smol bean language machine

to be clear the problem is real, I just happened to possess a niche combination of skills that one particular company needed immediately in my location, on a listing for which I among the first applicants & available to interview when the manager happened to be flying into town for a day. Lucky!

it's sort of surreal reading articles about how AI and ATS and LinkedIn are making job hunting impossible having just recently landed a job from an LinkedIn posting with my AI-tuned (but not AI-written, I have standards) resume.

there were a few weeks where things were genuinely hopeful and fun, before the campaign stalled/reached its ceiling/pick your narrative, doesn't matter. Point is, even if it ultimately and inevitably became a slog , the was 100x better than the approaching freight train Biden's would have been.

I increasingly think that for the people who battle Will in his replies over the economy it's actually true that they're doing worse because of their personal defects as human beings, and deservedly so.

social media is bad for all of our brains, but there are certain issues that tend to capture people who are susceptible to this way of thinking in a way that may not be intuitively obvious if you haven't seen it.

Willett isn't in the the same universe of awfulness as JK Rowling, but there's a similar social dynamic at play between them being radicalized into their respective and, importantly, totalizing anti-yimby/anti-trans worldviews, around the same time, on the same social media site.

(Willett, that is. BGJ is in a whole other ballpark of awful)

she's like a dog who found a bone and is never, ever gonna let it go

this is where I'm at myself, my lifestyle and family and hobbies don't permit lots of free time for "serious" reading so mostly genre sci-fi or nothing. (also dog man comics with the four year old)

tbh those folks exist(ed) on twitter and everywhere, but the ratio of normal person vs neurotic scold here seems way worse than most places

I think it's sad that "Temu version of x" has replaced "dollar store version of x" when dollar stores still exist and suck.

misusing the meme but it really do be like

the four year old is currently narrating his car play to the tune of Sleater-Kinney's Oh! so I'll be accepting my parent of the decade award thank you

in your specific case it's likely because nobody wants to spend time around you

(necessary caveat, given the kind people who inhabit this site, I intended that to be read ruefully and not pedantically explaining something you already know)

it is very funny that an interviewer would choose to put those words in David Simon's mouth, of all people

i'm sure raw denim is cool but the hobbyist pitch is so funny: these jeans cost $500, they'll feel like shit until you wear them daily for a year but you can only wash them every 6 months. Also doing so might ruin them permanently and you'd better guess the size right because they'll shrink

local news is nearly always trash on anything related to bikes, transit, or housing

i mean, the fact that women disproportionately bear the costs does not mean they go away if the arrangement is more equitable!

like, the problem with "just raise taxes on high earners" is that a typical household with two kids is effectively poorer than an otherwise demographically similar one earning 75% as much without kids!

The whole account is deranged, turns out

i took this evocative as fuck picture this morning, i call it Showdown at Dawn

(my own bike is a Class II pedelec which I've modded to reach class III speeds, but that requires a lot of effort. In practice it raises my typical cruising speed to about 18mph, up from 14 unmodded.)

it's also context-dependent. A class-3 RadBike going 25 on the suburban road I often commute on is basically fine. On a busy downtown street, no way.

impossible to overstate how useful it is to have a relative willing to babysit every other week, or a neighbor you feel comfortable asking to watch the kids for an hour. Stuff that's really hard to build policy around.

i don't think it's possible to appreciate how much unstructured free time you used to have until young children suck it all away like a vacuum sealer. It's a good thing my kids coincidentally happen to be the best people on the planet, even when I want to throw them into a river.

like it's far from "white collar knowledge workers are an oppressed class" territory but it's legitimately stressful!

so either parents of young kids are being systematically excluded, or they're wrecking their home lives, or they're doing some version of what I do, a don't-ask-don't-tell arrangement where I might check email and Teams at 8 but don't actually start work until 9-ish.

something that snuck up on me hunting for jobs last year is that 8-5 with an unpaid lunch is now pretty typical, including for my current employer. But even with my job being mostly remote that's just not fucking possible with two young kids in daycare and one with some medical complexities.