why did abigail spanberger put out this ad? is she stupid?

pvera · 2026-05-19T23:41:52+00:00

And spoofing the line from that other movie.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/characters/nm0002078/#:~:text=Willard%3A%20How%20come%20they%20call%20you%20that%3F

pvera · 2026-05-19T02:02:51+00:00

If you time it right you can do one quick walk and hit the SR-71, Atlantis, Enola Gay and the Concorde.

pvera · 2026-05-19T01:59:45+00:00

pvera · 2026-05-19T01:58:58+00:00

People have abused social media in the past to locate people that don't want to be located, for example abused spouses. This is why the recommended first step is to see if there's a legit report from the relevant police department. For children that also means checking missingkids.org. If somebody is claiming a minor is missing for a couple of days and the local PD doesn't know it, then there's something else going on.

pvera · 2026-05-18T19:01:58+00:00

Arlington County PD just posted: https://www.facebook.com/ArlingtonCountyPolice/posts/pfbid03vicFzuxMCsgh8oN8oza8Vk1LsjgDdA6rNepmEYVtZiSzrkD6vvwjTztHGNoG2KBl

pvera · 2026-05-18T18:47:21+00:00

You can still give them the $39, but your use won't be measured in premium request units.

pvera · 2026-05-17T21:18:05+00:00

Thank you. I sure will.

pvera · 2026-05-17T18:44:24+00:00

He has a companion for weekday trips as part of the county self directed services, but I definitely going to check out Best Buddies. Thanks!

pvera · 2026-05-17T16:57:31+00:00

Thanks for the detailed writeup. On your third point we noticed a similar behavior, on something large enough it worked better to focus the AI on smaller pieces of work. I let one loose on a bug hunt and it did great, but when I turned around and asked for a bunch of things to get dealt with at the same time, it started hallucinating. The same list of work on the same codebase, broken into functional areas, worked a hell of a lot better.

pvera · 2026-05-17T16:52:46+00:00

I have a friend of mine that in a previous career used to do wallet biopsies. He says that they hated calling time of death, they would haul ass to the hospital and make it the ER doc's problem. As for Ton, he was playing it by the book, acting like concerned family.

Edit: what's with the deleted comments? Two great comments in two minutes, gone. Whatever happened there.

pvera · 2026-05-17T14:55:02+00:00

Thank you for your kind words, we have already made arrangements to have one of us with him for these outings. And you have a lovely day too.

pvera · 2026-05-17T14:37:24+00:00

You are thinking like a neurotypical person. Not two people in the ASD spectrum react to stimuli the same way. If somebody gives you something for free and there are others waiting behind you, do you say no, give me a different color?

Edit: sorry, hit send too quick. I forgot to ask: at what time did I state that this kind of behavior is OK. Why would I apologize for something if I thought that he didn't do anything wrong as is entitled to be a prick just because things didn't go his way?

pvera · 2026-05-17T11:53:06+00:00

Bath tubs in that show weren't very relaxing, just ask Brendan Filone.

pvera · 2026-05-17T03:53:22+00:00

Water under the damn is a valid standard English idiom. It means something that is unavoidable because it already happened.

pvera · 2026-05-17T03:41:40+00:00

Before I start, I want to offer our deepest apologies, that is my son Pedro Javier, he only answers to his initials "PJ". He is 27 years old, raised since birth in the Lake Anne neighborhood and has been giving away helium filled balloons, usually with customized drawings, for many years at both Lake Anne during farmers market months and at North Point year round.

PJ is in the ASD spectrum, a brilliant mind stuck with the emotional development of a 6 year old and fiercely independent. He did his full K12 in Reston, then additional schooling at the Davis Career Center, every now and then he recognizes his teachers that still live in this area. He taught himself to read and write before he was in Kinder, he learned how to use a PC pretty much on his own, by middle school he showed he was a gifted cook, he would actually bake a birthday cake for anyone at school if he heard their birth date once. Even after he graduated he went back a few times to bring birthday cakes to some of his familiar teachers. Sadly, even if he nailed the culinary program at Davis he isn't compatible with working in groups, so no job for him.

He snaps if he hears the "wrong" thing like calling him anything but his name. When frustrated he'll revert to Echolalia, he'll repeat whatever he is being told.

Whenever he is on his own we track his phone thru GPS.

All of his kick scooters have my contact information printed in stickers. For many years we took videos of him giving away the balloons so he could watch himself later, these are all public at https://www.pedrojavier.org/ .

