So, the year I'm recovering from chronic fatigue probably isn't the ideal year to try #NaNoRenO. But then, I did just build @VisualInk... #VisualNovels
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Mastodon: the social media where everyone has a NAS
Or opinions on NAS
@[email protected] @[email protected] Or has mastodon running on a NAS...
@wohali @_elena @tommi @mavnn also, I suspect dealing remotely with someone who doesn't speak Italian too well may "attract" extra fees. He may want to take a short term rental (generally more expensive, but lower upfront costs) and then search for longer term rental while in already in Italy, ideally accompanied by someone local. But hopefully the Fediverse has some leads 🤞
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I think one of the hardest things to adjust to coming from the UK, is that bureaucracy in the UK may be ridiculous but in general you're told everything that needs to happen up front. In ITA you tend to gets things sprung on you as you go along, and frequently no one person in the process knows the details of the whole process.
Coming from the UK, this is extremely difficult to tell apart from people being dishonest and trying to take advantage, and unfortunately its just as true dealing with the authorities as it is dealing with businesses. Translation issues amplify this enormously, so finding at least one trusted person locally really is a priority.
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@mavnn You could be more familiar with Punisher than I am but I thought that Punisher, like Grimdark Batman, was presented in moral terms even if those terms are just that the ends justify the means. Golgo 13 et al are explicitly not portrayed as being motivated by anything redeeming or useful. They're psychos and the pleasure lies purely in the writers constructing these horrific houses of sand that the characters turn up and kick over. @SJohnRoss
@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yeah. I think there we're getting into the fact that Western comics tend to pass between authors while manga are often very much single author driven. I've seen Punisher arcs where he's presented with a straight up heroic character (which... doesn't really ring true to me, honestly) and one's where he is all about the revenge and really the only redeeming quality he has is that the people he wants revenge on are not very nice™. Manga tend to be more consistent on character motivation from what I've seen.
Still poking at the edge of whether I've understood you (I'm actually pretty interested in what we can learn from the different ways that other cultures approach storytelling, hence the digging), would somebody like the original (book) James Bond fit the bill? Obviously a nasty piece of work in many ways, choosing to keep the world a safer place for everybody else as a line of work bit with little evidence that I remember that he does for any particular moral reason.
Writing bios is the weirdest thing. I just had to write one for a local authority in the UK who want to know why I might be qualified to teach secondary school level computer science to somebody, and to my ears it both sounds weirdly boastful while at the same time I know that it probably doesn't include what some of the officials are looking for/expecting.
"Why does it matter that he's taught hundreds of people over 15+ years? He didn't even finish his degree, and he has no initials after his name at all!"
Also: just to be very clear, I know that many people working in education are not about the pieces of paper and the bureaucracy. But I've also worked in local councils, and I can tell you straight up that a small subset of the back office are absolutely obsessed with having the correct string of letters in the expected places and making sure that people are in the "right" box in the system.
@mavnn @SJohnRoss Deadpool is a loveable scamp. Wick is a blank sheet. The Punisher? I don't know... He's often framed in similar terms to Miller's Grimdark Batman in that he's an obsessive and a joyless fanatic.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I must admit that I loath Deadpool who doesn't really come across as loveable to me at all, so I may not be the best judge there. And you don't get much blanker than Wick.
But I suppose I'm not really seeing the line between people like Punisher and Lone Wolf, so I may have missed part of the essence of what you're saying.
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Writing bios is the weirdest thing. I just had to write one for a local authority in the UK who want to know why I might be qualified to teach secondary school level computer science to somebody, and to my ears it both sounds weirdly boastful while at the same time I know that it probably doesn't include what some of the officials are looking for/expecting.
"Why does it matter that he's taught hundreds of people over 15+ years? He didn't even finish his degree, and he has no initials after his name at all!"
