I was at a small roleplaying convention last week. It was great to meet the others again after about a year and game with them. Unfortunately someone was rather generous with their flu viruses and I got my personal helping. So I’m on sick leave for the second say but luckily, according to the test it’s just a flu and not the big bad C. On Monday I clobbered together a small template for my sister to build fake computer screens as props for TV shows… All in all a mixed bag of some good stuff and some annoying things…

The “gut” might not be an organ but I can’t see a microbe letting go of some tasty piece of food just because it happens to pass from the small incestine to the colon… (wrong terms can safely be attributed to my translation tool)…

Elon Musk supports eliminating rights for people who aren’t Elon Musk… That’s about it, I think…

Several times, sometimes to find out when an incompatibility was introduced in an upstream dependency to find the maximum compatible version, but usually to find the commit that introduced a strange bug.

The process is always the same… Write a unit test, start bisect, check test select next bisect step, repeat. If your last-known-good and first-known-bad are correct, it always worked for me.

I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page

I seldom use profilers because I seldom need to. It’s only usefull to run a profiler if your programm has a well defined perfomance issue (like “The request should have an average responsetime of X ms but has one of Y ms” or "90% of the requests should have a response after X ms but only Y% actually do).

On the other hand I use a debugger all the time. I rarely start any programm I work on without a debugger attached. Even if I’m just running a smoke test, if this fails I want to be able to dig right into the issue without having to restart the programm in debug mode. The only situation, where i routinely run code without a debugger is the red-green-refactor cycle with running unit tests because I’ll need to re run these multiple times with a debugger anyway if there are unexpected reds…

What enables me? Well there’s this prominent bug-shaped icon in my IDE right besides the “play button”, and there’s Dev-Tools in Chrome that comes with the debugger for JS…

Running your code without a debugger is only usefull if you want to actually use it or if you’re so sure that there aren’t any issues that you might as well skip running the code altogether…

Let’s pick 2 of my current characters…

First there is Winter, a Tabaxi Warlock in a Strixhaven campaign, who’s full name roughly translates to ‘Starry Ice Night’ (‘Sternenklare Eisnacht’ in German). It’s the only character in the party that doesn’t have a Strixhaven background and originally from a small mountain village on his home plane. Since it’s still first year, he’s still processing the whole school stuff, all these people and that strange idea of learning from books. Even back on his home plane he preferred solitude over the ‘crowded’ village and spent his time hunting and forraging through the mountain forrest. One day he noticed a man fighting a unicorn. Since you just don’t fight unicorns he shot the man in the back without much hesitation, landing a brilliant shot, triggering a magic surge that knocked Winter unconcious. When he recovered he found himself eye to eye with a very angry unicorn who explained that they hadn’t been fighting but were in the process of binding the man to unicorn as its champion and that right now, unicorn was one desperately needed champion short. Seeing that Winter could potentially grow into that role, unicorn persuaded winter to step in, made him a warlock (aka champion) and sent him of to a school he never heared of on a plane he didn’t knew it even existed. So right now Winter is a little homesick, very lost and with way to much to process in a group of people who worked and planned all their life on getting into that very school. He’s trying very hard to do the right thing and safe everyone from everything. Besides him beeing in way over his head one of the most fun things is flavoring all his magic with gold, rainbows and sparkles.

Then there’s Ethan Hayle who’s a young Ventrue in a Vampire V5 campaign. When he was still human, he worked as a crime scene cleaner, making crime scenes habitable again after the police was through with them. He was aporached by someone offering him a very well paid gig cleaning a crime scene before the police arrived. Ethan couldn’t resist the temptation and took that job. This led him to be a crime scene cleaner by day job and by night job as well. His new employer turned out to be the mafia who had to replace their former clean up guy after an accident. While the pay was very good this job didn’t sit too well with Ethan’s conciousness and after he found out that he knew one of the victims, he decided to collect as much evidence and turn that in to the police. As drama needs it, he handed the copy to a crooked cop who informed the mafia, iniciating a manhunt that Ethan only survived because of his inside knowledge and because he had help from a stranger. A few months after they went dark and decided to continue to try to expose the bad guys, Ethan learned that the stranger was a vampire and his sire wanted to turn Ethan into a vampire too. Seeing the possibility to kind of survive that way, he agreed. While Ethan doesn’t really have a Ventrue mindset, his sire decided to turn him into one anyway because he could use the skillset of a crime scene cleaner and all the inside knowledge about the mafia, which is controlled by a Brujah who he has a very long standing feud with.

Additional fun twist in this campaign, my SO has a character in the capaign as well, while being DM for Strixhaven and without us talking about this made a character who’s the white sheep runaway kid from a mafia family (guess which) and we both have this enemy as a flaw. We just had a run in with two ghouls who were sent by that family or rather the controlling vampire and since both characters aren’t very trusting and don’t know each others past, they both think, it’s about them. While they both might be right, roleplaying this has been a lot of fun in the last session.

German it magazine iX has an interview with the mods of r/de. I don’t know if this was mentioned here before…

Interview (German)

Short summary: the mods of the large German communities see a huge issue with reddit not recognizing content creators and mods work and there seems to be growing support for an ongoing blackout or so they say.

That’s an important question to ask. For me (and I want to make very clear that this is exclusively how I handle things for myself) there is a huge difference between things I use (or what I call passive association) and things I work on or contribute to (or what I call active association).

While im ok-ish with using their software if they don’t really profit from my usage, I wont be actively helping them. Given the state of the world and western society, I can’t really escape using products that are unethical and as a software developer working for a company I can’t really decide who gets to use my paid work and since I very much like having a bed and a roof and food and even some comfort in that, I’d rather stick to my job, but I can make a choice on who I support with my free time.

Hi, I’m Nicktar, end-40s software architect and creator of unfinished projects. I love to find out how stuff works and if I can make it better or different or repair it but once I figured out how to do that and and know that I could do this, I lose interest and it becomes work… So my place is filled with (partially) working prototypes like cat toys, hydroponic flowerpots, broken tablets halfway turned into interactive picture frames, disassembled cordless screwdrives that need a new battery…

Also climate activist, table top roleplayer and currently quite busy playing around with Stable Diffusion

I’d tag it as “wearing a suit, flowers in background” or “wearing a suit in front of flowers”. Basically what you’re doing with the description is saying “I’m going to show you an image of this_awesome_person, please ignore that they’re wearing a suit, flowers in background”. If you also describe that it’s a man, you ask SD to ignore the fact for the training.

P.S.: Please ignore the different accounts, I got confused, made two, this one’s the main one…

Since it doesn’t seemed to be mentioned by anyone (or I missed it), I’m going to say Robo-Rally… Programming your robot through a racetrack on a moving factory floor using drawn command cards, bumping into others, knocking the off course and ending in a totally wrong spot yourself because you miscalculated a step…