BougieBirdie

A hammer is beginner friendly, but learning to use a hammer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to build a house with it.

Well, I’m not a psychologist, so I suppose my interpretation might not be correct - the irony mounts.

But from the graphs you shared, it looks to me like the only people who underestimated themselves were the top performers. And from what I know firsthand with imposter syndrome, a competent person underestimates themselves.

I used hyperbole for effect, so I don’t think that if you believe you have zero competence in something because you actually have zero competence means that you’re secretly good at something. If you know nothing about plumbing, don’t try to install a toilet.

But if you’re working in the software factory then you don’t actually have zero competence, you probably have formal education and some experience. Having that feeling that you might not be good enough is a sign that you’re on the right track.

I felt like that early in my career. I used to think that being a rockstar developer was a good thing, and I’d be happy to describe myself as one.

The thing is, a lot of rockstars are really just churning out heaps of unmaintainable code. They think they have a high degree of proficiency, they’re confident in their competence, but there’s a disconnect between what they think and what they produce.

It can be a sign of personal improvement to question yourself when you think you’re doing great. We owe it to ourselves to ask ourselves critically if we can be doing better. Because if we don’t, and we just assume we’re awesome, then we’ll happily churn out sub-awesome cruft.

The insidious thing is that self-criticism leads to self-doubt, and imposter syndrome can be quite paralyzing. But if you learn to control your criticism instead of allowing your criticism to control you, you can achieve higher heights than rockstardom.

Based on what I know of Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems you’re at your most competent when you feel like you’re at your least.

So if you’re feeling badly because you feel like you don’t know enough to do your job, take some time to remind yourself that other people who appear to be confident have no idea what they’re doing.

It’s fake-it-till-you-make-it all the way down.

“We can’t force our people to work, so let’s call on someone who can!”

What an outrageous lie. Imagine if students had healthcare

Not that I doubt the locals or anything - and like, fuck Microsoft - but what kind of industrial waste would a data center have?

From the article, it sounds like the facility is still under construction, so I imagine there might be construction waste, but that’s not really my field and I don’t know what that looks like. Runoff cement?

Just so you have a heads up:

If you use yt-dlp like a regular user, you shouldn’t have a problem. If you use it to download like a thousand videos at once then YouTube may block you out or rate limit you or something.

If that happens, or that’s your use case, then you may need to use a VPN

The man with the gun shoots the gun.

The man without a gun finds a gun.

This decision sucks.

As a general rule, I don’t like to ask for help when I’m out shopping. More of a “get your shit and get out” shopper. No fancy cheese for me, I guess.

There’s a ton of people this affects too. Like, what about refugees who aren’t confident speaking English? People with anxiety disorders? The non-verbal and other disabled people?

And never mind the people who can’t ask for help, what about the trend to keep stores understaffed on a skeleton crew? How can you ask an employee to unlock the frickin’ cheese if there’s no employees to find?

I really hate this trend of treating customers like criminals. I just want to eat - so selfish of me, but I’m afraid I’ve gotten used to it.

The teacher believes he is being discriminated against because the state won’t allow him to discriminate against society’s most vulnerable members, who happen to be in his care.

You can’t make this stuff up.

This is a mutation of an anti-piracy campaign. The text usually reads “You wouldn’t steal a car” an then asks why you would download a movie.

I would totally download a car though.

I think the best format would be a side-scrolling beat 'em up like Double Dragon. Jack and Wang tag teaming their way through back alley Chinatown, enemies starting out as thugs but getting more supernatural as they descend into Lo Pan’s nightmare.

Beat 'em ups also lend themselves to retro stlyed games, and Big Trouble in Little China is already oozing 80’s neon charm that I think they’d go very well together.

Jack Burton is player two, I will fight people on this.

I have this argument with my wife a lot. She says that because the OJ is natural sugar it’s okay.

But the high-fructose corn syrup used in a cola is also natural sugar in the sense that it was grown on a farm. There even happens to be less of it in your average soda than in juice.

And I’m not really saying that you should drink soda instead of juice because it’s healthier, but somehow fruit juice is one of those things people think is good for them.

I’m not sure one has much to do with the other. I completely agree that the Boston bombing investigation was a witch hunt, no argument here. But witch hunts target individuals, and individuals are entitled to a certain degree of privacy which one would hope would protect them from an uninformed mob.

But airing your employers’ dirty laundry is whistle-blowing. It should be protected, especially if the industry secret is anti-consumer, dangerous, or illegal. And importantly, a corporation isn’t an individual, so they shouldn’t benefit from protections for individuals.

It’s tempting to think that we don’t see the Name and Shame posts actually naming and shaming because of Reddit’s interests with advertisers. But I think it’s also just as likely that users don’t want to be identified leaking secrets - likely due to the litigious nature of their employers.

I used to have really bad chicken-scratch printing and I wanted to improve.

The exercise that really stuck out for me was to find a font I liked in a book on calligraphy and started practicing the alphabet.

Before I started practicing, I didn’t pay much attention to how I was forming a letter, I’d just draw it - and it would look messy. Once you start looking at each letter as a discrete number of strokes you start paying attention to the small parts and the whole looks much better.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a guide with arrows showing which way to draw each stroke. Super helpful. Note that this font uses a fountain pen, so it’ll look different with a standard ballpoint:

If you don’t know what specific shows you want to watch, you could try going to the streaming services’ website. Hidden away at the bottom of the page will probably be an About or FAQ that might let you take a peek at some titles.

I think by design the only way to see the full catalogue is to subscribe. Lots of them have free trials, but it’s still a pretty lame way to do business.

I just shared this with my wife because she’s an artist and hates AI as much as I do.

Apparently she made an account last night.

Bob Loblaw lobbed law bomb: logged on Bob’s law blog

“Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.

Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.

If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.

Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.