Everyone always wants to say worthy things about the qualities that make a good programmer. But I occasionally think that "a sense of humour" isn't given enough credit.
In programming, you're constantly making mistakes, and being told you're wrong (by code reviewers, bug reporters, and the computer itself). If you let that get you down, you'll quickly find another career.
When I realise I've made a mistake, my reaction is often to find it amusing – smile a bit, maybe laugh out loud, share it with a friend if it's funny enough.
I can't remember how I got that attitude in the first place. Perhaps just luck. But I sometimes think it's the main reason I stuck with what would otherwise be a frustrating profession!
totally agree – a workplace that puts you under constant pressure to never make a mistake is utterly toxic. _Especially_ if you feel under that pressure from day 1 when you're still learning your way around, because it's even more obvious that people will make mistakes while learning than that they'll carry on making mistakes once they're up to speed (though both are true).
Not only that, but a workplace of that kind isn't even serving its _own_ interests, because if it's trying to incentivise employees to never make a mistake, what it's really doing is incentivising them to never _look_ as if they make a mistake. So the mistakes get covered up and the company never finds out about all the problems.
Google's new TV's will have built in mics, so your TV will hear you without your direct intervention. gemini "AI" assistant built in. And you no longer have to use a trigger word like “Hay Google" to get it's attention.
Basically this means that a Google TV with this trash in it will be always listening and collecting data on every word said within earshot.
This is some seriously dystopian, Fahrenheit 451 level bullshit right here.
https://mastodon.social/@verge/113782987209100156
Google will use more mics and Gemini AI to get you to talk to your TV https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337314/google-tv-gemini-integration-ai-ces-2025Mastodon
Makkora, the bird barbarian boy, charges into battle despite his wounds, collecting unexpected strength and energy thanks to the aid of his ancestral guardians. These spirits not only empower him in combat but also protect him from harm. Among them are ancestors from an ancient time when his species had only wings and no hands, reminder of his lineage.
This piece was created for a charity auction and donated to Nutrias de México, an initiative dedicated to the scientific study and conservation of otters in Mexico.
Picture for Flurrabell
Digital. Procreate
There is a short video where I show the time-lapse process of this piece, you can find it on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
Or you can watch the full video, download the full resolution version, and see WIPs and other works by me that I haven't shared publicly yet, at supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco or Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco
Thank you! :D
Become a supporter of Paco Panda today! ❤️ Ko-fi lets you support the creators you love.Ko-fi
Atari 130ST and 520ST first public demo from the Winter Consumer Electronics Show 1985, hosted in Las Vegas in January 1985.In it the unknown announcer discu...YouTube
Can I just be fluffy instead of going to work?
📸 - Seadragon_350 (IG)
#fursuit #fursuiter #fursuiting #mascot #furry #furries #furryfandom #fursuitphotography #foxfursuit #costume #cosplay
My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
can't wait to see them embrace the hardware capabilities and setup a copperlist to make a beautiful raster on that blue sky ;)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c6/67/75/c66775029fff64156c5ff6c4e6444b77.jpg
Digitisation now done! Followup thread (with considerable Amiga emulator war story): https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114021236557200593
Just uploaded a new set of photos to my Patreon! Really enjoying the LED tube lights. Easier to use than my flashes!
Can't wait, gotta share! #FursuitFriday
Meet Rezz in the fluff! Designed by
KezEtor and brought to life by the amazing Roofur (https://www.roofur.com/)! 💜💜💜
Creator of custom fursuits and accessories for everyone!www.roofur.com
"when furries beta test your software, is it animal testing?"
- from a Home Assistant furries group
🎵Wolves love their meat. Bears love their honey. But on the dancefloor. We are all the same. We're gonna move our paws to the rhythm of the beat🎶 - Vulpines in Heat - Baxxter & Burr
Poster for the Frolic Party, happening every second Saturday of the month, starting in February, in San Francisco, CA. USA
Check out their webpage for more information:
frolicparty.com/
Digital. Procreate
I shared a time-lapse process video that you can watch on the first comment of this submission on my art Telegram channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
But if you want to see the full video, with the full resolution version of this picture, WIPs of my future works and to see my art before I post it publicly, support me either at Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco) or Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco). Thank youu!!
Become a supporter of Paco Panda today! ❤️ Ko-fi lets you support the creators you love.Ko-fi
Since I'm about to attend the SotonFurs 2025 winter party, here's an adorable video from last year's one!
📹 @xenfluffs
✂️ @selkiesuits
⌚ #FursuitFriday
One dancing wolf, just for you! ❤️
I've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and doing footwork on carpet, but we made it work!
