[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 43 points 7 months ago

This is the second time I've seen someone incorrectly refer to chlormequat as a pesticide. It's not a pesticide, it's a chemical that encourages plants to grow thicker stems, which in turn makes harvesting easier.

I don't say this to defend its use. I just feel that it's important to call it what it is.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 28 points 8 months ago

I hate righty-tighty lefty-loosy. Depending on whether you're looking at the top or bottom of the screw, you can see movement to the right or the left. I hate whoever came up with it, and I wish I had been taught the right hand method. It works exactly the same as the electromagnetic right hand rule:
an example of the right hand rule as it relates to a screw thread

Basically, you take your right hand, stick your thumb out, and curl your fingers like you're grabbing a broom handle. Point your thumb in the direction you want the screw to move to. Want to screw something in? Point your thumb towards the thing. Want to unscrew? Point your thumb away from the object the screw is currently in. Then, just look at the way your fingers are pointing! If it helps, squeeze your fingers into a fist and see which way they move. Alternatively, bend your wrist in, and observe which way your fingers are moving. Works every time.

It sounds complicated, but there are plenty of people who are unable to intuitively differentiate from right and left the way they can differentiate up and down. I am one of those people. Thanks to this method, I've been able to develop the muscle memory/intuition to know which way to turn a screw.

It's important to note that this only works for screws that are "right hand threaded." If the screw is only getting tighter when you're using this method, then it's likely reverse threaded, or left hand threaded. If that's the case, just use your left hand instead of your right hand.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 113 points 8 months ago

lol, I'd love to see the fucking ruin of the world we'd live in if current LLMs replaced senior developers. Maybe it'll happen some day, but in the meantime it's job security! I get to fix all of the bugfuck crazy issues generated by my juniors using Copilot and ChatGPT.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 114 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It'll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I've had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people's systems? I've had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they're going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don't have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I've personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I've had senior management ask me about how I'm using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don't feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it's likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 33 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In addition to the fact that it's not just English via hand gestures, I believe it's done because sign language is speech, with all of the benefits that comes with. There are extra channels of communication present in sign language beyond just the words. There's equivalents of tone and inflection, and (I beleive) even accents. Like, this video of this lady performing "Fuck You" in ASL is what made it click for me when I first saw it many years ago. She's just so fucking expressive, in a way that subtitles could never be.

EDIT: changed my wording to be more accurate, since sign language literally is speech through a different medium. There's no need to draw an unnecessary boundary.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've been incredibly happy with Kagi. All of the listicles and blogspam get shunted off into their own sections. Kagi also seems to do a pretty good job at finding "deep" results. Like, when I want to find out more information about some home automation gizmo, Kagi does a good job of finding some random blog post where someone has torn the gizmo apart and analyzed every strength and weakness it has. I still prefer Google for looking up restaurants and stuff, but I hardly use it anymore. I don't at all regret the $10 a month I pay to use Kagi.

Edit: I also like that Kagi lets you define rules. Occasionally I'll be forced to go to Reddit to get some information (I really try to go elsewhere first). I deleted my account, so I go to new Reddit by default (which I hate). I don't want to add an extension to redirect to old Reddit, but I can just replace the www with old automagically for all Reddit search results. Works great.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 37 points 1 year ago

As much as I despise Oracle and the lawn mower man known as Larry Ellison, I don't think this is a problem. Oracle also had a lot to do with btrfs, and while that filesystem has problems, they're not the sort of problems usually associated with Oracle (i.e. rapacious capitalistic practices like patent trolling and suing the fuck out of everyone all the time always). Oracle won't own XFS, it's owned by every single person who has ever contributed to that codebase.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Perhaps only allow users to post titles and comments that are a command and a line? Like this: ⌘–

EDIT: and have that be the only moderation restriction going forward besides things that would get the subreddit removed. The more relevant the post is to the literal words "command" and "line" and the unicode symbols I posted, the better.

EDIT: correction, I posted an endash. Something like a box drawing line would be better, i.e. ⌘─

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wonder if we could find/contact/contract a developer with an accessibility focus. I'm planning on leaving some moderately significant donations in a few days (damn settling periods and bank holidays making that slow), and maybe there could be a community fundraising effort to get an accessibility expert in to submit some PRs. I made a big fuss out of accessibility on Reddit in the lead up to the protest, and it feels hypocritical of me to not keep pushing for it now. Not sure if Ernest would be interested in that or not, but it seems like it might be a good idea.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 113 points 1 year ago

What's accessibility like for Lemmy/kbin? I wonder if we could get an early start on accessibility with kbin, since it has a much younger codebase.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 49 points 1 year ago

That's incredibly impressive! I haven't noticed a single hitch and I've been browsing nonstop for the past hour or so.

[-] Badabinski@kbin.social 44 points 1 year ago

John Oliver understands the internet. Like, IMO it's clear he likes it because he posted more exploitable images of himself, but even if he felt ambiguously about it, the best path forward isn't to fight the internet, it's to say nothing, or make a joke of it.

Someone else could learn a lesson from John Oliver.

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Badabinski

joined 1 year ago