it's been one year since my last push -f

03:53pushcx Ask questions about the site or codebase anytime.
I guess that works. And then, otherwise when folks don't have questions, I tend to work on the code base because there are always lots of things to do. So it's been a running around kind of day. So let's see the topics I wanted to talk about were PR review. Cause I think there's a little bit of stuff to look at and then Maybe brigading because I touched on it over the weekend and there was a meta thread just a couple of hours ago about it. So I'll grab that link. Maybe go access logs. And then the big thing I wanted to do was UK OSA stuff. Writing a post that's hopefully the last thing about that. So we'll get that in. And then hopefully that's I really hope that's the last of the UK or say I am. very ready to not think about it for a very long time. So yeah. feel free to pipe up anytime, even if i'm rambling and I will put it on the topic list if I can't answer immediately. Otherwise. This is a so I always start out by showing the homepage, which is a little funny because, personally, as the moderator I always read slash newest because I want to see every last single story. And there's a bunch going on here like. This this very slightly click baity topic removing Jeff bezos from my bed is maybe the funniest title i've seen on the site in a while. and yeah, it's a little bit clickbaity, but it is clickbaity in the like ridiculous sense, because it's pretty obvious this is going to be a post about AWS or maybe some other Amazon kind of service or API rather than, you know, Amazon, the business or Jeff Bezos, the actual person. And it seemed really unlikely to kick off a flame war or terribly disrupt a conversation, so that's why this clickbait stood, I guess. That's the thinking there. That's the purpose of the stream, to talk about that. Anyways, I just thought this was very funny. Like, it's got to have gotten half of these upvotes just for that excellent title. Oh, speaking of excellent titles... There's a, .. Yeah... This one, right, that just came out. pushcx https://www.manning.com/books/w…
Peter, Sarna, and Cynthia. Yes, this is the one I'm thinking of. If you want to write excellent stuff, this book is a real nice intro. I just, man, that's... I just read this maybe a couple of weeks ago, and it is a from scratch intro of how do you pick what you're going to write about and refine your topic, make an outline, make sure you're writing something that is actually understandable. It is a very practical guide in that even if you don't think of yourself as a writer, I mean, whether or not you do, this is a pretty nice book. It does even have a section on writing interesting titles. I don't think it came up with anything that funny, but the other one, the other one that catches my eye is this top story right now about the philosophy of software design versus clean code this one is really interesting because john osterhout has written a book called a philosophy of software design i've only read a little bit of it but i've liked it so far and i've liked a bunch of his other writings and he got into a extended discussion with bob martin who has written clean code and then i think there was a cleaner code and he's given a bunch of talks and

08:39i'm not gonna say anything too spicy about it but i thought john did an excellent job of presenting his work and criticizing things it is also especially notable not just for the content but for the form of Being this back and forth they say some online and some in person, and then they kind of wrote this up as if it's a transcript of a discussion. So I assume that this was partially email and partially in person chatting and then they like wrote it up as a conversation and this practice of. It reminds me of adversarial collaboration in science, where. Two researchers who really disagree with each other will design an experiment and run it together, because if they totally disagree and they expect to see totally different results. And they both get a say in what the scientific protocol is going to be you're really likely to get a rigorous look at a question, and so this post was a really nice for that and. Just has some. Excellent style and clarity and maintainability discussion. Mods cannot and never have been able to move stories up and down the page, except by, as a person, I can vote and I have the exact same vote as any other user. There is never any kind of secret penalty, secret bonus. That's never been a feature on the site. But I am very happy to see this one as number one because it's a really thoughtful thing. I like that a lot. So let's go look at pull requests. I'll quit rambling about the home page. I just saw two really neat things. Yeah. So we have, oh, this very fiddly bug fix. I'm going to kind of warm up with the easier one. So Tomcat made a first pull request a week or two ago. and then jumped into this really hairy JavaScript thing that we looked at the last stream. And I left a few comments. Oh, and all of these have a red X because I broke the build. So maybe I ought to do that first, right? Fix the build because it is rude of me. I try to time box my time spent working on the site. I actually didn't think I was going to really do any code on this stream because there's so much meta stuff. But hey, if folks aren't asking about those different topics, all right. I'll keep working. So it's slow. There we go.

11:49So there is this fake data test for developers to load a bunch of lorem ipsum kind of content and i don't normally run it because it takes a while to live yeah it's one of those where yes it could run in one second instead of 90 seconds but usually people only run it once or only run it once every few weeks so it's fine-ish But then it's not in the suite. So the, yeah, the thing with tags was that I did on stream, maybe two streams back has broken it. So let's take a look. Oh yeah, it's because log moderation happens on story. Why is this big data 251?

12:43If I had infinite time, I would put some time into this generator. It would be really neat to have it It tries to generate a bunch of different kinds of data, it would be neat if the data was more representative like. I don't know only 1% of stories get removed by a moderator and I think it just picks a random number. Maybe two or 3% of stories get edited by their submitter that kind of thing so.

13:24That's probably enough to make it pass. In case you're curious, there's a pretty wide API on these associations. And I didn't want to override tags equals to automatically record that, because then there's also tag IDs equal and seven more. I would kind of rather it fail and force people into the, I should write this as a comment. I would rather it fail and force people into using the one code path than spread out. All right, so what did I do wrong here? Is there a second line? 287, and I'm at 251. OK, yeah, so there's another one.

14:22Any more? Yeah, here's another. Here's another, all of these. And it's a little, I should add that. Yeah. So let's see.

15:26need to explain what i decided because if i'm writing the comment it's obviously me deciding

...56Easier to see. Here we go.

16:23I wrote a blog post about this, I don't know, tail end of last year. But communicating the correct practice and making the right way the easy way is so tricky. I've been thinking about it a lot lately for years. Now, just because I was in such a big code base. So that one, that's probably enough. I should have started the test while I was writing.

...58AnakimLuke hewo
Usually I have the code up, and then the test up, and then maybe the docs up, and then the output of the test in another column, but I'm squished down to 1080p. Hey, Anna Kim. Okay, so that's it.

17:28Oh, it's not even the tag IDs method. I saw it in the diff there that I wrote the wrong method.

18:13So I'm fixing the build and explain error more. There we go. All right, so if that's set, the build will go green in a second. Yeah, no need to deploy that because it's just test code or dev code. So we've got this one from Utkarsh. He's been submitting a lot of fixes lately, which I really appreciate. Ah, this bug. So this bug is when you look at the line on slash newest, someone was just talking about this on the last stream where they suggested adding slash newest to the header because it was their favorite way to read stories.

19:08If you... pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
go to the page, you sometimes would see the newest line before it should have appeared, and then it could just be in the wrong place under certain circumstances. I will share the link, and then anybody who's curious can read the particulars. And then we should grab that commit I just wrote to fix the build just to stick it in the notes. That's you. And there we go. All right, so that's going to be there.

20:16OK, so this isn't a, yeah. So I noted this one is a feature request and a bug where Why not add it to the list of newest comments and cars first fix the bug, which is an excellent way to get into stuff is first make everything bulletproof. If last read story.

...48If you don't have a last read. From. AnakimLuke i watched All the president's men yesterday.
Oh, that's... This one, this is one of those places where I would rather... Oh, you watched All the President's Men. How did you like it? AnakimLuke it was fun! but didn't make a great job making me follow wth was going on 😅
For anybody on Context, I talked it up, what, a week or two ago when I was talking about having covered politics as a journalist. AnakimLuke reminded me of detective movies
It didn't start my career. I was a little young, but it started a lot. Yeah, it suffers a little from age because it can assume that everyone is familiar with the Nixon presidency and the downfall. But then now that we're, what, 50 years on from that, maybe people don't have that historical context.

21:59It is pretty similar to detective movies of, you know, there's not just a little bit of skullduggery in the parking lot, but lots of following clues and figuring out what was going on. If that's interesting, hey, lots of interesting work available in journalism. Looks like we have white space issues. I'm surprised Standard R.B. let that in. They must not have. There's that red X on the build, and I assumed it was me breaking the build, but maybe it's also standard RV complaining.

22:42So I like lifting this logic up to the controller. I just don't like the query. Yeah.

23:32AnakimLuke i want to watch The Post now
The post which one is that. They make another movie about the Washington post. Oh. I forgot about this one.

...52yeah so it came out about 10 years after I worked at the Washington post. And it's a historical right yeah it's about the Pentagon Papers so. That one's probably far enough away that they explained the historical context. AnakimLuke directed by spielberg
How did you find that one? Was it like you watched on Netflix and it was like, hey, if you watched All the President's Men, you would probably want to watch this other one also about the Washington Post. Ooh, yeah, Spielberg.

24:33AnakimLuke I had watched it years ago
AnakimLuke and it reminded me of it :)
Ah. I think 2017. Yeah, you're making me want to rewatch it. Because I think I watched it when it came out and I haven't thought about it since. Which, you know, is not exactly a ringing endorsement. But I think... When was... What am I looking for here? Chelsea Manning will lead me to it. When Manning... gave the big link to, no, okay, so July 2013. Because I was thinking that Manning's publishing or WikiLeaks publishing echoed a lot of the debate around the Pentagon Papers. So going from like 2012, 13, when that happened to 2017, it's about how long it takes a movie to get made, I would think. This could be kind of a response to that. pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
the other the other journalism film i mentioned was spotlight i just watched this one again a couple weeks ago and it's not really a feel-good movie because it's tackling such a hard set of events and story but I don't know. AnakimLuke I'll watch that one too
It is a story of journalism helping.

26:23Yeah. Enterprise journalism gets all the exciting stories and the movies. Things like beat reporting don't. Especially when the beat is the school board or the city council. And that's some of the most AnakimLuke ohhh I think I just cooked a QUALITY question to ask
incredibly useful journalism there was that that paper in kansas which one was that yeah so there's got to be the marion county record so hopefully it does not like the post why am i getting a video nobody wanted a video pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M…
this one hopefully gets a movie sooner than 40 years but this is the kind of just basic doing the work journalism that is incredibly valuable to a community and then it turns into a incredible story of small town corruption So I really do hope someone makes a movie out of this because, you know, to wave the patriotic American flag, the responses to this, well, we'll see when the dust settles, but so far they've been very good. Anyway, if you have a quality question to ask, yeah, let me have 30 seconds to finish this and then I'll answer whatever your question is.

28:14Thank you.

30:22Would the line not appear, or would it just? Yeah. AnakimLuke Do you have insights on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect?
Would not get dated correctly. That's nice. It's a nice cleanup. Do I have insights on the Gelman amnesia effect? Well, I can't claim to have studied it. pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
And I'm gonna grab a Wikipedia link here. So the idea from physicist Murray Gelman was, sometimes you will read an article and with your personal professional expert knowledge realize it is entirely wrong and then you will turn the page and you will just sort of assume that the next article is right i think this is a pretty incisive criticism but my my two responses would be Yes, but that second article is going to be about a different topic. Or, I'm sorry, it's going to be by a different author. And then the other thought is...

32:08I think maybe Gelman is reading the newspaper as if it were a physics paper. So to get a physics paper published, you have to have, well, at least a practical physics paper to a reputable journal. You have to have, meet an incredible standard of evidence. And I think it is, so part of his criticism, criticizing is that if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. However, that doesn't seem to happen when we're reading the newspaper. I guess what I would say is yeah, maybe we're okay with the fact that the newspaper is only about 75% correct instead of, you know, five nines of correctness like you get out of physics papers where they want a p-value of 0.0001. AnakimLuke related to it, I notice how surface-level news talk about the things I know 1 thing or 2 about; like computer science and physics. it makes me think about how different it is to, say, international politics
One of the nicknames for a newspaper is the daily miracle because if you think about it, It has a size and a word count that is like a short book and it comes out literally once a day. The fact that that much can be produced. Why did production just bounce? Yeah. Yeah, I think another thing is without naming any specific political topics. Also, people speak more confidently about politics as kind of a persuasive act. And there is certainly less fact checking in political discourse than there is in physics papers. Yeah. See, look at this. I did not deploy that build. Lobster should not have recycled. And if I go look at the log, it is almost certainly going to tell me that we had an OOM kill. This has just started happening in the last week or so. And if the peak was 3.1 gigs, what's the... DF is the one for memory. Or uptime... No, that doesn't say RAM usage. That's what it is. Yeah, the box has eight gigs. So even if it uses three, it shouldn't be getting OOM killed. What the heck? That is a very strange production issue.

