That’s gorgeous. How did you cut the grooves / notches? Table saw?

Steam / water doesn’t allow the temperature to get high enough.

I recently picked up a pipe. It has all the rituals and escapism of a cigar, without the hour-long commitment.

That being said, sometimes being”occupied” for an hour is part of the appeal. Each has their place ime.

Adding - triple check / proofread / rephrase the ai output. Assume the words may be used against you. If your manager is close with whomever reads the feedback, they could ask for “evidence” of any claims. You either need strong evidence, or to avoid any concrete claims. More vague more better / more defensible.

When dealing with children, the “oreo cookie” method works well - start with something nice, offer a “suggestion for improvement”, and then finish with something nice as well.

You’ll want to submit the politically correct version through official channels for traceability. After it’s submitted there, you can give a copy over slack. Don’t let anyone make any claims about what you supposedly said over slack dm. Leave a paper trail.

You’ve already been PIPed, so they have reason to look at you. Play nice and check the boxes; I would do the feedback even if the submission is entirely “yeah it was fine” level bs.

All of the above is playing it safe. Offer to provide additional feedback / “discussion” over a voice call as well, and ask what they’re looking for. If they’re building a case against your former manager, you can be honest.

If they just want “general” feedback, or they want it over text (“no time for a call”), or there are multiple people in the room, or the call is being recorded, then fall back to the politically correct version you already submitted.

Your nuclear button is to claim the PIP was retaliation for (something; you can make this up, just make it realistic), but you don’t press that button unless you’re about to be fired. It makes things extremely complicated.

I really hate office politics, but half of being promoted is knowing how to play this stupid game :(

It is not too hard and you can definitely do it! It’s like a puzzle - you will get stuck at times, but if you keep going then you’ll get there.

APK files are just zip files, so you can unzip it to see its contents. From there, a java de-compiler get you a version of the source code. It will have random variable names and no comments, so it will take some digging to find and reverse the api layer.

Or, who knows, you could get lucky and find an openapi spec file and auth.txt. Worse apps have been developed.

I have a whole rant on this topic, but the short version:

It’s dentists.

The gnarliest mountain man, who hunts bears with his bear hands, can be brought to his knees with a toothache. The toothache never sleeps, can’t be fought, and always eventually wins. Even basic dentistry is life saving - even another human with a pair of pliers and some moonshine - but I’d much rather have novocaine.

This is exceptionally well stated. I saw my parents, myself, and every reddit/lemmy/twitter thread I’ve ever read, in your description.

So much online conversation isn’t conversation at all; it’s posturing; saying something completely irrelevant that attempts to paint the “opponent” into an indefensible corner. The best response, then, also doesn’t respond, and does the same - end result being two people just saying stuff at each other.

Go a level deeper, beyond this news about news, and read the moat memo.

The third faction is the open source community.

The memo has an entire timeline section, dedicated to showing the speed at which the open source community absorbed and iterated on the leaked facebook model, LaMMa.

The memo puts a lot of emphasis on how google and co are building new models from scratch, over months, with millions of dollars - and yet open source is building patches, in days, with only a few hundred dollars - and the patches stack, and are easily shareable.

The open source models, through these patches, are getting better faster than google can re-architect and re-train new models from scratch.

The main point of the memo is that google needs to change their strategy, if they want to stay “ahead” (some would argue they’re already behind) of the competition.

Decentralized identity is a field of active research. It’s tough, but very interesting. I’m particularly a fan of what nostr is doing, where accounts are completely separate from relays, and can post anywhere.