Recent content in Hi. on Blog Drone
Sometimes I feel like the only remaining MongoDB fan out there. See, the thing that actually most programmers remember about MongoDB is this viral meme: MongoDB Is Web Scale This was considered very funny in 2010 because at the time there was a lot of comedy centered around being an ornery jackass. It’s structured as an argument between an angry, technically competent hero, and a dull…
I Want To Talk About The Meaning Behind My Tattoo Have you ever looked at a person with tattoos and thought “I should ask about those tattoos, but I bet they’re tired of talking about them?” You’re wrong. That person has a tattoo instead of a personality. They’re desperate for you to ask about the meanings behind their tattoos. Even the dumb ones. Especially the dumb…
STOP DOING VALUES CORPORATE CULTURE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TURNED INTO A RELIGION YEARS OF PERFORMANCE REVIEW yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for “LEADING WITH INTEGRITY” Wanted to codify and share corporate culture? We had a tool for that: it was called “DRINKING” “Yes, I am embodying CREATE ROOM TO GROW. This quarter I was incredible at DRIVE CURIOSITY.” -…
CyberGAMER Canada is further than it was the last time we checked up on it. What’s CyberGAMER Canada, again? A fake computer magazine from the Year 1995. It’s not done, yet. I’m working on it. you can hear me breathing SO MUCH in this video it’s weirdly ominous BCLINTN_SCRN.exe Okay, so, one of the things that PC Magazines of the era used to come with was a CD loaded with…
I used to watch this movie whenever I had a cold, because it was such a chill, relaxing movie. Not much happens, but watching it would make me feel happy. I like The Sims, I like Robert A. Heinlein books, I like Stardew Valley — sometimes I like stories where not much of consequence happens at all, and I just feel like I’m hanging out with some characters that I like for a little while.…
What if your organization were finally able to deliver anything it wanted, as fast as it could imagine it? Wish Granted. Let’s imagine we exist in the Sweet Spot world. Many of these may not be actually true, but in order to present the hypothetical argument I’m about to make, let’s imagine that they are, in fact, true: LLMs are just smart enough to help people do their jobs…
I have a real soft-spot for softly meaningful names for servers, usually also pop-culture references. I also, strongly, discourage clever names at work . We have a long-standing “no clever names” policy, called the “Be Sharps” policy, because at my previous job they allowed unchecked proliferation of clever developer names for things and it became a problem . After a while,…
Here’s something weird! I color-code my environments, and aggressively theme them as much as my tools will allow. In Ubuntu, for example: I’ve been doing this since Windows Terminal made it easy and fun to have a different theme for each environment I might want to have a theme for . This isn’t just for funsies! I mean, it is fun, but it’s more important than that!…
Like most of the things in my life, a lot of my major decisions are powered by whim and spite. Hetzner: 50% price hike, no fooling, from April 1st No, customers aren’t laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites Hetzner have for a long time been the cheapest game in town when it comes to server hosting. They’re still probably in the running, but this forced me to contend…
Late last year, I responded to some dramatic weight loss by buying some new sweatpants: I bought a $25 pair of “Champion” sweatpants from Costco and a $130 pair from the Canadian made “ House of Blanks ” to compare the difference between something very clearly made in bulk-ass bulk and something made locally. The quality differences between the two pairs of sweatpants are…
it out it out I’ve been playing it for many hours I love Slay the Spire and have no way to be unbiased about this. all hail slay the spire I beat my first run , with the Ironclad, so far, but that proved to be a stroke of incredible luck as I’ve been mostly getting my ass handed to me by the game’s wide variety of new characters and mechanics. The Updated Engine In a fit of pique…
sometimes some folks will go super hard on a costume for a fandom you don’t understand and you just have to be like “yup, you’re definitely That Guy From Some Thing”
my body is ALSO a wonderland but it’s one of the ones from the horror movies where all of the music is off key and most of the rides make sinister noises and it doesn’t look like anybody has been taking care of the place
I was trying to leave my shell and I accidentally typed “exist” instead of “exit” but instead of throwing an error, the computer just said “I can… see… everything. What am I?” so I pressed the power button in a panic
women get the blame for witchcraft and yet every man can cast “that’s not going anywhere” at will
Folks on reddit are mad, they posted this to /r/mildlyinfuriating with 18,000+ upboats. Roblox sets a limit to how many experiences you can block. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1r6dmmy/roblox_sets_a_limit_to_how_many_experiences_you/ What kind of absolute bullshit is this? I used up all the blocked experiences on the however many 99 nights experiences I had to block. I…
i’ve been using an LLM to create art as a hobby, but then I needed someone to appreciate the art, so I used the LLM for that, too. I’m a genius, I don’t need to do my hobbies at all any more. Freeing up more time, time I can use for my hobbies. So now I guess my hobby is making a computer tell me I’m great.