35:39Did I accidentally break the JEMalloc or something? And we're seeing, no, it's still listed here. AnakimLuke do you use the kernel oom killer or systemd's?
And if JEMalloc was not correctly installed, I'm pretty sure that Huma would just refuse to start.

36:11Anakim, I didn't know there were two. How do I tell? I would assume it's the kernel. AnakimLuke if you haven't configured it's prob the kernel
Because I didn't even know systemd had one. AnakimLuke so, not userland
How do I tell? You are seeing the... Yeah, so I haven't configured it. But you're seeing the limits of my sysadmin knowledge here. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
If you want in... The Lobster's Ansible repo, you can see pretty much all of our config. It's not, the organization is not super clear. The best thing to do would be to search for things that you're curious about. But if you search for like, yeah, systemd and then, or service, you'll see these kinds of things.

37:16I really didn't want to reopen that OM thing. Wow. So on the stream a couple months ago, Jean Boussier showed me how to analyze heat dumps a bit. Maybe I want to get back into doing that. What a project that was. Oh, I don't want the project though. Debugging memory leaks is not fun. Especially because last time it turned out to be exhaustion caused by the allocator rather than an actual memory leak. It's just, you know, when you get an OIM kill, most of the time it's a memory leak. All right. So I'm going to grab this PR's ID. And then...

38:19NoGoodNick_ @AnakimLuke another similar fascinating topic is the monetary system, hardly anyone has any idea how it actually works
Comment alignment is the other one here.

...27Hey, no good, Nick. Yeah, it is. There are lots of big and complicated things. And I think the monetary system is especially hard to talk about it because some of the people who have the most expertise and the most power can move the market when they talk. And I'm thinking here specifically of like when the chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States makes public statements. I listened to a couple of economics and finance podcasts and people nitpick the ever loving hell out of every word in those because the consequences are so high. The decisions are so important.

39:19Luckily on lobsters, I don't matter and we're not important. So you can just show up to my Twitch stream and ask me questions and I answer them imperfectly.

...45All right. So there's this very hairy PR. AnakimLuke @NoGoodNick_ bruh the only book on politics I've ever read is The Dictator's Handbook and it gave me such an incredible insight into how the world works that no amount of watching the news would ever give me.
And it's hairy not because the PR is, but because the way the front end is coupled and the way the JavaScript is attached is very hairy. The Dictator's Handbook? Oh, yeah. It's a bit cynical, but I can see why that one's interesting. Another one, and I just linked it today. pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S…
So I had put brigading on the list because I just left a comment about it. after some code this weekend. And I had in that comment linked this book, which is a classic. It's a fairly short book about why states act the way they do. And the very short version It's here in the summary central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects and fail to see complex valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. main theme of this book is that states operate systems of power toward legibility in order to see their subjects correctly in a top down modernist model that is flawed problematic and ends poorly for subjects. To put it another way.

41:17When you are the individual subject to a state. And one of its decisions is locally wrong that is incredibly visit vivid vivid and personal for you and maybe incredibly important to you. But the state knows that it is being inefficient and wrong in lots of cases and. The value the state gets out of imposing universal rules or even less productive rules that. Give it some means of control. are a necessity. And I mentioned it let's pull up that. We can jump over to that topic if that's relevant but. Did I? Oh, I had left a... These comments are out of order. Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't realize the threads page is sorting by the top level thread. That's... That's one of those things that feels wrong. But maybe everyone is used to it and it's bad if I change it. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/hdj2q4/greg…
So I left a couple of comments over the weekend, but then I left this comment an hour ago, and this one is down here because the top of the thread was up there. I have to think about that one. So this one was a comment where I mentioned legibility, that with brigading as a rule, which I just improved some over the weekend, we talked a lot about this in chat i keep wanting to say that i talked about it on the last stream but no we just talked about it a ton on saturday in the chat room is that if i make a general rule against linking into projects spaces we have a clear rule that we can enforce and if you are an individual you can understand and predict oh if i link into this project's bug tracker which is what all this is getting at my link is going to get prohibited or removed. And that's because it has really bad effects on small projects. But this conversation is happening about the Linux kernel, which is so big and such an institution that it would never notice. And there's so much friction to us linking into the project that we're not going to disrupt it, especially not meaningfully. someone was very mad about something they learned here because this is apparently a very contentious topic i don't know a lot about kernel development they would have to go find the sign up form do the sign up wait for the confirmation email find the confirmation get the archive email so they could have the message id and set the proper reply to header and then they could go and reply to linus's comment and you know say something mean and all that kind of stuff takes like, you know, five, 10, 15 minutes. That's enough time to cool down a little, but when we link into some tiny projects, GitHub, everybody has logged in. And so they have a text area right there. And so all of a sudden, like if somebody linked to this pull request of ours from the front page of lobsters, All of a sudden, there are about 100,000 people maybe looking at this text area going, do I want to explain to them how they're wrong and immoral about software licensing or manual memory management in the Linux kernel or any other contentious topic? So a rule like don't link into other people's bug trackers, in the instance of Linux, Linux is going to be fine right it has all that pain to join and it's huge but a rule like don't link into the bug tracker is really easy to explain and really easy to understand and really easy to explain this fucking thing I have to be able to start the build

46:09where a like well is the moderator going to think this project is big and mature enough and that it is inconvenient enough or unlikely enough that someone is going to jump into the topic and it's that giant wooly judgment call where the moderator has to kind of eyeball these three or four factors and maybe there are more factors and weight them appropriately and then I don't know. So, in the sense of that book seeing like a state, I am accepting that a legible rule, though imperfect, is better than a perfect rule that we can't really explain and use effectively.

47:08Hmm. oh yeah the only thing i didn't mention here is that especially when it's a contentious topic people are and especially when people feel very strongly about something i don't know i don't really know much about rust in the linux kernel so don't take this as a some kind of sub tweet of this actual example But righteousness is a hell of a drug, and when people feel that they are doing the righteous moral thing, they often feel like that allows them to break other rules, like don't insult people, don't try and disrupt somebody's GitHub tracker.

48:14So we want to have good discussions about those big stuff, but we want to do it preferably without being a bad neighbor. AnakimLuke wow your db has a memory leak??
There's also the smaller effect that if we link it to somebody's bug tracker, we are just dropped into the middle of the story. Like this rust in the kernel thing is like a six-month, year-long, two-year-long discussion. one random email in the middle of a giant thread, we spend half of our thread rehashing and figuring out what is even happening. Why do you think the database has a memory leak? AnakimLuke nono
AnakimLuke I'm talking about the past :D
Also, you are two or three minutes behind if you just heard me say something about a memory leak.

49:13In the past, no, it was the, so we have two servers. We have a web server and a database server. So that's two VPSs. AnakimLuke talkingh about this comment https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
pushcx https://push.cx/stream/2024-08-…
And we had, we had something that looked like a memory leak, but turned out to be memory fragmentation. Oh, you're talking about a comment I left in the Ansible repo. Okay, you've got to give me this context, man. No. This has... I was going to say this is... But I think maybe it just hasn't happened since I last upsized this service. So there's a... Let's look at the history of this. AnakimLuke i've no idea how to debug mariadb for a leak
24?

50:22I don't think we had a leak. No, I think... This is either some kind of default, but there's a MariaDB config. How do I get out of this history and just actually browse the files? I have to go out and come back.

...59Was it this one? No.

51:09Ah, yeah, here we go. It's specifically this one, this commit. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
So there's this InnoDB buffer pool size. I couldn't remember the name of the setting because it's been forever. Where you can specify to MariaDB how much RAM it should use. And you have to get that number right. If you don't get that number right, it will try to allocate more RAM than the box has. AnakimLuke hmm
And if you put stuff on the box that wants more RAM, well, now your memory target is a moving target. So if we got OOM kills in the past, it would have been because this value was wrong, I believe. And I say all of this with the big asterisk that I am not a great ops person and I only know enough system administration to be dangerous.

52:43There were some minor variable naming stuff here. I will have to go see what the diff is for this.

53:23That's... I see. I forgot that this is a strategy people do in the Ajax days. All right. What else do we have? Okay, so it sounds like Tomcat has edited so they always have instead of just half of them have. Yeah, I remember this one. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
Oh, I didn't. Let's grab the link. So if you want to follow along, here's the pull request.

54:28AnakimLuke is the oom issue you mentioned tracked? I couldn't find it
Yeah, it was tracked. So if we grab that, I think it should be linked in here, right?

...55pushcx https://github.com/Shopify/ruby…
Yeah. It's not tracked in our repo because it didn't show up until we enabled YJIT, which I guess was allocating memory a little bit different. YJIT is the just-in-time compiler that Shopify, you know, recently, as these things go, added to Ruby. And I caught up with Aaron Patterson, tender love here at RailsConf, RubyConf, one of them. julianwgs Hi! First time catching the stream live and it is great while coding myself :D
AnakimLuke LUL
shortly after it started happening to us and we did some debugging and he filed this issue to track it and so then just to keep the discussion together we did all of the discussion here rather than over in like our ansible repo or something oh look who wants to actually read this issue why are we here well hey welcome julian i have heard a couple of people say i'm pretty good background music If you have any questions about the site or the code base or just coding in general, feel free to pipe up anytime. So I have my rough outline of stuff I plan to do when people don't ask questions, but it is pretty easy to rabbit hole me into talking about, say, the best movies about enterprise journalism for 10 or 15 minutes. Because, hey, it's office hours. We're just hanging out and chatting. All right. Yeah, so this was a really, I mean, it's hard to say that a production outage issue is fun, but it was kind of a fun investigation of figuring out what was happening here and how to put metrics on it. I don't know that we explicitly got into it, but one of the issues, one of the quirks of this is Lobster sees a real amount of traffic, but because it is a hobby project, AnakimLuke sorry I didn't get it. is the bug back, then?
Like Shopify deploys, I don't know, probably every five minutes around the clock, you know? Other big users like GitHub and Stripe, they deploy every couple of minutes because they have a team of a thousand developers. Yeah. Whereas lobsters will be ideally up for days or weeks at a time.

57:30So it did look like the issue is back. I don't know if it is, it didn't turn out to be a bug. Maybe a misconfiguration would be better. Apparently the Rails received wisdom is that you should always use jmalloc in production. And then there is some kind of, I'm not going to try and summarize it because I don't know what's going on. but there are some people who believe it should be the default in all rails deploys in all Ruby deploys. I don't know why it's not integrated into the language. I don't know why it's not integrated into packages. I am sure if you look up Jade Malik and Ruby, you'll know more than me, but yes, while I was streaming here, my phone buzzed and that one, the lobsters is down notification it's like that and my spouse are allowed to cut through every do not disturb setting and so 29 minutes ago production rebooted for no particular reason if i look in the logs i'm trying not to pull up the log because it's very often has things like ips in it but if i actually i can probably just say

59:10Hmm, OK, well, OK, let's go beroot. Actually, I probably have that command in the history, yeah. So if I search the history for OOM, yeah, see?

...36Looks like it's about 16 hours apart. That was roughly what it was previously. It was like 12 to 16 hours. Actually, you know what? I'm going to grab this command and I'm going to start myself an off-screen root terminal. run that and watch it for other OOM kills.

01:00:09So I don't think I deployed between these two times. And so if we're back to this every 16 hours, Lobsters is getting OOM killed. That's a very familiar pattern. I have seen it AnakimLuke how does the mem% graph look like? steadily going up?
This is the first time it's tripped our uptime monitoring, because the uptime monitoring pulls every couple of minutes, and it takes about, when I do a forcible restart of Puma, like the OOM kill does, it takes about two minutes-ish, just ballpark, maybe it's plus or minus 30 seconds for the site to start coming back up, or to at least start queuing requests as it comes back up, and then if the uptime monitoring pulls, you know, at the time zero and then at time 10%. What mempercent graph? AnakimLuke ye
There's the mempercent graph. No, historical. And I'm joking a little at myself because There's a little bit of a cobblers choose thing here that... Why is this 64? I thought this box had eight gigs of RAM. Am I misreading?

