Follow Scrum, Lean / Kanban, or eXtreme Programming to the letter, and let your team focus on the product.

This.

But invest in learning how to do it right. Hire agile coaches to help and listen to them. “Agile theater” helps no one and only breeds hostility to any attempt at improving the process.

🙄

I want to hear the album for which this is the cover art.

How long is this kind of shit going to go on before we start having a serious conversation about making “limit dependencies” a widely-agreed-upon fundamental security practice? Right along with “validate your inputs” and “encrypt sensitive data” and such.

If you’re a software engineer, memorizing an ASCII table (particularly the hex numbers of each character code) is definitely helpful. If for no other reason than so that you can read things that are randomly written in binary without having to consult a table.

Something not really otherwise terribly useful that nonetheless helped me keep my sanity: learn how to convert to base64 in your head. At work, we had really boring 8-hours-a-day training for a couple of weeks. To pass the time, I came up with random strings to base64 encode in my head. “Hat is 48 61 7a. The first six bits are 010010 which in base64 is an S. The next six bits would be 000110 which in base64 is G.” Etc. I’d write down the base64 strings character by character as I derived them and then check my results for errors when I got back to my desk.

How to convert various units of measurement. (Including between imperial and metric.)

2.54 centimeters in an inch. Degrees Fahrenheit is nine fifths of degrees Celsius plus 32. Stuff like that.

deleted by creator

I pronounce it “AUR” of course.

It’s wild to meet Any Austin fans in the wild. I was watching his stuff and supporting him on Patreon when he was really obscure. Now that he’s really popular, it’s a whole different thing.

Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.

I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.

Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.

Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.

• I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
• Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
• I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
• There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
• I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.

Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:

TTRPG:

• Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.

Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:

• Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
• Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
• gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.

Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:

• OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
• Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
• Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
• Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
• Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
• Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
• Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.

Tech/hacking:

• Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
• Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
• James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.

Satanism:

• The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
• Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.

Other creepy stuff:

• Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
• Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
• Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
• blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
• Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.

Vidja gaming content:

• Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
• Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.

I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.

Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.

Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.

But I don’t know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I’d try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.

“My graphics programs.” Printmaster in particular. That was a long time ago and now she’s more open to Linux. We’ll see what happens next time Windows does some bullshit.

Based.

Star Trek: Voyager. I was raised on that shit. Not objectively the “best” Star Trek. (Far from the worst, though.) But it’s the one that’s most nostalgic and, indeed, “cozy” for me.

Not exactly the densest material out there, but pennies are cheap and easily procured. May not be quite what you’re looking for for your use case. (You asked about “cost/weight ratio” and “weight to space” which makes it sound like you’re looking to add a lot of weight.)

I’ve been known to make a fully-enclosed cylindrical cavity and set my slicer to pause at exactly the right layer to where I can drop a few stacks of pennies into the print before upper layers seal the cavity closed.

God that article is depressing. Where I work, it’s bad but not as bad as any of those stories.

You sound very upset

I am.

about a tool

No, about a massive scam.

I skimmed it to find the parts where it talked about why LLMs aren’t useless. Basically the only place it talks about why they aren’t useless is the section “…, and sophists are useful”:

If I use a LLM to help me find a certain page in a document, or sanity check this post while writing it, I don’t care “why” the LLM did it. I just care that it found that page or caught obvious mistakes in my writing faster than I could have.

So, I’m supposed to wade through the BS and hallucinations to find these nuggets of helpful feedback rather than just proofreading it myself? That’s a pretty weak use case.

I don’t think I need to list the large number of tasks where LLMs can save humans time, if used well.

So he’s basically admitting he can’t come up with any actually good uses. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

By all means, use LLMs where they are useful tools: tasks where you can verify the output, where speed matters more than perfection, where the stakes of being wrong are low.

There’s no universe where such a use case exists in a way that isn’t actively harmful or at least “brain rot”-y to anyone consuming the content created by the LLM user. This is why AI slop exists.

In short, “yes it does.”