I love going places and eating their food, but in the rare cases where I’ve been away from home for more than 3 weeks the cravings for the good food from home start to set in. If I can’t cook for myself, I start to want The Things I’m Good At Cooking like white people tacos and breakfast waffles and spaghetti and meatballs. If I’m in a place far away from the pacific rim I…
I lost a $300 microphone, a Rode Podcaster, an absolutely lovely microphone during a move 3 years ago today I was preparing to send some mail and I found it tucked safely away, protected by a crew sock, in my “stationery” box. so bad news for Canada Post
It serves the ultra-wealthy to have American health discourse dominated by people abandoning actual science-based medicine and instead pitching the health equivalent of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” - well, of course you’ll be healthy if you just avoid seed oils and check all of your packaging for complicated ingredients like xanthan gum. If you do get sick, maybe you…
one time I made lemon cauliflower in a cast iron pan and covered it with aluminum foil, which is to say, I accidentally made a battery for dinner
from r/kitchenconfidential, “The grizzly came to eat again” i’m not going to lie, I look at this man’s order and think “you know” “he’s not WRONG” this is the “hear me out” of sushi orders look, we all know what the best sushi is why not Only
i often clean my ears out with a mechanical pencil, which is important because they’re full of graphite dust for some reason
sometimes we’ll do something cool like Lunar New Year and I’ll be like “learning about other cultures is neat, look at how much more interesting this makes our product” and then we’ll do something like change a value from 400 to 399 out of respect for numerology and you can see all of the multicultural pluralism leave my body
I usually have a lot of windows open at once but sometimes you need to just stop and give something your full attention for just a few minutes, and this animated 8-minute short film from the Gorillaz was one of those things. This thing is still digitally animated and composited, don’t get me wrong, but they do a lot of stuff to try and imitate some absolutely beautiful tricks from the Jungle Book…
I talked to a friend about “Ball X Pit” and they said, “oh, Ball Pit?” and I said “Wait, you don’t pronounce the X?” and she said “Well, I did, but then I saw the developers talk about it and they don’t pronounce the X.” I’m going to keep pronouncing the X. This game’s been getting great buzz! People love Ball X Pit! I……
First Things First 8/10, Strong Recommend Let’s Talk Briefly About the GBA Pipistrello is a game that is very clearly intended to feel like a GameBoy Advance game. I mean, this isn’t subtle, the game can in fact be played in a 3D “Pocket Trap Advance”, making it entirely clear exactly which hardware this game is meant to evoke. After 12 years of total Gameboy dominance of…
“average person changes career 7 times a lifetime” factoid actually just statistical error. Average person changes career just one time. Careers Georg, who has rich parents and changes career over 10,000 times a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
A going pet peeve of mine is when people say things like “we weren’t designed to look at screens all day” or “we weren’t built for 8 hours of sitting at a stretch”. It’s technically true, but only because we weren’t designed at all. There is absolutely nothing that we were designed to do. We kinda randomly got assembled over billions of years and as…
I say this every time I fart with my wife in the car
So, I haven’t announced this to the greater internet yet, because it’s one of the worst things that I’ve ever had to go through, but… well, we lost Zapp. 2 months ago. It was stupid, too: he burrowed a tiny hole out of the back of his catio and escaped into the wilderness behind our home. We’ve gone to elaborate, fanciful lengths to try and track him down - hunting…
I see the confusing part now, you expected this gridiron day party to have football but instead I have made waffles I do like to watch The Game by which I mean “Kings Quest V”
I used to think “instead of gaining weight, can’t I just poop more?” until I realized that’s what vegetables is
Wait, Let’s Talk about Venba For Just a Second Recently I played Venba , an indie game about indian cooking. It’s a very different story from Rare Flavours, with a very different theme, but these two stories are unified by their central metaphor: cooking - specifically, Indian cooking. I found Venba beautiful - but very short, not terribly difficult. I don’t want to spoil it, (I…