01:01:49Did I resize prod sometime? I'll put that on the post-stream investigation because I'll have to log into the DigitalOcean panel and all of it.

01:02:11So a quirk of DigitalOcean is that if you want to add RAM to a machine, you can do that in just a click or two in the web interface. If you want to remove RAM from the machine, oh, I'm sorry, you have to completely delete that VPS and create a new one. That's a funny little asymmetry. But this really does look like the box has way too much RAM.

...51AnakimLuke you are using 9.9GiB
I meant for it to have four and I accidentally updated it to eight one time, I don't know, a year or so ago. Yeah, this is, I sure shouldn't have 64. That's weird. It's weird in a, you know, not so awful direction.

01:03:35AnakimLuke would it allocate this much should the VM have only 8GB?
Oh, wait. Which server was I on? I think that's the state. So now I'm on... Now it says 64. I must have run... AnakimLuke ah!
I must have closed SSH. This is my personal box. That's the confusion. I didn't... The prompt changed. My personal box has 64 gigs of RAM. The desktop I am physically sitting at that I can kick right now. AnakimLuke 😅
Yes, it has. Okay, we can take that off the list of things I have to look at. I was especially puzzled because 64 gigs of RAM at DigitalOcean, I would have noticed the difference in that monthly bill. Even with autopay turned on, you know, there's a big difference between the hosting bill is 50 bucks and the hosting bill is 500.

01:04:35That's why I was so puzzled. I was like, did they give us a free upgrade? No, buddy, you just forgot which box you're logged into. I missed the prompt difference. All right. All right. So big distractions. You know, I figure one of the inadvertent lessons of this stream, inadvertent. One of the smaller, less central values of this stream is you can watch it and you can watch me make typos and you can watch me misunderstand stuff and you can watch me not know anything about OOM. AnakimLuke we can empathize :D
And you can say, oh, it's actually pretty easy to run a big popular website. And I say, yes, yes, it actually is. The bar is lower than you think. You do not have to be a genius coder and system administrator and moderator. You can just start doing stuff. and learn from your mistakes. Just, you know, as long as your mistakes generally get smaller over time, if you are learning from them, you are doing fine. And if you don't believe it, just watch me make mistakes for another couple hours. Speaking of which, we are, what, one hour into the stream here? Yeah. So I want to finish up the pull request review and then move into the OSA stuff. So let's see. It doesn't have elements in it. All right. Has is, I love it. It's super powerful in CSS, but it's one of those, Chainsaw kind of tools where it's so powerful that you can very easily cut yourself with it, I understand what this is doing but. Only because I stare at this. html and CSS every day for the last couple years. there's a lot going on. You can do a lot of silly stuff with has to. select or no Okay, so they kept. I didn't ask them to reorganize because I understood why this diff was the way it is. So what's happening here is they didn't change this function. They just put another one on top. But it's similar enough that... Oh, they actually rewrote it now. That's fine.

01:07:43I am sure there's a shorter way to express this but that's clear I don't need to. get into all the schmancy new javascript syntax that has been introduced in the last 20 years i'm just going to be happy to have my Swiss army chainsaws of query selector and has.

01:08:27I see. So, oh, that's what he's doing. Yeah, he wanted to be able to use QuerySelector on the thing that comes back, and then...

...46So I couldn't quite follow what all this code is doing, but his, and I'm assuming his, with a name like Tomcat... I had been assuming it did something else actually.

01:09:25A tempting thing to do here is to move the Comment form down.

01:11:36yeah i'm very i see why tomcat has done everything this way but if we can make the page more consistent so that this javascript that's already very coupled has fewer special cases that would be Big improvement. Oh boy. This is more complexity, right? So to the previous comment, previous comment is the deepest subtrees list of replies. Yeah.

01:12:27Oh, that's so painful that it has to be. Thank you, Anna Kim. The way we loop over comments has gotten fairly gnarly over the years, mostly for performance stuff. I have experimented with replacing this whole nested OL structure with grid and got, I don't know, call it 40% of the way there. And then with Joel Draper on a previous stream, kicked around using Flex, his library, for doing HTML templating as components. And I like it a lot because it would clean up some of this tag soup kind of stuff. I talked a little to him. on the naming things discord about how to performance test that, because all of this odd complexity is here because of performance. So how much is actually, I can't actually see the changes for the white space.

01:14:15If previous step. Close previous subtree. It's funny, I can follow his comments, but I can't. So this part's the same. And this part is swapped down.

...55I think this code path is lost. So wait, if the previous depth is the comment depth, we close its.

01:15:18Ah, it's in the else here. Oh, man. okay so this is a lot of reordering and juggling but i think it's equivalent so if there is a previous depth do these things else if there is a previous depth it'll jump down here and if it's the same or if it's less

...55Okay.

01:16:33Top comment depth.

...41Oh, it's the depth of the first comment in the tree, because you would think that would be zero, but that's only for story pages. This thread template also gets used on like slash comments and slash threads for individual users, like I was showing earlier. OK. And so we have to compare against that, not the root of the tree. OK. So then we always open the comments. That's better? Oh, man.

01:21:27Yeah, this is just... So I wrote it there, but this has just been... This is one of those PRs where I see like 10 lines changed, and I know that somebody spent two or three hours on that 10 lines. This is really heroic effort. And it's funny because they're doing all of this from a... anonymous throwaway account that they created just to interact with lobsters. I don't know why they don't want it attached to, you know, their stable pseudonym, but I appreciate it. It's really complicated code. What is no children for? Ah. Yeah, so at the time we added this no children class CSS didn't have the has pseudo selector Tom cat is just really insightful about this stuff.

01:23:21Not just so anyways, Tomcat, if you're watching, drop me a line. All right. So

...52Let me grab this link and jump up to the conversation.

01:24:10Okay. This is me breaking the build, right? Yeah. Okay.

01:26:10Did I leave a comment about the grid? Yeah.

01:27:06What was it called?

...19This one, I thought it worked in Safari, but not Firefox.

...37And I did all this on the personal browser this wasn't. So there were some experiments I didn't do on stream tinkering with this but there's a thing, especially when you are on. A mobile phone or something else that's a smaller screen than a desktop where deeply nested replies get too narrow to comfortably read and. If we had, here we are, scroll driven animations, we could broaden those comments as they scrolled into view and out of view. And it is not yet, it's funny to be here on MDN, but I believe it's not well supported in Firefox yet. It's behind a flag, but it would be so nice And Firefox has a very small share only on Android. Because on iOS, it is Safari under the covers. So, yeah.

01:29:31Try that.

...40Oh, I forgot to mention that.

01:30:21all righty so this is tomcat's second pr but it is sort of also their third pr because their first pr they opened it once under like the name tomcat123 and then github banned that account i guess because it looked like a throwaway possibly spammy account then they created this tomcat 582 and reopened the first one and i merged it i i kind of want to grab this branch locally just in case github's gonna ban them again because this is so much work i would hate to lose it yeah let's do that real quick just like the first one i had to I begged GitHub to give me back the comment I had posted, but they wouldn't reopen the pull request for me. How am I diverging? I don't think I pulled this before. Oh, it might be diverging. So on that regating thing, I wrote a short commit message. And then we were talking about it in the chat room. And I realized there was a lot of important context that was going to be valuable in that commit message. And I did a push F to put it in there. And you saw two days later, it immediately became useful. So I'm glad I did that. is probably me breaking things. I just don't want to lose Tomcat's code. Okay. Good.

01:32:38AnakimLuke push -f?? WutFace
So now even if GitHub decides that Did I say push? AnakimLuke LUL
Yeah, I did a push F. It's been, I don't know, it's been one year since my last confession. But yes, on Saturday, I did a push F. And I want to say it was about a year since I previously, you know, put that in the title if I said it funny.

01:33:18kitty_kot_ chicago?
Hey kitty. Yep. I'm in Chicago. Best city. So that, Anakim that commit was this one. It got a comment. kitty_kot_ scary city sometimes
Was it me?

...44Ah, yes. This person caught a typo. Scary city sometimes. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
I don't know, it's hard to be scared of the city I've lived in pretty much my whole life. It seems like a very normal city to me. So, here. Anakin, this is the one I linked to.

01:34:19and I had just written the headline message and then this is pretty much what I said in IRC of what's happening there. And then obviously today after sleeping on it for two more nights, I wrote that longer comment today. kitty_kot_ what are your thoughts on the nonsensical posts regarding LLMs?
And I wondered if Raimi or anybody else would show up to chat about that today, but it didn't come up. So I'm just gonna, let's just grab that and throw it in the list. kitty_kot_ not your posts
kitty_kot_ people in general
kitty_kot_ yeah the slop
my nonsensical posts regarding it could you be clear about what's nonsensical when we've gotten are you talking about posts on lobsters because we've gotten one or two we've gotten three or four times people have submitted llm slot and i've removed it when it's really obvious that it's just garbage output.

01:35:40kitty_kot_ what are your thoughts on that
So when people submit stuff that's obviously slop, I remove it because... Everyone has access to these tools at this point. So you can have all of the LLM output you want. The point of the site is to talk about things that people write and to learn from each other. We're not doing that if people are posting LLM output. It's just not helpful.

01:36:13I don't know. They're interesting tools and we'll figure out ways to use them. There are also tools with significant drawbacks. Go Access.

...37What are your thoughts on LLM?

...47kitty_kot_ I mean if someone works at a major gpu company, I bet this whole thing is very good for them .
It sounds like you don't like reading it either. AnakimLuke speaking of AI, how long do you think i'll take until AGI? you too kitty_kot_
Oh, yeah. I imagine if you own a bunch of Nvidia shares, it's been a pretty exciting time.

01:37:15julianwgs It's a useful tool and should be viewed as one
Well, exciting in a good way.

...37kitty_kot_ @AnakimLuke When we can replace the CEOs along with the workers
so it's not visible on stream but somebody pinged me that we were just talking about the brigading stuff here i'll pull it up the there was a story submitted just a couple of minutes ago here that is exactly into some projects bug tracker and in this case it is i wonder if they did it to be cute because like i pointed out exactly that julianwgs Good for learning new tools, debugging and writing code if you are already proficient (dangerous in the hand of beginners for just writing code)
For a big project like Firefox, they're probably not going to be disrupted by us. But more people are going to have a link into or already be logged into the Bugzilla instance of Mozilla than anything else, than some random thing. So I am going to pull this story. I'm doing it off stream because there's a bunch of mod info on stream.

01:38:54kitty_kot_ @julianwgs dangerous in the hands of any beginner of anything
kitty_kot_ in some cases it is a better search engine, in others it just provides more slop
was the uzz evr no v2d

01:39:26All right. And then I'm also going to not do anything here. The rest of that can wait a minute. Yeah.

01:40:26Alrighty. julianwgs It's great for learning. I asked LLMs so much about the Rust garbage collector and got really good answers. It combines knowledge with your own context, which is different than Stack Overflow, Docs
So there's all the pull request review. So yeah, I've been going an hour and a half. I will do the bumper. This is Lobster's office hours. If you have any questions about the site or the code base, feel free to pipe up and ask any time. Otherwise, I work on the code base and other maintenance-y kind of issues.

01:41:01yeah it's interesting how llms are sort of useful as like a having a junior dev as a pair and it's like a junior dev who can really google things well in that they find deep cut stuff but like one time in 10 they're terribly misled and they hallucinate stuff on you which is A little bit like working with the junior developer where sometimes they misunderstand the context they're reading something in. I don't know. AnakimLuke BRUH I feel attacked
kitty_kot_ I think people in college are scared
I've used them as an experiment for finding weird config issues where it's like

...53kitty_kot_ they won't find a job after graduation
kitty_kot_ thats one of the main fears
It could be any one of 20 config issues in, say, the Rails config or the Puma config or the Nginx config or, you know, because there's so many layers in the stack, it's hard to think of every config option that could happen at three or four layers.

