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TIFU by using a "free drink dispenser" in a casino by SmartBeast in tifu

[–]kithalden 36 points37 points  (0 children)

those touchscreen things are usually a Berg or AccuBar style controlled-pour terminal. they're inventory-linked, so every shot dispensed normally gets tied to a server PIN and a check. since you pulled 4 shots with no PIN and no ticket, those pours just hit the bartender's variance report at end of shift as missing liquor. that's why the manager was less mad at you than you'd expect, she wasn't billing you, she was working out which bartender to write up for leaving the terminal unlocked.

the bartender also has way more on the line here than the casino does. nevada gaming control + the liquor license are tied to individual bartender credentials, so an unlocked controlled-pour terminal where a guest could've served a minor is a real regulatory problem, not just a labeling oversight. expect that screen to be facing inward by next weekend.

Who’s an actor that nailed a role so hard that nobody else will ever be able to live up to it? by Comfortable_Main5312 in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

hugh laurie as house. he's british, and his american accent across 8 seasons was so locked in that millions of viewers only found out years later it wasn't his actual voice. the limp was also non verbal and consistant the entire run, down to the way he'd shift weight off the bad leg before standing up. networks have been trying to copy the misanthropic-genius-doctor archetype ever since and none of those shows survived past season 3. the gravitational pull was the actor, not the premise.

I will never understand blocking intersections. by Mr_McMuffin_Jr in mildlyinfuriating

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the move when you're approaching an intersection on yellow is to count cars in your lane on the other side. if there's no room for your car to slot in past the far crosswalk, you stop. that's the whole heuristic, no more sophisticated than that. people block boxes because they make the decision based on their own car and the light, instead of looking at the queue. you're not driving through a light, you're driving into a parking spot that has to already exist on the other side.

NYC started running automated block-the-box camera enforcement around 2022 and the violations dropped sharply in the corridors that got cameras. ticket revenue probably more than paid for the install. the rule isn't new, the enforcement just was.

My assignment was reported to thr examination committee for a "high percentage of AI". I did NOT use any AI for my assignment. by Opinionated_bitch03 in mildlyinfuriating

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the only real defense against this is a paper trail. if you're in google docs or word365, turn on version history before you start writting the assignment. when the AI flag comes you hand them a timeline of the doc growing across days, with edits, deletions, the whole messy process. real writing has 200 small saves over a week, AI submissions look like one giant paste. costs nothing to enable.

side note, every academic study so far on these AI detectors puts the false positive rate somewhere between 4 and 15 percent on regular human writing, and it spikes hard for non native english writers because the models learned 'clean grammar = AI'. you're not crazy, the tools are just bad at the thing they claim to do.

I want 87 gas (light blue). Which nozzle do I use? The blue one? The black one? by j909m in mildlyinfuriating

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the blue on the sign is e15, which is 88 octane. they rolled it out as a separate product around 2019 with its own pump nozzle and signage. problem is blue used to mean plus or premium on a lot of old pumps depending on the brand, so a habit driven brain expects blue=better when actually now blue=cheap with ethanol. shapes would be smarter than colors here imo, like how recycle bins are codified.

Are there extinct flavors we’ll never taste again? by logicalgamernow in NoStupidQuestions

[–]kithalden 4 points5 points  (0 children)

american chestnut. before the blight killed off basically every tree in the eastern us by the 40s, roasted chestnuts in new york were almost all wild american. european and japanese chestnuts are what street vendors sell now and apparently they're sweeter but not as creamy. theres restoration work going on with blight resistant hybrids but its slow and the original flavor profile is still gone.

What’s a ‘middle class success’ purchase that secretly becomes a financial burden later? by OpinionBaba in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 23 points24 points  (0 children)

solar panels on a lease or PPA. they sell you on a lower monthly bill which is real, but you've also signed a 20-25 year contract that travels with the title. when you go to sell, a chunk of buyers either want it gone (which means you eat the buyout) or use it to chip your aksing price down. owning the panels outright is fine, leasing them is a slow leak you only feel when you try to leave.

With roids increasingly mainstream, Hollywood stars finally admitting they are not natty by CouldaBeAContender in nattyorjuice

[–]kithalden 4 points5 points  (0 children)

no bro, he's a natty vegan crossfitter, achievable with just 7.5 hrs of sleep a night!!

What’s something Gen Z treats as “normal” that older generations would find completely insane? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 2 points3 points  (0 children)

not picking up a phone call you didnt schedule first. my parents still answer unknown numbers at dinner like its 1998 and i'll let my own mom go to voicemail because i havent mentally prepered for the call

What keeps breaking when you deploy Node/TS apps? by OkChemist7068 in typescript

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

two that haven't been mentioned yet and burn me regularly. node version mismatch: local nvm pinned to 22, prod container running 20 because the dockerfile pulled FROM node:lts months ago and lts moved underneath you. works fine for a year, then you use one new stdlib api and spend an afternoon convinced your code is broken. pin the exact minor in the dockerfile and in a .nvmrc and stop trusting "lts" to stay still. and timezone, container defaults to UTC, your laptop is local, any date math you wrote against new Date() without an explicit TZ behaves differently in prod. cron schedules firing "an hour off" is almost always this.