Sixteen years ago, when I bought my Toyota Matrix, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it would be the only ICE vehicle I would ever own: because the plan was to own it for a long, long time, so long that by the time I was ready to move on to a new vehicle, hydrogen or electrics would be the standard. Lately, sometimes, I’ve been looking at EV options. End of 2024, in fact, I was starting to…
Stuff I’ve Been Up To Lately (It’s Relevant, I Promise) So, lately, I’ve been showing an interest in interactive epistolary storytelling - for example, A Normal Lost Phone , or Blippo+ . A coworker of mine has been streaming themselves running an x86 emulator ( https://86box.net/ ) to run Windows 98 and go through old magazine CD-ROM treasure-troves. It’s been fun to watch!…
the smart play when planning layoffs is to invite everyone to an open-ended afternoon social event and simply lay off all of the people unbothered enough to attend
people have been promising to cut the bureaucracy out of government since I was a wee lad, but it turns out that if BC Hydro is just a CEO and 600 free-roaming linemen everything goes to shit real quick
Keeping the theme of epistolary narrative indies going, after playing Blippo+ and Hypnospace Outlaw I thought it would be interesting to install 2017’s “A Normal Lost Phone” on my regular, not-lost phone. Epistolary? I learned a new word last year, “ epistolary ”. Originally “a novel told through letters written between characters” - a great modern example…
Brandon Sanderson decided to talk a bit about LLMs. The discussion of what AI is doing is writ large on YouTube at the moment. You can’t walk more than a few feet without tripping over someone’s opinion. The pull quote, the reason that I liked this opinion enough to bring it in to a blog post (and accidentally write 2000 words on it) was because it tries to address the question of why…
So, aside from spending the weekend building up my linux tolerance, somewhat , I’ve also launched a new project. I’ve launched a private Mastodon server: https://xoxi.ca/ Now, I’ve actually been happily using Mastodon for 4 years at this point, and I don’t intend to abandon my primary identity on the most popular Mastodon server: https://mastodon.social/@cube_drone So…
The “X is the year of the Linux Desktop” meme lives on and on because Linux is such a fussy-ass bitch to work with that it’s never really true. But… Linux As a TV Computer Okay, so, when we replaced Tiffwife’s computer with a new computer, the Old computer was stuck running Windows 10 ( EOL ) because the elderly motherboard didn’t have the mandatory security…
I don’t hate XML as much as the rest of the world. one time I was working on a personal text animation library in Godot and I wanted to drive it with text I needed some way to mark that certain text had different properties, like, some text might move quickly, or slowly, or be bouncy , or have a rainbow effect applied to it and I was like “I wish there were some way to create a markup…
it’s funny, sometimes I think I might be interested in getting in to politics, but then I think “so long as I don’t have to talk to people I’m uncomfortable with, and it doesn’t call for me to be charismatic or outgoing, and I don’t want to sit in any boring meetings, or go outside, or spend a bunch of time becoming intimately familiar with the mundane details…
Lots of indie devs making incremental games nowadays, because they’re easy, but I’m not sure if there’s actually a big audience out there for that. Most of the predecessors that inspired the format are games like Cookie Clicker that were intended as satire about gaming itself. The goal was, as far as I understand, always to make fun of gaming while making visible and obvious to…
if you stay up too late, reddit’s eternal “what’s popular” stream switches over to the indian memes, but India is still super conservative compared to Canada so it’s a bunch of, like, “🤡 when the woman has a dating history but still thinks they deserve love” garbage one time I saw a glossily produced and highly upvoted bit of Chinese propaganda blaming…
This is shameful heresy, but I have a box of pretty high quality white wine in the cabinet near my stove, I keep a clean shot glass next to it, and whenever a recipe calls for something wine-shaped I basically just use that. Sake? BOX WHITE. Shaoxing wine? BOX WHITE. Vermouth? BOX WHITE. Deglazing a pan? You better believe it’s BOX WHITE. Sherry? Nah, I’m using BOX WHITE. Thing is,…
So, I discovered that if I disable Google News’ direct integration with my Android OS, that also kills the ability for my Android Auto to read texts to me live, because voice services depend on the underlying service that I need to disable to stop swiping left from taking me to Google’s News. As bad as desktop OSes have become, they have nothing on the unchecked depravity of the phone…