01:42:20Yeah, I can see college students being Pretty nervous about that one. It's been alone, I don't know, two or three weeks since I was a junior developer. kitty_kot_ people are scared that there won't be any more junior devs
So I don't really have my pulse on or finger on the pulse of the concerns of junior developers. I have heard anecdotally that people are hiring fewer of them, but I sure haven't followed the hiring market.

...57AnakimLuke cries in looking for first job
yeah i have also seen pretty junior developers find ways to jump ahead in that they can produce things that i would not have guessed were from a junior developer both because of how much code it is and because of sometimes how sophisticated it is and then also kitty_kot_ @AnakimLuke same
On Lobsters, I have read pull requests and wondered, is this a junior developer who doesn't speak English as their first language, or am I being sent LLM slop to review? Because sometimes that's really hard to tell. I don't know.

01:43:53kitty_kot_ I am
Are you both recent CS grads? It is a... AnakimLuke I'm not. I'm self-taught
kitty_kot_ the latter heheh
you know usually people graduate in the early spring so are you graduating soon or are you coming up on a year of looking for work if it's the latter i'm sorry that's really hard i'm sorry well kitty caught my email is on my profile so here it's

01:44:33kitty_kot_ Thank you
Thought of my email is on here yeah you can message me on the site or you can email my first name at push CX if you want to send me your resume i'll give it a read and give you some advice on it i've done this occasionally for folks you probably don't want to you know put your resume on stream my. AnakimLuke in fact, I'm learning rails exactly to raise the chances of getting interviews
suggestions to junior developers are usually that. You want to be. real explicit about what you've built, especially if you have anything that sounds like it's not an academic project and not a game. chamlis_ if my university cohort is representative, a fair few folks get their degree with no small help from LLMs
And I realize that's tough because a lot of people get into programming because they want to do games, but employers tend to be really dismissive of the work involved in games, unfortunately. kitty_kot_ but what about academic work
Well, Anna Kim, I hope it works. kitty_kot_ I've done a bit of that
If you have any questions or you'd like me to review your resume, feel free to email it to me.

01:45:35Your academic work is good and you wanna call it out, but employers often discount it and they assume it is not as valuable as commercial work. So if you have work that is, if you have projects that you can list like What's it called? Maybe volunteering for a nonprofit or volunteering for a student organization or small contracts where you can say, I built this website for this company. kitty_kot_ I see
That kind of thing is considered much more valuable than I did a semester long project. And sometimes that is not fair, but to business people, it looks like it's going to have the kinds of demands and structure that are more like business and less like toy projects at school. kitty_kot_ I understand
Does that make sense?

01:46:59julianwgs I would agree
kitty_kot_ so something that directly helps some part of the business
Okay, the other general piece of advice I give is see if there's a tech community in your city. Right. Especially if your resume can talk about not just the code you did, but what was the value to the business of that code. So as a developer, it's really tempting to say something like, I rewrote the foo subsystem. And more experienced developers will say, and it got 50% faster. And then attractive developers to businesses will say, and we made 50% more money. dlamz STAR method is useful for that
And if you can tie back your accomplishments into the business goals, it shows that you are likely to be an effective developer because you are thinking along the same lines they are. Oh yeah, DLAMs, that's excellent advice, especially if KittyCot can get to the stage where they are interviewing. Do you have a good link for that? Because I don't.

01:48:27AnakimLuke my resume def does not have that
AnakimLuke but im working on it!!!
kitty_kot_ yeah user groups i've heard of those
where's my other general piece of advice is to find the technical communities in your city so you may have a meetup like a ruby users group or a javascript users meetup group or a database users group and it is worth going to as many of these things that you can get to because like this is networking, you can talk to folks and say that you are looking for a first job. kitty_kot_ I understand
But you can also see a bit more of how experienced developers talk and think about things and try and echo that in your resume and your work. You can also do things like talk to the organizers and say, Hey, in your meetup next month, would you like a presentation on insert relevant topic here that you happen to know something about? NoGoodNick_ maybe local business groups, where the employers might be
And most organizers are always looking for people to give talks. That might be very scary, but you could offer to do like a lightning talk, which just means that it's five or 10 minutes. kitty_kot_ so something that provides value
That's the kind of thing that's very nice to put on a kitty_kot_ I get the gist
resume is to say that you've talked to the local user group because it looks like, yeah, you're offering value to the user group, but then also it looks like, hey, another gatekeeper thought I was worthwhile. And a lot of people, you know, the hiring manager as gatekeeper wants to outsource that decision and say, has someone else like a elite university said that this person is competent? And that's why it's very easy to get hired if you went to MIT as opposed to, I don't know, small state school. Where's my last? AnakimLuke does lobsters have an HN-equivalent of Who's Hiring?
All right. So I want to grab the... Yeah, Anakim, we do. pushcx https://lobste.rs/t/job
AnakimLuke oh cool
Since we are a much smaller site, We have a quarterly thread instead of a monthly thread and they get, you know, 30 or 40 comments instead of 300 or 800. But that also can work in your benefit because the jobs listed don't automatically get as much attention as the HN jobs. So maybe that's something you want to consider looking at. Good question.

01:51:56kitty_kot_ I think explaining things to an interviewer in business jargon rather than tech jargon can help
kitty_kot_ or rather a combination of both
So one thing is Even if I, on my resume, my own, even if a job, like the bullet point that I want to write about a job, even if that doesn't say, oh, my change made this app 10% more money. Well, at least I can say this app is responsible for $50 million a year in sales or whatever that number is, because it shows that I'm working on something and I understand what the business value is, even when it's hard for me to track. how much I've changed things. Because if your job is sales engineer or developer support, it can be really hard to show a, no, I moved the needle on this project by $3 million. So.

01:52:59kitty_kot_ so at least mentioning that "x" company makes "y" amount is good
digging up links here for the next topic. Yeah. Well, not just the company, the specific project you worked on.

01:53:25kitty_kot_ I understand
Great. pushcx https://ruby.social/@pushcx/114…
All right, so here's the one I wanted. So I will throw this into the chat. All I can say otherwise is good luck. It's a brutal slog getting the first job.

01:54:07all right so kind of i thought maybe i brought up regating because i'm thinking about this rule a lot nobody asked so we're not going to do go access logs so i'm coming up on two hours these streams usually run for three and trying to i am not a terribly fast writer especially when i'm thinking aloud on streams so trying to write up A summary of the UK OSA is going to be an hour at least. I may not finish on stream because I'm... It's good to write these things up, but then also because I get lots of feedback, especially when folks have questions about why things are happening the way they do. But it's easy to accidentally leave out small things that I catch when I'm rereading. And this one i'm trying to. What I want to do is. write up a summary post because. People are still learning about this censorship law for the first time and. I see discussions about the online safety act where people keep making the assumptions, the same assumptions over and over of, oh, it can't be that bad. Oh, of course it won't apply to hobby sites. Oh, of course it won't apply to nonprofits. Of course, you know, the regulator would never target you. And those very common assumptions are unfortunately false where dlamz easy to say when there's no skin in the game for them :-/
They claim it applies universally and that they have the authority over the world. And the politicians of all... Yeah, that... I'm trying to be charitable on these DLAMs, but yes, I do sometimes think that. And...

01:56:20kitty_kot_ If I don't have any internships, but I do build something that aligns with the way they run things does that help?
Yeah, so this has been a big hairy project that has burned way too much time the last few months. And so I want to try to summarize what the law means for sites.

...39Because maybe folks will link to it.

...47kitty_kot_ yes
When you say the way they run things, you mean like a potential employer?

...58Yeah. If you're using similar technology to what they use, you know, the same tech stack of this JavaScript framework, this CSS setup, that kind of thing. Yes, it can help. I do think it helps if you can, I think it's a significant help if you can make that project for an external organization, like that could be a nonprofit in your area, a business in your area, maybe your church. kitty_kot_ something thats not just a toy project
any kind of thing that's not just a hobby project that you invented and that you got to design totally because a big part of programming is well it's not just that it's not a toy project but the problem with a toy project is you never have to talk to users you're never forced into hard choices and so projects are less convincing than even very small projects for real people in real organizations.

01:58:45AnakimLuke can I get a lobsters invite? littlxCassie
julianwgs And your budget is unlimited for toy projects :D
kitty_kot_ I see
AnakimLuke yaay
kitty_kot_ non profit orgs are a good idea
anakin we've talked a bunch on streams and it you've been pretty chill all the time yeah go ahead and email me otherwise i don't i usually ask people not to email me because i don't know them but we've talked enough and you've hung out that i think you're unlikely to be a troublemaker so sure it'll take me a couple hours to get to your email

01:59:15To build on Julian's point, also your customer's patience is unlimited for toy projects. And that's customer in the general end user sense, not literal customer. Yeah. And nonprofit organizations are careful of, you know, beware geeks bearing gift because sometimes It's more trouble than it's worth to take those things on, but if they are looking for technical expertise and volunteers, especially if you have experience with things they're already using, like WordPress or like Shopify, where you can say, hey, you have this thing that you know is a problem, can I fix this problem you have?" That can be very attractive to them.

02:00:30kitty_kot_ so directly address an issue they have?
AnakimLuke @kitty_kot_ what I have been doing is trying to contribute to open source projects taht will look good on my cv. im targeting issues that companies have demonstrated interest in
kitty_kot_ don't replace wordpress with hugo
kitty_kot_ is what you're saying?
kitty_kot_ @AnakimLuke aI see
yeah so yeah definitely don't try to do something huge like that but also they probably know that they have a website that it should be possible to go to their wordpress blog and get all the new posts by email but they don't know how to set that up If you know how to set that up, you can help them to do something they would like to do, but don't have the resources and knowledge to do. Open source projects can be good, especially if you can work up to doing larger projects. So more than just one little bug fix, unless that's a really crucial one, you do a couple of bug fixes and the maintainer likes you and i mean you were just on stream here where i that tomcat contributor has taken on some hairy code and so i said hey if you want to keep doing things here is another kind of substantial project that you could do That's something I'm learning to do more of as a maintainer is try to provide a smooth on ramp for people to become regular contributors. Because I would like help with larger projects. I don't know.

02:02:35kitty_kot_ it seems that drudging through some unpaid labor is a necessary step towards prosperity
Yeah, unfortunately. It's hard to stand out from the crowd. And there are always lots of folks. kitty_kot_ Explain
Do you know the concept of a lemon market?

02:03:04AnakimLuke got any grapes?
pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…
kitty_kot_ I'm 21 btw
So this is me being middle-aged because I'm like in my forties or fifties, but a lemon is a, an old term for a car. That's a piece of crap where it's just problem after problem every week, you know, this week, the timing belt breaks next week, the alignment is off the following week, the oil cap pops off. Cause you know, sometimes a thing is just a dud and it just keeps breaking down and cars used to be much less reliable than they are now so if you go to a used car lot it's really hard yeah suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high quality car and a lemon they're only willing to pay for cars that account for the risk that they get a lemon so if all the good cars would be worth ten thousand dollars and the lemons would be worth one thousand even if you are selling a good car you are not going to get ten thousand because the buyer always has the risk of getting a lemon and so it's sort of an insurance if they pay less for the car overall So what this turns into in the hiring market, employers really don't want to hire bad employees who can't do the job, which is unfortunately true of some folks who are looking for work. And so you are having this tremendous slog and there is all of this unpaid labor to set yourself aside because you were trying to show, no, I can actually do this and I will be a good employee.

02:05:09pushcx https://brucefwebster.com/2008/…
It also gets worse. Another feedback mechanism is called the Dead Sea Effect. So this is an example going the other direction. If a company is... So the Dead Sea is a body of water where a river goes in and then it evaporates, so the salt is left behind. there isn't a river flowing out to carry the salt away. And so over time, the Dead Sea gets saltier and saltier and saltier. Well, in the used car market or in the hiring market, it actually gets worse over time because the really good employees get hired out first and then the bad employees are left behind. And so over time, people's expectation for is a random developer who's looking for work any good is going to be biased by the fact that even though it happens imperfectly, the good developers are more likely to leave the market by getting jobs than the bad developers. So the market for lemons is unfortunately also self-reinforcing.

