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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • A full stack developer is either a back end developer that has no business writing front end code but does it anyway, or they’re a front end developer that has no business writing back end code but does it anyway.

    Or they’re perfectly capable of doing both because they’re at a startup that’s years away from running at scale or having to worry about performance and security.


  • Last week, a vendor sold an item for $10. With tax, that item costs $12. Let’s pretend a 50% markup (which is reasonable for retail but insanely high for groceries):

    • they made $5 profit
    • they recouped $5 for their costs
    • they collected $2 of tax for the government

    Now the government has a GST holiday and there’s no tax. I went to the store and bought the item and it still cost me $12.

    • they made $7 profit
    • they recouped their usual $5 for their costs
    • they collected $0 of tax for the government

    The main thing is that their costs for that item didn’t increase and they’re still selling it at its original ”final” price (because they added the tax amount to the sticker price). That tax savings went straight into profits. It was intended for the consumer to save money but the consumer is spending the same amount and the government isn’t getting anything. That money went somewhere.

    Edit: that assumes that the claim made in the post is true. It’s definitely not going to be true across the board, but doubtless there’s some fuckery afoot in some stores.




  • Pretty much. It’s a tired analogy, but the “unawakened” people in The Matrix come to mind. They’re not helping the cause, but it’s not right to declare that they’re evil or deserve hate like OP was suggesting.

    They don’t know any better but that doesn’t mean they deserve ire. They’re reasonably reacting based on the information they have.









  • Yup. I was using self checkout once and it flagged me when I was trying to pay but didn’t say why. The supervisor was on top of it and unlocked the terminal and it made him watch a 5 second video of “suspicious activity”, which was me moving my reusable bag to the other side at a low angle. Some AI they use saw that as trying to sneak an unscanned product past the scanner.

    I thought it was terribly clever but he just rolled his eyes and apologized for the inconvenience. As if an underpaid Walmart employee is going to waste their time arguing with a shoplifter.





  • I bought Terraria when I was really into Minecraft. Didn’t like it at first because the only Minecraft thing is “pick up blocks and crafting”, but once I gave it a fair shake I absolutely loved it.

    Fuck, now I have the game music stuck in my head from thinking about the game!



  • I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.

    The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.

    Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.