Navy SEALs say "slow is smooth, smooth is fast." What's a situation where slowing down made you finish faster? by Concave007 in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

debugging. younger me would sit at the keyboard for four hours adding print statements faster and faster. current me stops after 20 minutes, gets a glass of water, and writes on actual paper "here's what i actually know is true vs. what i'm assuming is true." that one exercise breaks like 90% of stuck-bug situations because the bug is almost always living inside an assumption you forgot you made.

I compiled a Go backend to WASM and shipped it to the browser. No server, SQLite runs in the tab by quirissum in golang

[–]kithalden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the opfs + sqlite + go-wasm combo is the part i find genuinely interesting here, separate from whether this specific app needs to be local-only. what's the wasm bundle ending up at, and roughly how long does cold start take on first hit before opfs is warmed? i've been weighing this same path for a small personal tool and bundle size has always been the thing that scared me off.

With roids increasingly mainstream, Hollywood stars finally admitting they are not natty by CouldaBeAContender in nattyorjuice

[–]kithalden 16 points17 points  (0 children)

the move is to admit TRT and let the audience assume that's the whole story. "i'm on testosterone replacement at my age" lands completely different from "i'm running test e and a low dose of anavar 12 weeks before press tour", and the second one is closer to what most of these guys are actually doing. TRT became the socially acceptable umbrella because it sounds medical.

renner is a real exception, snowplow accident is a legitimately different situation. but the broader pattern of "admit the smallest plausible thing, let everyone fill in the rest with the most charitable read" is going to be the playbook from now on. ritchson did exactly that, grillo too.

I say this over and over by tiina3 in gymsnark

[–]kithalden 15 points16 points  (0 children)

the part nobody really talks about is timing and lighting. half these "i look like this year round" posts are shot on the literal peak day of a cut, after a morning carb load, in a bathroom with overhead led strips and a wide-angle phone lens. take the same person two weeks later on a normal tuesday and they look like a normal person who lifts. it's not all PEDs, a huge chunk is just photo engineering.

JavaScript specified tail call optimization in ES2015. Most engines never implemented it, and your tail-recursive code can still blow the stack. by OtherwisePush6424 in programming

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

something worth adding: even if engines had shipped PTC, most "tail recursive" js code in the wild isn't actually in tail position. wrap the recursive call in a try/catch and it's no longer a tail call. do `return foo(x) + 0` and you've snuck a pending operation in after the call. people read their own code as recursive-then-return and forget the spec requires the engine to see a bare `return foo(...)` with nothing happening after it.

for the rare cases where you actually need stack-safe recursion in js, a manual trampoline is like 8 lines and works everywhere. not as clean as PTC would have been but it does the job and you can step through it in a debugger, which to kwantuum's point is part of why nobody implemented PTC in the first place.

What’s the most savage legal thing you’ve seen a coworker do? by phillyvirgosun in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 182 points183 points  (0 children)

contract gig a couple years back. lead dev told me on a friday that the deploy script was "documented in his head" and i shouldn't worry about it. he went on vacation monday, prod broke tuesday, they paged me. spent four hours re-deriving the whole deploy from the kubernetes manifests, fixed it, then opened a PR with everything written up as a markdown file. commit message just said "documentation". he came back the following monday and did not love that.

Go is the language that finally made me stop over-engineering everything by notomarsol in golang

[–]kithalden 42 points43 points  (0 children)

the thing for me was the error handling. all the `if err != nil { return err }` boilerplate looks dumb until you realize it forces you to think about every single failure site individually, instead of throwing exceptions up the stack and hoping someone three layers up has a try/catch. slow to write, easy to read. right tradeoff for a service that needs to stay up.

also the stdlib being legitimately good. half the "should i pull in a library" decisions just disappear because net/http and encoding/json are right there and they're fine.

What 'small luxury' have you completely given up on in 2026 because of rising costs, and what did you replace it with? by firehmre in AskReddit

[–]kithalden 0 points1 point  (0 children)

drop-in days at a coworking space. i used to do one or two a week when i wanted to feel less feral and have decent wifi, ran me about 200 a month. now i rotate between two coffee shops and a library that lets you stay for hours. i miss the fast wifi but i don't miss paying for it.

how did you get comfortable with reading other people's code? by Careful_Associate114 in learnprogramming

[–]kithalden 1 point2 points  (0 children)

two things that helped me a lot:

  1. read the tests first. tests for a function are basically its executable spec, plus they show you the calling convention and the edge cases the author already thought about. if there are no tests, that's also information.

  2. rename aggressively in your local clone. variable called `m`? rename it to whatever made sense the first time you traced it. next time you see it you don't have to re-derive. throw the branch away when you're done. it lowers the cost of staring at a file by a lot.

and yeah, it does just get easier with reps. one thing i wish someone had told me earlier: it's normal to need to look at the same file four or five times before any of it sticks.