02:06:39kitty_kot_ We just need light at the end of the tunnel for it to be worth it
So that's why it's not enough to have a degree and a computer science, a couple of computer science classes and a good GPA and say, oh, I have a school project because everybody has those things. The thing that really sets you apart is something that looks like, oh, they have already done this job. And that is tremendously unfair for new developers, but dlamz every resume I see has loads of side projects. very hard to tell apart.
That's why this is set up the way it is. Yeah. D lamps. It sounds like you've been hiring more recently than me. So it's been a few years since I was interviewing anybody.

02:07:36DLAMS, do you have any other ideas of things that you look for on resumes that would make them stand out to you, especially of junior developers?

02:08:04kitty_kot_ so you're saying, If I can show that I've done something for a non-profit or a local business
kitty_kot_ that would be better?
kitty_kot_ both of you haha
dlamz I'm at a loss to be honest. still overwhelmed from the LLM frenzy.
yeah i'm saying that oh well maybe you're asking d lambs because i've kind of been beating it to death it makes more sense that you're asking if d lambs agrees with me especially since okay both of us well you are reiterating my own opinion back to me so yes i think that if you can show that you've done something that looks like work it is easier to get work and the more it looks like doing the job commercially, the better. Fair enough. Thanks for thinking about it, DLAMS.

...56kitty_kot_ Very lucid take
kitty_kot_ I like it
Put that on the topic list.

02:09:27kitty_kot_ Better than being told I'm going to be living on the street in a few years haha
dlamz just try to meet people any way you can. referrals are the thing that gets your resume looked at the most.
Hey Vecchio, you have to paste your message again because Twitch thought you are maybe a ban evader. I have just told it that you're probably not. But I don't think anyone saw your message that started pure technical issues.

02:10:02veqqio Pure technical issues play less of a role than how you can communicate with others in a team. Most of pushcx' examples are aspects of team work. Those school group projects are actually quite similar to real life
veqqio Not a ban evader, just made an account tho
There we go. I hope everybody could see that one because Vecchio is making a real good point here. Thank you. Are you maybe Vecchio like a brand new just made an account? Yeah. And if you have a VPN, someone has already gotten banned off Twitch on that VPN. So chat moves slow enough on this channel that I can see these things and talk about it. Oh, what is that? Who's that? Who's the most popular programming streamer in the world? AnakimLuke pirate software?
What's that guy's name? He's got a Discord with Pirate Software. His name is Thor. Yeah. He's got a Discord. pushcx https://discord.com/invite/pira…
And I know one of the channels on it. Yeah. NoGoodNick_ does pirate software do programming on stream?
kitty_kot_ I'll try my best, but no gurantees
So people come by his channel a lot to ask about getting that first developer job, especially because he makes video games and lots of people get into programming because they want to make video games. I know there is a channel and like a wiki and some info for junior developers there. pushcx https://www.twitch.tv/piratesof…
Nogudnik, yes, he does. And his Twitch stream is over there. guy streams like eight or ten hours a day six days a week i think it's wild but maybe he'll have more good advice or his community will

02:11:51NoGoodNick_ I checked his stream several times and it was never programming
Oh, and DLAMS. I didn't mean to miss it in all the hassle of Twitch moderation, but I think you also have a good point there about finding lots of ways to meet people. It is tough to keep bringing it up and getting rejected to your face. kitty_kot_ I'm stone cold at this point
That feels like crap, but it can be worthwhile. I think So I have a friend who watches his stream and I think he programs for a couple hours in the morning and then plays games. Mostly. I don't know. Well, whatever he's doing, you know, it's working out for him because he has 1.2 million followers and I have 400. So, you know, he's a lot cooler than I am. That doesn't necessarily mean the job advice in his discord is better, but there's going to be more people talking about it over there.

02:13:04Yeah. So I want to have a TLDR for lobsters and then

...41veqqio @kitty_kot_ Even without the experience, if you grok what a good employee does, you can "simulate" it. Like, writing code is 1/5 or less of the job. Instead you need to decide what to code, (what the features users need etc. to generate revenue to pay your salaries etc.) So how can you get that knowledge? The process of getting that knowledge will serve as resume content, even!
That's a really good point, Vecchio. Yeah. When I think about how much time I actually spend with Vim Open at previous jobs, I would like that number to be more than one fifth, but especially the bigger companies, that's very true.

02:14:08So. kitty_kot_ @veqqio elaborate a bit more
link to this because it's great.

...54You know, a really good book here might be Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen. Hasn't come up on stream. Oh man, it's a favorite book. pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/de…
Let's just go straight to... S-O-N or S-E-N? S-E-N.

02:15:27kitty_kot_ @pushcx thanks
So one of the things Vecchio is saying is it's hard to know what to make for people, even if you can write any kind of program, writing the correct one and figuring out what they need, even when they can't explicitly say it needs to have a screen that has an add to cart button and an add to wishlist button. And I get the audio book link, right? Like not every user can tell you exactly what they want. Some of them have to say, well, we just want to be able to sell books online. Well, okay. You, the programmer, will have to know, well, customers are probably going to want a shopping cart. And then if they want a shopping cart, do I want to write one from scratch? Do I want to find an existing shopping cart system that they can use? Should they even have a website? And maybe instead they should just sign up on Shopify because then they will have all of that functionality instantly. then it won't be perfect for them, but it will let them start selling stuff very fast. And this is hard as a consultant, but generally customers are happy if the consultant charges them for an hour or two instead of 100 hours or 200 hours. So this book, Deploy Empathy, is all about talking to users and figuring out what they actually need. The other one that comes up a lot... Yeah. So this one's a little more advanced. And... pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/ba…
I know it's come up on stream before. This one is not going to make as much sense to you until you have done... more of this kind of product research and product development but it is one of those books that is going to be very valuable if you read it and then you come back to it in a few years and you read it again with more experience i want to say i have read it i don't know every other year since it came out 10 years ago right on like 10 years and we're one month shy Yeah, if I've read it five or six times, that's about right. Where it is about making products that really knock it out of the park for users that make them feel powerful and empowered and capable.

02:18:23You do have to know how to make a product to get the most out of it. So keep coming back to that book. In my office, I have a small bookshelf of like a half a dozen books that I just come back to every year or two. Make up my own study program, right? I don't need a school to teach me. I've been... Really exercising my library card this last 10 or so months that I've been on sabbatical.

02:19:10veqqio @kitty_kot_ I don't know your story, but a junior can code well. They don't know what to do with the code. Coding is just like writing or using a hammer, it doesn't tell you how to turn a piece of writing into money or turn hammering etc. into a structure or furniture someone will pay you for. This describes who you want to become: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/…
kitty_kot_ I'll look at these books
So they had three big points.

...35kitty_kot_ @veqqio thank you
veqqio Push, listening to you is great btw. I've never watched a streamer before.
NoGoodNick_ I’m on sabbatical too, kinda
julianwgs May be not so interesting for a junior developer, but I currently read "The Principles of Product Development Flow" and it really transformed my thinking about executing software project in a team :)
kitty_kot_ what do you think about the leetcode grind?
oh hey Vecchio well you know I call it office hours and we've been talking a bunch about you know recent graduates and I think about it a lot like a school office hours of like look the door is open we can just hang out and chat about this stuff and yeah the primary topic is lobsters but yeah I hope I am a reasonably good streamer, but it is not exactly my profession like that pirate software guy with a million viewers.

02:20:13And thank you other chatters like Vecchio and DLAMS here. You're adding a bunch of really thoughtful opinions on these things. Thank you. No good, Nick. Why is it a kind of sabbatical? I don't know this one.

...41Well, sounds like it's going to be a book, so. I don't need the word book on the end.

...57NoGoodNick_ I extended mine beyond how long a sabbatical would normally last
julianwgs It is a book
Julian, could you double check that title? I'm not immediately seeing it. Do you have a link? julianwgs Look on Amazon
Maybe if I throw quotes around it. Am I just typoing?

02:21:27Oh, Amazon. No, we're mad at Amazon. Remember, we're kicking Jeff Bezos out of bed this morning.

...46julianwgs I didnt buy it on Amazon ;)
It's just going to be a link to Amazon, isn't it? Yep. All right. Fine. I give up.

...58I've seen this cover before.

02:22:04But I don't think I've read this book. Manage queues, reduce batch size. That sounds like pretty standard, lean software development practices. Oh yeah, you know where I should have gone? And I would have remembered if I knew it wasn't a current book. Not current, you know, new release.

...32pushcx https://www.alibris.com/booksea…
A Libris. This is a great place for getting older and out of print books. Here we go. So.

...47I'm going to have to give this a read. Thank you. I haven't read this one, but I do think pretty highly of a lot of the things that have come out of lean product development. I wouldn't go so far as to endorse some... Who's that guy with the four-step entrepreneurship thing?

02:23:20Four Steps to the Epiphany? Yeah. This one... Oh, is this just the book directly? No, not at 45 pages. This must be the first chapter or something, but this book is the one I'm talking about that also applies a bunch of lean stuff. But if you look at people like Mary Poppendick, she had a lot of really good talks on this in the 2000s. kitty_kot_ What do you think about pursuing a masters degree?
pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/im…
Oh. And it must have come up on stream here because their book is here. I think you should stay away from a master's degree unless there is a specific job and you have talked to three people who have the specific job title you want and all three of them said you have to have a master's to do this job. So off the top of my head, if you want to be a librarian, you almost certainly have to have an MLS. But any other job, unless you talk to current professionals and they say you cannot get hired without a master's, don't do it. I think really highly of... education and doing those things because you enjoy it and learning for its own sake and putting in the research to advance understanding. But if you are a job searcher, a master's degree is three years and a whole lot of expense for not a significant amount of job improvement. kitty_kot_ I'm saying this because my git history hasn't been the brightest shade of green for the past 4-5 months
except in a couple of fields and you have to talk to people who work in the field to be certain of it and i am echoing cal newport who doesn't have anything useful to say about getting a first job but he's written a couple of good books about being a student

02:25:32That's fair, Kittycock, but you can make that GitHub thing a little bit greener without spending many tens of thousands of dollars on tuition.

...52kitty_kot_ well my parents are willing to pay for it
And I don't think that for most jobs, I don't think that having a master's Yeah, but the money is cheaper than the three years. And I realize that's especially hard to believe when you're 21. julianwgs If you get a chance to read the book, I would be glad to hear your opinion on it :)
But three years is a lot of time. And if I waved a magic wand and you got to add a sentence To your resume that said kitty caught has a master's in computer science. What would change about your job search. kitty_kot_ not much I would guess
And Julian yeah I will try to take a look at it, I actually have a ton of interesting books in my queue right now, but let me know this one over here, so I don't lose it. AnakimLuke what books are you reading currently?
I will try and come to that one. pushcx https://www.alibris.com/Emergen…
Right, so I am rereading this great book. veqqio @kitty_kot_ I think leetcode is sort of dead. AI can autosolve them, so it loses benefit. Bigger companies loved it, to make sure you can code. And then they had pipelines to teach the domain and rest of the job. But I e.g. hire people just in 20min interviews asking how they'd deal with so and so situation or how they handle logging, asking how that helps them with whatever problems they'd encounter in production
Emergent Tokyo is a really nice look at urban design, how it gets shaped by julianwgs The book is also about queuing and queuing theory so it might help there as well :D
history and legal realities and norms and then it has these really wonderful cutaway diagrams and i realize i sound like i'm reading a richard scary book but the way the buildings and the neighborhoods end up looking is so different than american suburbia that it's incredibly informative to me pushcx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A…
I'm also rereading the Aubrey Maturin series, which is a series of 20 historical novels about a captain and a doctor sailing around on a tall ship in, like, 1804, sinking pirates and such. I'm on book... I finished book three last night, so I just started four. So I chew through those at a rate of like two a week. So I'll be done with that before too terribly long. kitty_kot_ @veqqio I see
But the nonfiction goes slower. So actually, Julian, tying together conversation topics a little bit ridiculously, oh man, I'm gonna get three conversation topics in one. When I was at the Washington Post, there's journalism, I was working with someone who was getting a master's degree, there's two, in operations research, and he was writing a dissertation on queuing theory. julianwgs Wow! :D
So I am actually tying together three topics on this stream AnakimLuke you should write a connections game :D
I am actually pretty versed on queuing theory because I just thought it was neat and he would show me what he was doing. So there's a fun coincidence. Connections game? No, I think if we have a...

