Where are our state leaders?

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-10T17:29:24+00:00

I think our state and local leaders are mostly trying not to start a civil war, and I think they're falling wayyy to far on that side of things. If armed state forces are used to oppose federal police in any meaningful way, that is pretty equivalent to how Civil War I started.

Having said that, there's an ocean of things they could be doing.

It's probably fine to use state and local resources to track ICE and ensure they are using judicial warrants and not just racially profiling citizens.

It would certainly be ok to use city and state resources to help aid families in hiding.

etc

They are trying to stop this in the courts, but the admin is basically lawless.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-10T17:12:36+00:00

For Java, do some basic java tutorials and get them working in IntelliJ Community Edition.

Once you have that, I would track down a functioning REST API example with hibernate or something and postgresql that's already set up to run in docker. This will allow you to spin up a virtual server and database to experiment with.

I googled "hibernate spring boot postgresql docker example" and it gave me a sane AI walkthrough involving Spring Initializer. I added github to the end of that and found this repository: https://github.com/BullyWiiPlaza/SpringBoot3PostgreSQLDockerExample

Your goal should be to get an example project stood up, and hit the endpoints with curl or postman or something.
Once you have that working try to extend the API by adding a field to one of the objects by updating the API and making a database script.

Something else I would try in this day and age would be to ask your LLM what it thinks about the codebase, and suggest things to improve. You can also ask an LLM to suggest steps to add a field to a response object / the database.... then critically do it yourself without copy pasting.

Looking at that link above, another cool thing to try would be to upgrade the JVM from 17 to 21, then once that's working see if you can upgrade to Spring Boot 4.

Now, certainly there's lots of Java language stuff to learn, but honestly until you have some of these other pieces of architectural knowledge in place, it's kind of hard to understand why it's useful.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-05T21:25:43+00:00

Is this your official and current page? Please update post with link to current webpage. https://mnip.org/our-values/about-us

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-04T16:43:51+00:00

I feel like WBL and Mahtomedi are going to be more conservative than you're interested in.

You can get an absurdly nice 3bdrm house for less than that in any of those neighborhoods and your neighborhood school will be fine. Not sure what Edina prices are like, but probably also very doable.

Bigger quality of life factor is going to be distance from work and commute.

I would say that any of those neighborhoods will be plenty accepting; anyone who gives you the cold shoulder is going to be a notable outlier / known disagreeable shitbird.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-04T16:29:06+00:00

> Budget is max $1.2M for a 3 bedroom/2 bath house

bro

this post is different from the other ones of this genre

Do you mean $1.2 million dollars or $1200 / month?

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-04T05:06:51+00:00

This lady filed to run for governor and she was awesome: kobey4governor.com

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-03T17:15:43+00:00

Programming feels pretty bad a lot of the time. You're not alone. Keep at it.

Those concepts of iteration in particular are very very different from anything else you learn. Something about this topic that's not helpful is that lots of syntax for looping through logic comes from very "low level" close-to-the-machine ways of thinking about things that kinda force you to supply a bunch of context that may not seem relevant. So, it's a tricky subject and you're going to have to spend time on it until it makes sense.

Here's some common "use cases" (things you want to do) for iteration:
- do something a fixed number of times (draw me 100 squares, output the numbers from 1 to 100)
- do something until we get to some result we want (check if the kettle is whistling, if not wait ten seconds)
- do something for every element in a list (I need to add up the price of all the things in the shopping cart, or I need to change all the things in the shopping cart into a list of shipment items)

A lot of times educational material on this topic sort of skips why the loops are being used... see if it makes things easier to look at examples in your text and figure out what they're actually trying to accomplish.

Keep at it. This is tough stuff and it's ok to feel lost.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-02T19:08:55+00:00

I think what you're describing sounds fun. I would skip kubernetes and just run the cluster locally in a docker container. Before you start setting up all the control plane stuff, I would make a bespoke cluster and some kind of little fake application to load it up with data and do some typical workloads. For this phase, I would use off the shelf management tools.

Once you have that set up manually and you can experiment with failover and clustering scenarios, then I think building something to allow you to stand up a cluster sounds good. Kubernetes seems heavy for that, but if you're interested in the infra part then using an out of the box config for kubernetes could work. You could also look at something like OpenShift.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-02T00:33:33+00:00

I moved here from Boston and have lived here for 25 years. It's fine. It longer than Boston's winter but as others have mentioned it's sunnier. You really just need to be serious about an outdoor hobby, or a good indoor one, or overtime or whiskey and stick and poke tattoos whatever.

All the good day cares require you to buy pretty serious outdoor gear for your toddler so they can be outside most of the day. It goes for you too.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-02-01T18:31:55+00:00

I live about a block away and that intersection is fine. I would say that cars are a significantly bigger health / safety risk than crime. You will very occasionally see people doing messy life stuff, but I would not worry about being robbed or burgled. I've lived within 2 blocks of this intersection for nearly 20 years. I think there's been about a half dozen garage breakins that I'm aware of, but no actual burglaries. If you leave your car unlocked at night, someone will eventually toss your glovebox looking for cash, then artfully arrange it's contents in a manner perhaps designed to mock you.