One dancing wolf, just for you! ❤️I've wanted to do this dance for such a long time! It sure was tricky getting these big bappers to move fast enough, and do...YouTube
@thumper The default for 4.2 is 99MB, up from 40MB before, though we'd have to ask Scatterplot to see if it's correct here. https://github.com/mastodon/documentation/commit/9340cb6a9f6aa4dc7685a8b19af20bc5c9d5f285
A 40 second long video will be re-encoded to around 7MB. This is plenty for a short clip with mostly static camera, though might be insufficient for high motion videos such as recordings from video games. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/#media
Attached: 1 image Got a video you posted to the bird site but its far too large to post here? Grab a copy of HandBrake https://handbrake.fr/downloads.woof.group
It's made me grumpy. I'm tired of living in a world where everyone is constantly out to trick, wheedle and dark-pattern stuff out of you on the sly.
Just charge a fair price for good work for smeg's sake. Piss off with the trickery, fucks sake. 🦬
Kinda' crazy to think about.
In about five billion years, when the world dies by fire as the Sun in it's death throws engulfs the Earth, only half of the radioactive material in Chernobyl's damaged reactor 4 will have decayed.
https://youtube.com/shorts/LCQu8EXiDAA?si=4TB2QJgIfng8MA0w
The containment facility for the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor being built back in 2014YouTube
If you’ve had the “pleasure” of a Samsung washing machine’s “wonderful” tune at the end of a cycle, you may enjoy this hardstyle remix.
https://youtu.be/dztbE3RY_eE?si=vUz3YTt_9PwmFefi
Provided to YouTube by DistroKidThe Washing Machine Song · MennielThe Washing Machine Song℗ Broken Speakers RecordsReleased on: 2024-12-17Auto-generated by Y...YouTube
@chloeraccoon You call that an act? I saw better acts with Fozzie Bear telling jokes!
The Prime Minister is at the dispatch box? I sure wish someone would dispatch them!
Let’s make 2025 a bluetiful year, with lots of orange too! - @bluefops
- @juke
📸 - gerhardt_the_dragon
#fursuit #fursuiter #fursuiting #mascot #furry #furries #furryfandom #fursuitphotography #foxfursuit #costume #cosplay
Proof elephants have intrusive thoughts, and sometimes they win. LOL!
@steckschwein_6502 you could see it that way, but I honestly don't experience the feeling I mean as frustration. It is actual _amusement_, like when you get a joke. The combination of understanding why something seemed sensible to me at the time, and also why it's totally wrong, often has (for me) that same contrast and unexpectedness that makes jokes funny.
I do feel frustration (of course), but more often when I'm failing to come up with a good idea at all, rather than when I do something and it doesn't work.
@lnr when I was at school, we had a guy come to give us a talk, and he started by saying "I'm going to teach you how to juggle". In fact he discussed the mechanics of juggling not at all – what he taught was a technique for transforming frustration into amusement during the initial phase of learning when you're doing nothing but drop the balls and pick them up again, on the theory that that's why most people give up before succeeding.
His suggestion was: every time you drop a ball, tell yourself a joke, and bend down to pick the ball up just as you get to the punchline, so that you learn to associate picking up balls from the floor with amusement.
(And then he went on from that starting point to apply the same ideas to exam revision, which was the main point of his talk.)
Sadly, I'd already learned to juggle when I heard this talk, so I couldn't test whether the idea worked!
And the best way to think about your code is that it's disposable, but your skills are not.
Hence, in a code review worry about learning what you can improve, not your precious words laid end to end.
@genehack Pretty sure I've told this story here before, but I was once responsible for a team that managed daily log file analysis. For various reasons sometimes some of the necessary log files might be missing when the scheduled job ran, so I built a tool admins could use to rerun the daily analysis after trying to fetch the missing logs. In certain circumstances that tool could restart itself, leading to a subtle bug related to an open filehandle.
I (eventually) found and fixed the bug, and added a Bart Simpson style comment below the bug fix:
#I will always close my filehandles.
#I will always close my filehandles.
#I will always ...
Months after I left that job, I got a text from somebody still at the company, containing just that code comment. He'd gotten a big laugh out of it.
@fedward I have a friend and former coworker who is currently maintaining a stack of bioinformatics/sequence analysis stuff originally developed by ...let's be kind and say, "non-coders", that I completely rewrote during a period of pretty high stress, and he periodically toots out comments that I left behind. It's amusing.
(As a sample, the first line of the project's README.md was "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"...)
@genehack @fedward I suspect that's a fairly common opening line of terrifying comments, along with variations on 'here be dragons'!
One of my favourite comments I ever wrote occurred when I found an incomprehensible source file, spent an afternoon making sense of it, and since there wasn't an explanation already, wrote up what I'd found in a big comment at the top, with the opening paragraph
"This module is totally incomprehensible without hours of drawing small diagrams and swearing, so I'm going to write a comment for the benefit of the next poor sucker."
The reason I liked this so much was that, ten years later, it turned out that the next poor sucker was Future Me, who was very grateful to Past Me!