02:29:56It's going to be the... It's gonna be this meme from It's Always kitty_kot_ @veqqio it just seems like to me that not being super good at your craft is a major disadvantage
in Philadelphia. AnakimLuke LUL
Like Peter worked in journalism with a guy who knows queuing. Like it's going to be this kind of stuff because my, my background is just weird and ridiculous and I never have had a career goal. I have always just said that I follow my nose. You know, I just look for interesting stuff and interesting people and I talk to them and I do fun stuff. Kitty, I think Vecchio's point is that being really good at leetcode kind of puzzles is actually not very close to the kinds of things you do during work. Like, very rarely at a job have I cared about the big O of anything. julianwgs May be someone used the Improbability drive...
I have actually had multiple hour-long meetings about the colors of a button on a page, and they did not need to be a meeting. Where I've never... kitty_kot_ it is a popular thing people repeatedly state among my peers
I mean, I guess I've had a meeting about performance issues, especially during downtime, but nothing... It doesn't look like lead code. The actual day-to-day looks very little like lead code. Someone needs to make a... AnakimLuke LUL
julianwgs Please don't
veqqio Your peers are not employed engineers nor hiring managers, but people repeating misconceptions etc. :D
julianwgs It triggers PTSD
elite jira that's about like can you actually find the ticket that's assigned to you in jira you have 90 seconds go what's the other tier yeah julian you don't want to have the the jira round of interviewing

02:32:02AnakimLuke 😅
I used it at my last job. I didn't love it, but I understood why it was a reasonable choice. I keep hearing nice things about Linear. julianwgs But yeah it is a skill and I like Jira
All the cool kids who work at startups that I know like Linear. Maybe my startup would be cool if I used Linear.

...35kitty_kot_ @veqqio I'm not trying to be rude, but is it possible to give some sort of routine one could follow to eventually get hired?
Yeah. So this is down here.

...53kitty_kot_ something I can do starting right now
Kitty, I don't think you're being rude, and I actually think you are being very chill for somebody who has spent most of the year doing a very frustrating thing. thrifty_txt Hello! Been enjoying lurking lobsters for a few years now, just wanted to say ty
kitty_kot_ right at this point
I so I would echo again go look at that pirate software discord because I'm pretty sure they had a like guide to a first job kind of thing and I am just going to assume that that's probably pretty good hey thrifty welcome I think you could probably invent a routine like what if you're not waking up to an alarm clock definitely do that kitty_kot_ right in this moment
because you want to have some structure on your day. And I know unemployed, it's really easy to just drift into nonsense. AnakimLuke @kitty_kot_ exercise!
julianwgs Oh I heard about Linear in a local first conference talk. Seems pretty legit
But you could make up your own schedule that's like, you know, 9 to 10, check job RSS feeds for new listings. 10 to 11, lift, bro. I'm not saying that as a joke. I actually think lift, bro, or cardio, bro. that is incredibly helpful for, well, for everything. What? 11 to 12.

02:34:40AnakimLuke pet dogs
kitty_kot_ I wake up at 5 for some reason
kitty_kot_ 5 AM not Pm
Ah, I do that too. If I wake up the same time a couple of days in a row, I do it consistently. And so I just always kind of snap awake at 7am. But if I wake up at 5am a couple of times, that's what I'm waking up at for a week. I don't know how that works.

02:35:49NoGoodNick_ @kitty_kot_ are you getting enough sleep? my trick for falling back asleep is to eat a tiny easy snack and to avoid phone screen
kitty_kot_ also I can't get too absorbed into my work cause my gf is going to get mad at me
kitty_kot_ if I do
kitty_kot_ @NoGoodNick_ I think so
thrifty_txt why do you think twitch is so much worse of an experience technicallly than youtube
I don't know so key i'm kind of just making this up off the top of my head, obviously, so don't take this too seriously, but if, like a sketch helps. You could break up your time like this and say well I know I got to look at these jobs so i'm going to do them first thing in the morning, just to get it out of the way and apply for them. And then otherwise. Try and make sure that you're doing a repeated amount of. Work on some projects, talk to some things.

02:36:28Go to user groups.

...44kitty_kot_ I understand what you're saying
Yeah, I don't know.

...50Thrifty, I don't know who you're talking to. thrifty_txt do people really have strict routines they stick to, i have never been able to apply something like that in my life. its always one thing to the next as needed
NoGoodNick_ can also run a schedule like that by your favorite chat llm and have a back and forth about it
Yeah.

02:37:25kitty_kot_ I'll try this
Hey, no good, Nick. Good callback. Yeah, that's the kind of thing you could throw at an LLM.

...56veqqio @kitty_kot_ It's a good question; I'll write an article on it tonight! But asking it shows the problem, it's interesting to see the mindset which makes you ask. I think you want a 1,2,3,4... step guide. But the point is, you need to learn to become independent. When you asked about a master degree, it's like asking "what if I can hammer REALLY well" Be empathetic about a manager who'd hire you.
So there's one more book. kitty_kot_ your advice has helped quell some of my dread
pushcx https://bookshop.org/p/books/sl…
I'll find a... Yeah, I'm sorry you have the dread. The whole process sucks a lot. So you also have my empathy that

02:38:28kitty_kot_ @veqqio yes but I can't just be doing anything now can I
NoGoodNick_ @kitty_kot_ your gf not supporting deep work doesn’t sound good
veqqio They have so many hours in their day and can tell their employees what to do (smplified). If an employee can just find and solve problems, the manager's load is lighter. But if the employee wants the manager to say "make this array, then use this algorithm" why couldn't the manager just do it themselves?
kitty_kot_ independent within a certain set
That you're just doing a really stressful thing and it's funny because it's not stressful like you have to jump out of the way of the bus that's about to run you over like that's at least exciting, this is just a long slow slog.

02:39:03Vecchio, this is more great advice. Thank you.

02:40:26AnakimLuke "we regret to inform..." :d
kitty_kot_ i mean it oculd be worse
kitty_kot_ I could actually be on the street, but its good that I can think this stuff through
kitty_kot_ @veqqio I will take your statements to heart
Is some. I mean, between the outline I'm trying to build up and the topic of job searching, it's a pretty heavy stream.

...42AnakimLuke one thing that I haven't been doing but am considering is to ask for feedback whenever I get rejected.
kitty_kot_ @NoGoodNick_ its not that she doesn't support it
There was more here. kitty_kot_ @AnakimLuke this is a good idea
julianwgs I need to leave! Have a good one! :)
I mentioned email, that's.

...53veqqio The whole business is a series of people who delegate downwards. At each level, they're trying to think of how to accomplish the goals given to them and delegate it lower etc.
i'm going to make sure that one's in archive.org take care julian i will try and read that book i don't think i know your username on the site so if you want to either drop by a stream in a couple of weeks and ask me about that book or drop me an email and i will let you know what i think of it

02:41:20OK, it's gotten, oh, but this is before the response came. How do I get this one to save again? AnakimLuke @julianwgs byee
veqqio (Originating goals is another issue. It's all recursive though)
kitty_kot_ I have to go in a bit as well, but thank you all and thank you pushcx for your help
julianwgs It's always julianwgs
This one, that's what I'm looking for. Julian WGS. Okay.

02:42:24moussx_ Hello, thanks for Lobsters! Don't understand that that OSA is about but hopefully it's fine
Hey Moose. julianwgs Bye and thanks for the great work!
Yeah, that's why I'm writing up what the OSA is. So there's a bunch in that thread, but as much as I tried to put a summary at the top... Thanks Julian, that's really kind of you. I think it's still worth trying to summarize the OSA again, because... Well, I read some people talking about the OSA and even this post over the weekend, and it was clear that people did not even read as much as this paragraph. So I still want to have one comment that put things together. veqqio Push, are such supracode issues a valid topic for the site? They're not direct tech, but... the whole domain context of what to apply tech to? (Or seeing social structures etc. at technology too)
And actually with fewer links, so it is less intimidating. That really frustrates me because it feels like it's automatically less helpful, but yeah. When you say super code. Oh, you mean like seeing like a state kind of things? Like I mentioned that book.

02:43:57pushcx https://lobste.rs/about#topical…
So I put highlight. Yeah. So like my very best write up of topicality is what's live on the about page right now, because obviously I want to express this as best as I can.

02:44:23I guess one thing that's not specifically in here is veqqio I missed that part, but the non-technical aspect of the job, being an employee etc. which kitty-kot needs.
thrifty_txt seeing like a state recommendation is straight out of financial times Kappa
We tend to have really good discussions when we start from... Oh, I see what you're asking. Oh, it's different than I'm assuming. Okay. Financial times. I don't know what that... Kappa. Someone's explained that emoji, but I don't think I actually know what it means.

02:45:04pushcx https://lobste.rs/t/practices
So Vecchio, we do have a practices tag and it, why does Firefox do this every once in a while? AnakimLuke kappa means sarcasm 😅
I must be like bumping control or something and it does something weird. moussx_ essentially, /s
So under the practices tag, we have a lot of this kind of stuff, but not all of it. thrifty_txt being a lil facetious
Kappa means sarcasm. Ah, thank you. I mean, I do read the Financial Times and not religiously. I also read The Economist. I listen to podcasts like Odd Lots. I read money stuff. I don't know. Finance is interesting. I used to work at Stripe, which is a large international financial firm. I don't really think of... NoGoodNick_ what do you think about Modern Monetary Theory?
london economists is recommending books by anarchist professors but okay so vecchio i would say like mona modern do i want to rant about politics no i think that's a political topic and i would direct you to the wikipedia page especially the criticism section NoGoodNick_ ok sorry
So let me finish the answer for Vecchio, which is I think like half of it, lots of the non-technical stuff is here, but I remove stuff that's about the pure management stuff or being an employee, like, thrifty_txt FT recommended that software engineers read Seeing Like A State in one of their 2024 round ups
how to run a good one-on-one or how to look good at your performance review. The stuff that is very purely about the job and that could do, that could be applied to almost any kind of white collar job, I remove those links as off topic. Cause I'm trying to keep us towards computing and we do, thrifty_txt https://www.ft.com/content/c4a9…
I'll be a lot more flexible when something starts with like a harder technology story and broadens to talk about jobs kind of stuff. But if it's all job stuff, I'll pull it. Does that make sense? And then there's a whole bunch of stuff that Kitty needs that's like polishing a resume or how to network and none of that would be topical even if it's because the site is less about working as a developer and more about the practice of development and i'm not going to kid myself that you know almost everybody who reads the site is some kind of professional developer or a very closely related role but the site is not really about jobs So if you watch the mod log, you will see that. So like I probably I think this one had a good discussion going before I saw it, but I tend to remove stories that are like how to interview for a job, how to apply for a job. And if you look in the mod log, you'll see that's a fairly regular thing. But. This tag isn't permitted by new users because a lot of the times that turns into let me gripe about my job kind of stuff that I don't want to see on the site. Anyways, long answer.

02:49:05Vecchio, or I'm sorry, Thrifty, you got me there. I would not have expected FT to... linked to seeing like a state that's pretty darn neat that they did it's a it's one of those books that i feel put a tool in my toolbox for figuring out the perspective of others and thrifty_txt specifically recommending to programmers too!
It explained a lot of behavior that had been inexplicable to me before in politics and in businesses. Oh, well, I didn't. So I'm on my stream browser, so I can't actually read NFT story. I think I'm only logged into GitHub in this browser.

02:50:11Oh, they call it the one book to read to understand your industry. I don't know. OK, so I grabbed the archive.is page.

...35Oh, relating it specifically to surveillance. Yeah, that's a really good one. I can see why they make that recommendation.

...57You know, along these lines, maybe not really along these lines. What, what actual connection am I making here?

02:51:12davidofterra I also found that the Dictator's Handbook explained a lot about politics.
There's, shoot. What's the name of this newsletter?