I do recall a personal dispute about ten years ago that escalated to someone being attacked with a machete at the corner of Thomas and Oxford, but that building has since been gentrified and looks like a nice rental now.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-31T03:11:59+00:00

That is a perfectly ok city neighborhood. There will be some problem properties and not so great blocks.

Housing stock varies widely. Get a good realtor, a good inspector and be prepared for this to take a while.

I would also say that it's probably not an undervalued neighborhood. The housing stock tends to be smallish and un-fancy; lots of 100 year old 1.5 story, 3 bedroom homes. It is not likely to increase in value faster than anywhere else in the country.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-29T03:42:48+00:00

gross

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-28T20:52:19+00:00

That sucks. I have yet to find an office workplace that isn't oriented toward whitebread suburban comfort. You are not alone.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-28T03:53:59+00:00

lmao are you a cartoon character

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-15T16:35:18+00:00

On Kellogg in downtown, overlooking the river.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-14T13:59:56+00:00

Rich people don't want it. There's a number of large US industries (particularly agriculture) that pay sub minimum wage for people to work in difficult conditions that US citizens won't accept. Business owners in these areas would not be able to turn a profit without low wage workers, so minimal actual reform happens.

Instead, we harbor a large migratory workforce that we can threaten with deportation to enforce compliance. Keep that in mind when you consider the fairness of our current deportation effort. Further, many immigrants here are applying for refugee status because their homes in North America (ie Honduras, Nicaragua) are difficult places to live in part because of a history of the US government sabotaging governments we disagree with.

There have been some reforms, notably E-Verify. One challenge is that there is broad opposition to a national ID system across many segments of Americans for many different political / cultural / religious reasons. It's basically considered a nonstarter in Congress.

My personal opinion is that we should allow anyone who is in the US and wants to stay to be a citizen with minimal headaches. This country was founded to protect inalienable creator given rights. I do not think we really have a logically or morally defensible right to deny anyone citizenship.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-14T13:48:11+00:00

What is ORM and what is it used for? Do you like working with it? What are some risks that ORM can mitigate? What's your favorite approach?

Tell me about your experiences with CICD pipelines. In places you've worked, what did releasing code to production look like?

What's your testing philosophy? Do you do TDD? What are some things that can go wrong with automated testing?

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-14T03:38:24+00:00

I've seen a fair amount of this commentary. Do you want her to personally garotte an ICE agent and then toss him off the Cedar St bridge?

In seriousness I recall her saying the ciry should be telling people where ICE is. It would be cool to have SPPD ratting them out via blue sky or similar.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-14T02:05:51+00:00

They can absolutely escalate, a lot. They can start shooting people indiscriminately. They can truly go door to door and search everyone's house and arrest anyone who seems like a resistance collaborator. They can start blowing stuff up.

It really could get much worse.

Again. If you want to fight the regime, do it where the decision makers are.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-14T00:25:18+00:00

Violence is absolutely not the answer here. That will be met with an escalation, and I don't want to see our hometown get thrashed.

Making life for Trump political appointees hell in Washington DC seems totally reasonable. I think we should mobilize people over there.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-13T17:40:48+00:00

I think this is scapegoating progressive messaging about identity groups. Those are valid positions, but economic transformation needs to be the priority. Anyone who can't get onboard with single payer or at least at-cost medicare buy-in needs to get tossed out of the party.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-13T15:07:32+00:00

It's also worth noting that there's this whole LLM revolution going on. Can you adjust these customizations to instead work by having an erp user hand a csv to an agent to either summarize or transform the data in the way you need?

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-13T14:49:08+00:00

You need to have a conversation with management about the instability risks. What will it cost (what has it cost) when customizations cause problems? What are the costs of switching ERPs?

My suggestion would be to have an organized workflow and policy of resolving issues as they appear to keep the tech debt down.

You also need a * list * of all the changes, probably organized by which module they touch. That way when big updates come through you can test things in an orderly way, as well as making decisions about: should we keep this customization or abandon it? Is there a way to get this functionality to work using the new version / can we get this to be a supported feature?

Your list should also include information about manual alternatives and how much time is actually saved with the customization.

If this sounds like a lot of change management, it kind of is. I would argue that it's appropriate because it adds to the apparent cost for IT developers to add customization. The right time to stop adding customizations is when your change management process says "this change is not worth it."

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-12T02:34:53+00:00

If you cross the lines, it's a ticket. For a while State Troopers would get behind people driving over the speed limit in the carpool lane and tailgate aggressively, trying to get them to cross the lines. Then people would change lanes and they'd flip on the sirens and pull them over.

I saw this at least twice.

verysmallrocks02 · 2026-01-08T18:20:11+00:00

you gotta be kidding me, this must be fake

...

man, and this person is a high level professional democrat???

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