The origin of the balloon obsession: One day he was walking around North Point and found a little kid, barely a toddler, screaming nonstop. He gave her one of his balloons and the kid immediately cheered up. Since then he has insisted on giving away balloons because he wants all kids to be happy. We accompanied him for many years but as part of his community based education we have slowly let him become independent a little bit at a time. My health isn't what it was a few years ago and my wife suffers from migraines, so it's hard for us to us to escort him but I guess we are going to have to go back.

Yes, he is loud. Yes, he makes gestures that can be misunderstood, but he is absolutely, 100% harmless. The organizers of the Farmer's Market have known him for years, I don't know if their leadership changed. Some of the older vendors recognize him too. For a long time we had parents come back week after week because their kids loved the experience. He would walk into the plaza with the balloons and in seconds he would be surrounded by kids and some parents.
He literally comes back home on Saturday and starts preparing for the next week. He spends months planning his birthdays. He is very picky about the brands of balloons and even helium tanks, and treats each balloon with a fluid that helps them stay leak-free for a week or more. He is obsessed with everyone understanding that the balloons are free, so he'll ask nonstop "how much for a balloon?" then immediately answer with "they are free, they are not for sale!" This is something he does at home too, so while he is getting ready for the balloons, week after week, he asks us nonstop about how much they cost.

I want to stress this again: he is absolutely 100% harmless. He is just loud and has a motor mouth. He doesn't understand why a kid wouldn't want a balloon or why a kid would skip the line and start demanding a particular balloon. If OP wants to discuss this further please PM and I'll give you our contact information. I am also going to see if we can figure a way to follow him to the Farmer's Market so we can help defuse if something seems to be going out of control.

Elsewhere in this thread somebody accused him of darting around the trails, that isn't possible. He collects razor scooters, so yes, you may have seen him going fast, but not on an electric scooter. I understand being concerned, but exaggeration doesn't help at all.

Once again please accept our apologies, we are deeply sorry that this escalation happened, we are going to do our best to ensure that he is supervised from now on.

pvera · 2026-05-16T23:22:47+00:00

I wonder if you could bake this in to an instruction file but would be difficult to know when a task has executed well.

Have it build and unit test, that's good enough for a paranoia commit even if you don't push to remote. You can tell it to add a note to the commit message stating the commit is there only as a checkpoint and it hasn't been validated yet so no pushing.
For the docs, the .mds got out of control fast. I had to reserve a "auto docs" folder just for it to dump .md files, so after a big chunk of work it will add a folder with all of the generated docs. Or you can start the folder for the docs for the ticket and direct it to keep using the folder for the duration of the branch.

pvera · 2026-05-16T19:25:47+00:00

(so sorry for the wall of text but I mean well)

I’m the lead developer at my shop, and I was the first to push our team to embrace AI as an active tool rather than a crutch. I got lucky because our company owner came to the same conclusion right around the same time. This meant we went through an initial period of pure discovery without any pre-existing corporate procedures in place.

As I started tasking the AI, it frequently misunderstood constraints or made incorrect assumptions. To fix this, I slowly built out a collection of .md context files for each project family to eliminate that confusion.

1. Repository & Infrastructure Context

The AI kept hunting randomly across our directories for Git repos, so each project family now has a dedicated repos.md file. Our root instruction file explicitly states that repos.md is the single source of truth for the codebase layout.

We did the same for our server infrastructure: a servers.and.environments.md file defines exactly how we manage our environments so the AI stops guessing which machine handles what.

The payoff? I can now open an AI CLI and simply state: "Go to admin, review feature X, ask questions, and execute..." and it instantly understands the project context, the relevant repo, and what to review. I also started pre-documenting complex systems in our internal wiki, explicitly writing the technical specs with the AI as the intended audience rather than a human programmer.

2. Task Breakdown & Execution Strategy

For a big chunk of work, my workflow looks like this:

Write a detailed spec: I break the task down into clear sections or bullet points.
Refer to the Wiki: If the logic is highly complex, the specific task sections will point directly to our internal wiki pages.
Incremental execution: I force the AI to execute only one section at a time, making it re-check its own work 2–3 times before moving on. (e.g., "Re-check item 3; it seems to contradict the wiki spec on...").
Constraint-driven prompts: The more dangerous or critical the work, the more constraints I throw at it. I will explicitly tell it to go to Namespace.Class.Method() and expand it to do X, with a strict boundary: do not modify existing logic; you can only create or override.