...25Oh, Hey David. I recognize your name. pushcx https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/
yeah if you didn't see that one came up on stream a few minutes back and touched this off there's a lot of that kind of learning to understand how different people see the world and so i that's the same kind of connection i was making here where this newsletter bits about money is about veqqio Seeing as a state emerges from the cliodynamics debate. For a short time, some thought you could just use data to give objective answers to history. Others pointed out that much data doesnt exist and the data distorts reality. We know this as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". This book presents the counter cliodynamics argument to the lay public
seeing like a bank where it's about how do you understand these financial claims and why are bank transfers so weird and all these kinds of things the cleo dynamics debate hmm

02:52:29You know, it's funny you mentioned Clio dynamics there because I did notice that the very first book on the list here is accountants should read the foundation series.

...51Good echo.

02:53:11Where was my list of, ooh, I had a list of other things in here. What was it?

...35I swear I mentioned it.

...46Ah, yeah. That's what I was trying to find. It was up in the post, not a comment. I'm looking at what are the other off-ramps from the censorship.

02:54:09You know, for anyone trying to understand the OSA, seeing like a state is a pretty good one. There's a lot of, honestly, dictator's handbook too. I don't mean to call the UK a dictatorship, but the public performance of politics is part of what's happening with the OSA.

02:55:44I'm getting it here is that occasionally off-con is thin. It's not offhand.

02:56:05It's shortening, so I have less line wrapping. Coming up on three hours there is no way i'm finishing this on stream I don't regret any of the time we spent talking about finding a job or. Understanding politics but. does mean I didn't finish this post.

...52veqqio It's very nice to see how you build a post, structure the argument etc.
Yeah, Vecchio, for a lot of these, I just, like the comment I wrote earlier today about brigading, I just kind of hammered it out. But for the big stuff, like this one, I write an outline and I go back and forth and I collect my links and I'm like, what the hell am I even trying to say? veqqio I only noticed that now, but I've been struggling with this lately
And then I draft and I draft. You know, we talked all about that CS. Maybe it is worth mentioning, I don't have a computer science degree. I have a... basically an English degree. It's pretty much about writing for the web rather than being a hard technical degree.

02:57:40What else was I going to put here?

...56This is... veqqio Tangentially, do you know the rhetoric vocabulary like doxa etc.?
I guess these are my notes. At a previous job, someone influential... Oh, I know some of it, but it's faded. Yeah, like... Are we making a pathetic argument here? Are we appealing to logos? Yes. I used to know all of this cold, but it's faded out over the, what, more than 20 years since my degree. So, like, all of that knowledge is rattling around here somewhere, but if you quiz me, I would fail. Please do not leet code me on rhetoric vocabulary.

02:59:05What's next?

...14Oh, I was mentioning Bluff here. People used to send emails at the company and they would put a TLDR at the top and then an influential employee argued, hey, we are all skilled professionals who read and write things for a living. This implication of TLDR, too long, didn't read, is kind of an insult to the idea of writing things to be read and understood. It is an anti-intellectual statement at its heart. Let's find something else. And I think what the company landed on, I think it was like a good idea from an executive was big lift up front i think it came out of the military where you know my vote was for the word summary but big lift up front was like make your most important points you know journalists would call it inverted pyramid style but then And bluff was what kind of caught on. AnakimLuke LUL
But then one of the employees noticed in Slack, like, yeah, every time I see this, especially knowing it came from the military, I always read it as better listen up, fuckers. And so we even saw a couple of messages where they would put a comma in there. So it was not T-L-D-R. It was B-L-U comma off. I still vote for summary but.

03:01:10veqqio It's a good higher abstraction level than mere code! You can label classes etc. or technical debates like the recent linux+ rust debate. Journalistic organisatio like the pyramid is very applicable in organizing flat code too!
My drop. yeah so it really is like all these it's that's what I wanted to say it's.

...50veqqio This is what I want to teach kitty_kot
veqqio I like how thoughtful you are about these things. It's a tragedy most people just see youtubers iterating about some tech
That's a really good point, Vecchio. Yeah. So Twitch does have a DM feature. It has a bunch of limitations. And I think you have a new account. And KittyCut was also a new account. So I'm not sure that you won't trip a spam filter. But you could try and message them that if you think of more stuff.

03:02:17Yeah. Well, you know, I'm kind of blessed by not having to be interesting. I don't care if I have 15 viewers or five or 500. Actually, it'd probably be a problem if I had 500. And I just wanted to show people what it actually looks like when I'm maintaining the site and doing the work. Some of that is stumbling my way through bug fixes and unbreaking master. Some of that is writing posts. And a big, big part of this thing I do as moderating is helping the site understand itself. And that's things like stats. That's things like, why is this rule the way it is? Why did you make this moderation decision? What is the goal here? How do these things reinforce each other? I don't know. I hope to peel back the curtain because there really is no magic here. There's just trying to be thoughtful about things and trying to be thoughtful to people.

03:03:38It's killing me. I thought there was one more thing I wanted to say in this. Oh, yeah. It's this one.

03:04:09Speaking of writing phrases, I've always liked Kill Your Darlings. A phrase that Ofcom uses a lot is illegal harmful content. Where in their guidance and their public statements they constantly say, they reiterate, that they are regulating illegal harmful content. And they call it harmful because it's illegal and it's illegal because this law made it illegal. And as an American, the idea of speech becoming illegal because a bureaucrat said it was harmful or vice versa is pretty strange. And by American law, a government officer emailing you and telling you, you can't say that. That email is illegal, harmful content. And it is maybe too cutesy, but when I'm writing, I have to make these points. I have to write them just the sentence or two and get them out of my fingertips and out of my brain. Otherwise I can't stop thinking about them. And then in one of the edit passes, I go back and I clean up these really cutesy snarky things because They make sense to me, but they don't actually make sense to other people. They don't make points clearly. When I was writing, I think this post or one of the previous comments about the OSA, I was doing it on stream and DPK came by and I was like, there's this thing that I want to write and I know I shouldn't write. And she was like, yes, you shouldn't write it. That's actually bad. Here's another reason it's bad. And I pulled it out and The writing was much better for it, but that's part of the process.

03:06:23I guess these two are the same thing. Because it's...

...43speaking of vocabulary quizzes jawboning is a u.s legal term of art around free speech and if i use it i have to link to wikipedia to explain it but it is part of what ofcom's prerogative is

03:07:22AnakimLuke it's my time to go. thanks for the convo!!
veqqio Brilliant, I had to look it up too :D
Take care, Anna Kim. Thanks for hanging out. I appreciated your questions. And do email me your resume if you'd like a pair of eyes on it.

...35Oh, yeah.

...45So the big ones have been jawboning. chilling effect fire restraint and i'm not even a like a first amendment lawyer i'm sure they could drop other very important terms but this has been so the thing the darling here that is there is to kill that's why this probably won't end up in the final version of the post is

03:08:26Part of the reason this has been so exasperating is Ofcom's insistence on writing as if jumping into the legal context of some other country and their free speech norms and laws and lawmaking process were trivial. As if I could read their law and their guidance and understand what it means when actually. I am constantly running into assumptions that are wrong because i'm not in the UK and I don't know really know much about its legal system, besides what has diverged forked off 250 years ago into my country and. in the the same bit of the vice versa on their threats is that when they make these threats the sites have to censor themselves and do all of this process oh what's that that was the other one that i surprised the uk lawyer with is unreasonable burden

03:10:01they're also ignorant of legal concepts over here and they are claiming that they get to apply to the US and they they would fail this leetcode quiz of not just like you know the college finals version of this would be justify your threats against these standards and in light of these topics. But the leetcode version is like, can they even give a half decent explanation of any of these topics that are incredibly important for speech laws in America? And I would not. Expect a British regulator to be able to write about any of these things, to answer even very basic questions about these things, because it's not their country. I am sure they are kept plenty busy by the complexities in their own law and their own legal traditions. So when they are very dismissive and say, oh, all you have to do is look at these 17 things that we have deemed illegal and read this 250 page law and read our 2,900 pages of guidance and create a bureaucratic process of your own for each of these 17 kinds of harms and then keep it updated and then also come around and justify yourselves against all of those things, your own process that we forced you to implement.

03:12:00It's just exasperatingly hypocritical, I guess.

...25Yeah, I guess this is would not will because it's not at all certain they'll contact me.

...51I glanced at my clock and I see I've run over three hours. haven't even put down a sentence. I spent the most of my time talking about a thing I probably won't include. veqqio In Western Europe, the approach to law seems to be "figure out if its legal first" while in the US they'll even do openly illegal stuff (like Uber) until someone makes them stop. I'm curious, how did you react to GDPR which birthed a miniconsulting industry etc. but seems to have actually been irrelevant? I saw some forums are closing, but... What makes you care instead of just ignoring it?
If they ever email me, I probably will include this and be snarky as hell about it because, you know, as an American and as a journalist, I am forced to get on a very high horse about speech laws. They issue you the horse in J school. And a stepladder to get up on it.

03:13:40veqqio The horse?
veqqio Oh, hobby horse
So I've seen a little about the figure out if it's legal first. There's also a different process where veqqio Understood!
No, I was saying being on a high horse in the sense of the moral phrase of looking down on someone. You're said to be on a high horse. I guess it's fair to say I'm also on a hobby horse about it. But to your point on the difference between the US and Western Europe, there is also a difference in lawmaking where In the US, there is this idea or this accepted structure that case law and courts kind of rewrite, not rewrite, but restrain or can alter the laws. And that doesn't seem to be the expectation in Western Europe where it's more of a, more often they write Really broad laws with more... What's the word I'm looking for? I fucking used it in the... See, this is a thing. One of the reasons streams are three hours long is because after about three hours, my brain is cooked from prattling for three hours. Judgment calls. that kind of latitude to make judgment calls appears less in U.S. laws. So like with an example, like if a U.S. law says that foo is illegal and the punishment is a million dollars, you are probably going to get fined something like a million dollars if you break the law. And in Europe, justkarolis @veqqio Not to get crazy political, but it seems like thats whats happening with executive orders right now, just seeing which ones will get through the supreme court and stick lol
you're more likely to see a sliding scale kind of thing where the implementer has a lot more choice about how hard they're gonna hit you with that stick. veqqio Huh. I always had the opposite impression! That European fines etc. are quite exact.
So it's very hard for me to read the Online Safety Act and have those kinds of very fuzzy gut feelings for how seriously to take things. Oh, well, Vicky, you know, I don't have a lot of confidence in that kind of broad comparison, because it's not like I've lived in Western Europe, or written laws in Western Europe. Like I've covered u.s politics and u.s laws and the u.s court system and i've written written no i have read lots of books about all those things but very little about western europe so don't take my opinion too seriously on that last one

03:17:10So to your direct question about what made me care about the OSA is it threatens criminal penalties and it claims to apply even if you have no presence in the country. i'm aware part of what i'm saying is they have never justified this extraterritorial claim and i have asked them directly and they have ignored the question and i know they got that email because they responded to other nonsense in it no they responded with nonsense to other parts of the email but have never even attempted to say oh yeah under such and such a treaty or such and such a principle the uk gets to make laws censoring the entire world now and i guess the other part of that is they won't want other countries to have this power and i've made it in the comments down here but at some point the uk is going to figure out that hey wait a minute If a country can justify censorship based on having readers. A whole bunch of countries that we don't share cultural values with are going to attempt to regulate us this way.

03:18:53justkarolis my bad
So Just Careless, that is probably more political than I want to get on the stream. There's... I obviously have opinions about current American politics. No, it's okay. You asked the question in a chill way, and I appreciate that you put it in with the qualifier that you knew it was maybe off-topic, so not a big deal, but... I don't generally talk politics in public and I am aware I have been doing a lot of it here, but let me find the comment I wrote a couple of years ago.

03:19:43Yeah, I've said the word politics a bunch lately, but I don't remember who I was.

03:20:00thrifty_txt i love politics
veqqio Executive orders have been the main tool of governance for a few decades now, everything seems so broken. The new spray and pray method though, is curious
But I said this. Nope.

...14veqqio Brb, have to let the dogs out
Oh, huh. Pentagon Papers and then the Stone Disclosures again.