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@Taskerland There are oddities like the very long Parker series of novels, by Donald Westlake writing under a pseudonym ("Richard Stark"), where the protagonist is morally awful, his world has moral complexity (it's not the case that the whole system is rotten), and the books are kind of built around a viewpoint where ethics is everything. Just a kind of utter amorality (there isn't even an explicit rejection of morality; it's just ignored) rather than immorality or grimdark faux-morality, etc.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Isn't this also basically the Punisher, Deadpool, etc? Obviously not nice people, sometimes in fairly upbeat settings (if not always upbeat stories) but who only interact with enemies who are so obivously worse than them that they appear... not quite as morally bankrupt. See also things like John Wick, although that has the whole glanced at initially redemption overtones that are almost part of the character if you squint hard enough.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yes. That is hard. Although mentioning remote work has reminded me of somebody else. @[email protected] , do you happen to know anybody in Padua who can recommend reputable estate agents? I know it's not right in your stomping grounds but I don't have many contacts "up North"
@_elena @tommi @mavnn tyvm! he has tried immobiliare and idealista and directly emailing agencies but nothing's worked out so far.
he was about to close on a place a few weeks ago for 900€, then a 500€ deposit, then then they wanted to charge an extra month of rent in fees, and an agency fee, and more fees on top of that and he couldn't afford it 😢
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] A lot of the best deals here go by word of mouth, so if he is moving there for a job or similar it may also be worth asking any local contacts. It's far more acceptable here to both ask for and recieve help with this type of thing from 'professional' contacts than it can be in the some parts of the UK.
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I'm a broken record on this one, but the "Modular Monolith" idea comes with its own set of new complexity and it's not right to say that it's any kind of silver bullet.
Is it maybe the best idea knowing what we know right now after a decade and change of micro-services? Maybe, but don't be fooled into thinking it's just going to be easy.
@[email protected] It's almost as if software architecture needs to try and solve real, specific, problems rather than being chosen according to fashion. Who would have thought?
“Somebody got promoted for this”, boss battle edition.
@[email protected] "I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million security researches all face palmed at once..."
@Taskerland I will add, though, that the IT people aren't the only ones.
Gearheads.
And I don't mean gamers who like mecha. I mean the people who can't comprehend how anyone goes through life without disassembling a carburetor. They're the redneck IT crowd.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I needed to speak to a plumber about irrigation for a large garden a few years ago, and yeah. Whole new world of plumbing knowledge and terminology I didn't understand layered on top of horticultural terminology I didn't understand.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I have been promoted repeatedly in my career for being mediocre at translating between my fellow IT professionals and ... well, anyone else.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I cringed this morning when I saw somebody saying 'oh, I'd love to set up my own blog but I'm not sure how' because I'm sure that at least 15 helpful IT professionals have now convinced them it is impossible.
(Although also, hats off to people like @[email protected] who are actually doing the hard work of writing guides that make sense to the rest of the population)
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@Taskerland I am perpetually amused that IT people really, sincerely have no idea that they speak Martian.
@[email protected] @[email protected] I have been promoted repeatedly in my career for being mediocre at translating between my fellow IT professionals and ... well, anyone else.
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If you replace a junior with #LLM and make the senior review output, the reviewer is now scanning for rare but catastrophic errors scattered across a much larger output surface due to LLM "productivity."
That's a cognitively brutal task.
Humans are terrible at sustained vigilance for rare events in high-volume streams. Aviation, nuclear, radiology all have extensive literature on exactly this failure mode.
I propose any productivity gains will be consumed by false negative review failures.
Yeap. I've been thinking about this as well. Maybe especially because of my #adhd (which - let's face it - is not rare in the industry) I'm keenly aware that scanning walls of existing code for bugs and existing test suites for holes is way, way harder and more error prone than writing the same code/test cases yourself. Which is why we ask devs to produce small, scoped, change requests and try and spread the review load.
@[email protected] @[email protected] ...and have the scars and the tears to prove it
Fedi, a good friend needs to find a place to live in Padua (Padova), Italy. He has citizenship, but doesn't speak the language well. He's not wealthy but he's able to afford a small place. He's currently in the UK.
Can anyone help me find him a letting agent or any other source where he can view and apply to rent an apartment? He's tried calling a couple of places to no avail.
@[email protected] Although she's not based in Italy right now, @[email protected] might know some groups it would be good to pass this on to?
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And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.
@[email protected] Fun fact: my mother has expert card shuffling skills because as the daughter of a merchant navy captain she was one of the only people the sailors trusted to deal for money games in or out of port (she would have been around 10 at the time and didn't normally travel with the ship). The captain, of course, couldn't be involved but the crew preferred having relatives of the captain run the game than the local casino.