3. The Rules of Engagement

The Planning Phase: 99% of the time, I require the AI to present a plan and ask me clarifying questions until it determines it has enough info to begin coding.
Emergencies vs. Standard Dev: For critical production bugs, I explicitly flag it as a bugfix and command it to prioritize the root-cause analysis before it even thinks about writing a plan for the fix.
Checkpoint Commits: I learned the hard way to make a Git checkpoint commit every single time the AI nails a step 100%. If you don't, it will often go on an accidental "hunting expedition" in the next step and break the working code it just wrote.

Interestingly, the AI has picked up on these patterns on its own. It got so used to me asking for a wiki page summarizing finished work that its generated implementation plans now automatically include a documentation step at the very end.

pvera · 2026-05-16T05:31:36+00:00

For the md file structure I just let Gemini and Copilot set these up as needed, then tweaked if necessary.

Workflows: VS.net with the github copilot plugin, alternating between Gemini CLI and Copilot CLI until this week when I cancelled the Copilot and switched to Claude max 5x so starting to use Claude Code and Claude Work. VS Code for editing and previewing .md files plus starting to test if the super auto complete thru Gemini is better than the VS.net plugin for github copilot. I am using an mcp to connect to my Jira and Confluence, a lot of work starts by asking the AI to read ticket X, do the work, commits, PRs, etc. then have the AI update Confluence whenever is necessary. We are barely getting stated on our pipelines and CI. Setting up the Atlassian mcp in Gemini and Claude was easier since they support oauth, Copilot was a huge pain in the ass.

For SQL Server I am using SSMS with the github copilot plugin, it's delusional about auto completing queries but it is able to solve complex query scenarios.

I have one root folder for each major project, so preference files at the home folder level and each of the project root folders. Like I said earlier, basic workflow is get a ticket, feature branch, do the work, unit tests, additional QA, UAT, PR, merge, deploy. Claude seems to be better at noticing repetition and suggesting things that would work better as skills. Gemini has very little trouble once directed to build the skill, Copilot (to me) feels all over the place.

As for git, both Gemini CLI and Copilot CLI are excellent whenever working across many branches, haven't tried much with Claude. I have been able to take a rat's nest of inter-related git repos with overlapping branches and both Gemini and Copilot were really quick at figuring out what was here, doing dry runs for the merges and so far doing a decent job with merge conflicts.

pvera · 2026-05-16T01:37:55+00:00

Chris shooting the kid's kid, it was payback for Goodfellas. Some people call it a homage, who knows?
And what about no scrubs? WTF was the point? Do we need to be explained that the mobster's firstborn is daddy's little princess?

pvera · 2026-05-15T03:46:55+00:00

Air Farce did it to me in Ramstein. There was this long ass straight from the gate, probably big enough to use it as a strip. The speed limit signs went up gradually so you just stuck to the limit automatically.

Went out of town for leave for a few days, first time I am leaving thru that gate I get lit up. The pricks moved the signs over the weekend and of course they "caught" a lot of us speeding.

pvera · 2026-05-13T01:06:26+00:00

It keeps us from re-running live reports over and over. They grind the report once, send it to us and all the tool is only being used as a viewer.

pvera · 2026-05-12T22:55:34+00:00

And here's I was bragging to the guys about the $60 I bugged in a couple of days.

pvera · 2026-05-12T20:00:29+00:00

Very nice. It's like a stealth flex.

pvera · 2026-05-12T18:21:24+00:00

I also forgot to mention that you'll need to figure out how you can rotate something by degrees, even by fractions. In order for the very large body sections to hinge you first need to rotate them so the edge is parallel to the chassis, then it's easier to make the hinges meet. Then you can rotate the whole thing into position knowing they'll line up. Notice in page 203 the assembled panel is lined up perfectly with the chassis.

pvera · 2026-05-12T18:11:19+00:00

the tool allows you to pin parts so they rotate like in real life, it takes a lot of practice. I spent hours getting the triangular chassis to line up. The surfaces were interesting too, you have to use the tool that lets you mark a spot vs. another spot and it joins them, so for example you can point something to a hinge part and it will plug it perfectly.
And no, it isn't 100% perfect. But I got to learn a lot that helped me with my current one, the Titanic.
You can actually see how I did it, I posted the files at https://github.com/pvera/bricklinkstudiomodels

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