...24So I wrote this up. about why I typically don't talk about politics, and I'm not immediately finding, like I'm not immediately remembering an exact word I used to find it again. But I was pretty satisfied with that, so I should have saved it. So the half-assed version of it is Can I link it here? No. If you're curious, I can keep digging and find the comments sometime. But the gist of it is I don't talk politics in public because it's just how I was raised. And then when I started working in journalism, which came pretty early in my professional career, I distinctly remember my editor came to me and he said, hey, the most important rule that you ought to know because you're coming not from another journalism outfit is There's no cheering from the press box. And he was a big sports guy. So he's talking about. It is standard in American baseball that. Reporters get to share a box like a special booth, a nice one overlooking the field so that they can report on the game. But there shouldn't be any cheers coming from that where the journalists want to see, you know, the home team or the away team winning. So. That just kind of reinforced my I don't talk politics in public. And that's actually turned out to be kind of useful because, you know, occasionally Lobster talks about political topics. I have definitely said that I see a lot of our work as having political relevance. But it has been kind of useful that People don't say, oh, you are moderating like this because you have this political view and you support this candidate and you want to see that law. Otherwise, I don't have a lot of political opinions that I am so absolutely confident about that I think my opinion is going to add much to the popular discourse.

03:23:25justkarolis makes sense, in a perfect world i think it would be great to have political discussions, but i think its really easy to get heated and just start arguing instead debating lol been guilty of this as well .
It feels really weird to be reading my own comments on stream, trying to find something.

...45I thought I had used the no cheering from the booth. pushcx https://lobste.rs/search?q=comm…
Ah, here it is. I actually did. Okay. This is the comment I'm thinking of. I hope it's good after all this buildup.

03:24:16Yeah, that's all right. I feel like I got a pretty good reiteration of this comment. So I wrote this what? just over six years ago, and that's still where I'm at.

...34Yeah, just careless, before, maybe before you connected to the stream, I did mention one of the problems that informs the brigading rule is, and definitely is a problem for politics generally, is that when people feel righteous about stuff, they feel like behavior that would be otherwise unacceptable justkarolis us vs them lol
is acceptable is morally justified is morally commanded that because these other people are doing the morally impermissible thing you have to get them it is very easy to get swept up in politics or for general political threads to be about things that are life and death important yeah so it's us first them but honestly politics is life or death important like political question like who do we go to war with could there be anything more life or death right oh don't answer that please especially from a a particularly high horse because i can just kind of imagine that if i had said that on blue sky or mastodon someone would explain to me what is more important than war and why i'm immoral for saying that right like that's very clear that people feel justified being real rude about politics in the way it is less common not non-existent but less common when we're talking about i don't know indenting sequel properly so in the in the guidelines one of the ways i put that was some things that are off topic here but popular elsewhere includes defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world when we can't even settle tabs for spaces so speaking of me echoing my own comments and you can call me a broken record you can call me reliable depending on what you think of me personally but veqqio I run security/defense communities. "War is politics by different means." So politics is the hare the dogs chase. But we have to nip it at the bud or all discourse and insight collapse. There are precious few places without politics etc. so we must safeguard them where we can.
I come back to language like this because when we start talking about what is the right way to do politics and to do economics, as programmers we don't actually have any kind of special knowledge or authority about these topics, and we don't exactly do super well on these. Oh, the old Clausewitz quote, huh? Yeah, the spicy version of that is politics is war by different means.

03:27:33veqqio (N.b. I failed and my community's gone off the deep end of late. Sigh)
Vecchio, when you say communities, are you talking about like online forums or like offline things? Oh, sounds like online forums. Well, it has been a busy month or so for politics. thrifty_txt political power flows from a barrel of a gun
A friend of mine studied military history and has lots of opinions on security and defense and works in the defense industry. veqqio Yes. We exchanged messages 1-3 months ago. I mentioned an osint mapping project I'm building too
And I understand that there's been lots of talks about lots of things the last four or five weeks.

03:28:19Oh, yeah, yeah. oh thank you now i remember sorry i didn't recognize your handle i've placed it now i remember the email thread and you did give me a link yeah oh man i think i think we had that conversation like just before the american inauguration i have not looked back at your community since i can imagine and i can wish you good luck Hmm.

03:29:32This good luck to UK residents is also not me being smarmy. It's... These are big, hard topics. justkarolis i just found this channel randomly, what is lobste.rs ?
Politics of how do you coordinate 70 million people about what is acceptable to put in an internet comment. FreeFull The British government just can't stop overreaching
pushcx https://lobste.rs
That is a non-trivial political topic. Oh. Hey Just Careless. It's here in the web browser. Lobsters is a topic about computing and we are talking about politics a bunch because the UK has created a law they call the Online Safety Act that I have been dealing with and I have done a bunch of this dealing with on stream here. So actually let me find that for context. or no, tags. pushcx https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/ https://push.cx/tags#uk-osa
So the streams get archived to my blog, and the ones with the UK OSA tag, you can watch me struggling to find out what the heck this law is and how we're going to respond to it. And after a lot of this, so this post was me waving the flag of, hey, UK users, I'm kind of overwhelmed by this thing that says it applies to me as an American in Chicago. Help me understand what the hell we're doing here and how we should respond. And I've got a lot of good responses and good resources. And this has been running for months. I want to say I heard about it in December, just before Christmas. And then I put this up a couple days into the new year because site traffic is dead the first two, three days of the year. And then I think we've gotten to a point where we understand what it is and what the risks are. So now I'm trying to write it up and be done with the dang thing. But this kind of stuff of me puzzling through a giant project that is legal related is very unusual. Mostly we're kicking around stuff that's on the site and what should the guidelines be and how does the code work, so if you're curious the whole. pushcx https://github.com/lobsters/lob…
whole code base is up available open source. If you're right rails code there's plenty of bugs that you can help with. I add more bugs that you can help with every stream.

03:32:23justkarolis lol unfortunately ive never touched rail, im confused as to how the UK can enforce their laws in the US? Will they just block your website?
so then i think this gets me everything i wanted oh right this call the cut was she runs this transparency something right was it promising trouble who did this I thought it was her. Shoot, I have the wrong browser.

03:33:06justkarolis Sidenote, I'm from the Chicago as well! I go to school at UIUC lol
Yeah, OK. So I found it off stream because I knew it was in my personal history.

...22pushcx https://buttondown.com/indie-an…
on their button down all right i'll bring the link over here this is the one i wanted oh hey just careless well as someone from the best city i i salute you sir so yeah just careless that is a big part of the law it has said It applies to all websites that have user-generated content if any of the readers are in the UK. And a big chunk of the confusion caused by that law is how can you possibly expect to do that? That's not how laws work. But Ofcom, the regulator that's involved with this law, has reiterated many times in no uncertain terms that they feel that they have authority over the entire world because of this law. Which is kind of a begging the question, because I asked them, why do you think this law applies internationally? And they said, the law says that the law applies internationally. Which is very circular. Anyways, UIUC, yeah. My neighbor used to work there. I think I got an MRI at UIUC. Maybe it was Rush. justkarolis lol we should hand the UK the seven keys that hold the internet together
Are you guys on the... You're on the Green Line, right? I never remember. So, I'm a... I, .. Oh, man. Having dealt with Ofcom a little bit the last two, three months, I think I would like to vote against giving them those seven keys. justkarolis I think youre thinking of UIC, UIUC is in Champaign its like 2 hrs away
FreeFull Seven keys for the five eyes?
Let's please not do that.

03:35:38You're right. Just careless. You're right. I am thinking of UIC instead of UIUC. Thank you. seven keys for five eyes oh yeah this is turning into a an rpg here hopefully like a really good action rpg like linked to the past i'm old i like old people games god it's been 20 years since i visited champagne

03:36:18All right, so I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to spend two hours writing that and I'm not doing it on stream because I'm already fried from talking for a couple hours. I think I'm gonna wind down this stream. Yeah, yeah, I think we're gonna end for the day. veqqio I had a big Q about the codebase: How would you describe the code base's bugs, their urgency etc.? Is it many easy ones, few harder ones? What bigger projects/goals do yo have (besides postgres?)
If anybody has any like slide in under the wire questions about lobsters, whether that's the site or the code base, you could probably nerd snipe me for a couple more minutes, but otherwise, veqqio But you can leaveit for another time
Like I'm going to count to 20 in my head and ramble a second. Oh, big question about the code base. How would I describe the bugs and urgency? No, I might as well handle it. veqqio Like, I'm curious how you allocate them etc.
So I do office hour streams on Monday afternoon and Tuesday, sorry, Thursday mornings. And Just Careless is in the good time zone, which is Chicago time. So that's easy for them. Everybody else gets to do the time zone math in their head. But I have a very rough mental prep ordering where if we have a bug that is messing up conversations, I care an enormous amount about it. Where let's click over to closed yeah so like this updated app column and editing a timestamp there was this bug where conversations were getting the wrong timestamps that one i got fixed real fast from when i saw it in the issue tracker because it was making conversations really confusing and then lots of these other ones like Do we want to run on this other database or do we want to refactor some things? Some of this stuff hangs out a while. I mean, if you dig back in our issue tracker, you will find bugs that have been hanging out for years. So here is a 2018 bug. Yep. Oh, I remember this one. There was a bug in how the traffic level. So if you hover your mouse on the icon in the corner, justkarolis if you delete the issues of the old bugs, its almost as if the bugs dont exist
get a live traffic level that is based on how many stories and comments and votes people are doing right now compared to the last couple of months there's a bug in that but that's a fun feature so that can just hang out for years no like i know it's a little tacky to be like oh we have 135 open issues but As a volunteer project. Where I try and put a couple hours of code a week towards lobsters and then we get. As many contributions as I can encourage. Yeah, it's totally possible that some of this stuff hangs around for years. This one, as long as I'm here, 740. That reminds me.

03:39:54These two are related.

03:40:04The downside of leaving these old ones hanging around is occasionally somebody posts a comment on a bug that's like six years old and it's like, hey, is this still a problem? And then I'm like, oh, yeah, no, we deleted that code. That's gone. Oh, or I see a bug that I clearly clicked on five years ago and then didn't finish.

...32Yeah, we don't. Typically, the answers support inquiries, especially about, like, I ported the site to a different database. And I don't know that this sister site ever existed. Yeah, so no GitHub activity. Oh, these fucking Hyperloop people. Speaking of.

03:41:04Illinois institutions of higher education. This is U of Chicago and they experimented on me and I'm still mad about it. That's on the about page for anybody who wants to dig out the link. In the meantime, I'm not going to do anything when I'm reminded that I'm mad about something, but maybe I will close this as stale later. All right. justkarolis they experimented on you lol??? wtf you cant just say that LOL, ill have to read the about section
Vecchio, I hope that answers your question. If not, especially if you have specific issues that you're curious about why they got. Yeah. FreeFull Was it like that "experiment" on the linux kernel?
So it's down in the, down in the trivia section. Oh no, it's queries. Free full. Yep. You got it. You guessed exactly right.

03:42:06Oh yeah, there we go. It's down at the bottom. I even called them out by name. I was... I'm still pissed about it. You can probably hear it in my voice, but I definitely shouldn't be writing bug comments and closing things if I'm pissed about that.

...28FreeFull Ethics? What are ethics?
Did I put Noria in here? Oh yeah, that was the MIT thing. Noria. veqqio Summary: the put fake prs etc. to test his responsiveness iirc
oh yeah if you free fall if you read into that one you will see that i even talked to the the ethics review board at university of chicago i'm not going to tell the whole story if i start telling the whole story i'm going to be here another hour and i'm going to be real mad and i think instead i'm gonna go make some pasta sauce and have a nice dinner and chill and either like to do this before the next stream, but maybe it has to wait for the next stream. veqqio Bon appetit! I've been cooking while listening
All right, so that next stream will be Thursday morning at 9 a.m. Oh, nice. Send me the recipe. Take care, everybody. NoGoodNick_ thanks for the stream
I hope to see you again. justkarolis have a good night!
That's how the stream works. FreeFull Thanks for streaming
We just talk about stuff. Take care.