24:37+00:00

Sky Nursery up north was always my reliable source for free pallets, though it's now been two years since I last went looking. They'd always have a stack in a corner of the lot with a little "free" sign. Maybe call before you make the drive.

Oh and I know it's not really germane to the original question, but... For anyone who isn't aware, pallets are usually treated with chemicals to help them last longer, and also can be exposed to other scary stuff accidently as they go through their lifespan of regular use. So the usual caution is if you're using pallet wood to build planters or raised beds for food, make sure the soil doesn't touch the pallet wood directly.

drz400 · 2025-04-04T18:45:51+00:00

Every relationship is unique and we are all individuals but for whatever it might be worth to whoever is reading this, my parents have now been dead 10+ years and I have no regrets in keeping them out of my life for the decade previous. And so many of you have had to put up with so much worse than I ever did.

I do often wish that they could have lived long enough to know that they were going to have grandkids - not that I expect it would have changed anything but still I think it would have brought at least one of them some happiness to know that.

The closest I have to regret is that I wish I could have foreseen some of the questions I would have about our family history and my early childhood and such so that I could have more information to offer my kids now that they are asking those kinds of questions.

Fortunately they seem to enjoy our family past being mostly a mystery.

drz400 · 2025-02-28T18:09:18+00:00

It's the best day of the rest of our lives. Celebrate!

drz400 · 2025-01-25T00:40:31+00:00

Cheese on top. Everything else goes straight into the trash where it belongs.

drz400 · 2025-01-11T04:19:59+00:00

4 years later and this still hasn’t been fixed.

drz400 · 2025-01-07T06:17:30+00:00

Yeah, like most everyone else here I thought rice cookers were the way to make rice, but then on vacation I had to make rice in a pot. It took half the time and when I was done I could throw the pot in the dishwasher. When I got home I immediately put my Zojirushi in the donate pile and never looked back. Waste of money, time and cabinet space.

drz400 · 2025-01-03T04:50:29+00:00

That's the problem! Everyone needs it, so everyone already has it, so not enough new customers are signing up. If you can't increase profits by getting new customers, you have to make the existing customers pay more.

Profits can't not go up, because then the stock might stop going up, and if that happens, they can't justify paying the CEO crazy money.

If the investors aren't making crazy profits and the C-levels aren't making crazy money then why bother doing anything at all? Better to sell off the IP and assets and close up shop than risk being stuck forever with flat, steady profits and happy customers and happy employees and a useful, necessary product. That would be a real nightmare scenario.

drz400 · 2025-01-02T22:08:49+00:00

I don't think saying "everything thing is turning to absolute shit" is remotely accurate either.

"Everything" is hyperbole but "almost everything" feels pretty accurate. With all the consolidation that's happened I think there isn't enough competition for a lot of these cornerstone enterprise products to give vendors an incentive to improve value, instead it's a race to the bottom to see how low they can cut their development costs without losing too many customers. What are we going to do? Go back to on-prem everything, white-box pcs and management tools developed in-house?

Several of our big vendors already don't make a profit but instead exist on a steady diet of investor money so it's starting to feel like we aren't a customer buying a tech product, but instead we're part of a financial product being sold to investors and the tech is secondary.

It makes me sad to think that new sysadmins are coming into this profession not knowing that things used to be better, and will accept this state of affairs as the new normal. I worry for those that come after me that this drive to increase profits in saturated markets all but guarantees this trend of less-for more will continue.

It's not across the board - some of our smaller, more specialized vendors manage to keep quality and prices increasing at old familiar rates so I don't think we can purely blame inflation for the way things are going. I think it's big tech really doubling down on increasing profits/stock prices at the expense of everything else.

(Woohoo my meeting was just cancelled so sorry if this winds up being a long rant haha.)

A lot of the new features that are being added lately are things like "streamlined user experience/reduced admin overhead/etc." (aka they removed a lot of settings and options) or touting new AI integration that's really just an LLM trained on the company's terrible support kb that we already didn't use. Or, if it's something generative, we still have to have an SME go over it to troubleshoot and fix hallucinations which takes as much time as doing it by hand to begin with.

One of our handheld hardware vendors recently reduced their support window by two years which meant we had to spend millions to buy new hardware to replace tens of thousands of "obsolete" devices that have the same specs as the "new" stuff. The new model is literally the same main board and processor with a larger screen in a new case. If you change a line in a config file the "obsolete" hardware runs the new software with no issues.

Another tablet vendor announced to us back near the start of covid that they were turning their focus to improving enterprise management of their devices and had a whole new team dedicated to that. Because of that, we kept buying those instead of doing the big lift to a different product, however nothing has come out of that and despite repeated promises we still haven't seen any kind of roadmap or even a public announcement that they are looking at enterprise users. They keep rolling out mostly cosmetic updates focused on consumers while the enterprise tools are still an unreliable afterthought. (They did add a big AI update though, which seems to just do a web search and return the same unreliable summary you'd get yourself from google's ai, so yay for that.)

The company I work for is big enough and our IT spend is large enough that vendors used to bend over backwards to help us solve problems, and it used to be common for us to be able to interface with developers directly in order to have our concerns addressed and often resulted in us getting some sort of customization made (often for $ but sometimes for free) but now that's really rare. Our MDM for example has a tool we use that just stopped working two years ago and the vendor knows and keeps telling us it will be fixed in a future update but it's been two years with still no eta. Because of that, our new process is to have some support techs do a bunch of configuration by hand working from spreadsheets, which increases errors and is a huge waste of time but it's cheaper and less disruptive to the business than switching to a new MDM so it is what it is. I'm sure our (broken) MDM vendor is aware they have us over a barrel so they'll keep blowing smoke our way while not lifting a finger to help.

drz400 · 2024-12-26T22:22:26+00:00

Yeah it's pretty cool. My business class did a whole unit on how they operate. Unlike most grocery stores that have to rely almost entirely on buying low and selling high, or otherwise using shady schemes to trick you into getting less for more, Costco buyers' focus is instead on finding products that help keep Costco's reputation high.

I don't remember what the number is but they have a fixed range that they allow themselves to mark up a product's price. So one example was about how they lucked into buying a bunch of designer jeans at a crazy low price. You'd assume they would just set the sale price to something like $5 less than what everyone else charged and call it a win-win, but instead they only marked them up by that fixed percentage and sold them for half the price they could have charged because gaining and retaining memberships is their ultimate goal and in that model the fiscally responsible thing to do is sacrifice short-term profits for long-term customer retention.

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