At least we also have LLMs to generate our status updates during outages of our SaaS products while groping around in the dark.
Readit Newsschlowmo commented on Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero mindflash.org/coding/ai/a... · Posted by u/AntwaneB
schlowmo commented on Is the Ballmer Peak real? (2011) skeptics.stackexchange.co... · Posted by u/tosh
I know it's mainly a joke but...
If I stop working at my desk to go out for some drinks and return to my desk afterwards, this hopefully also means that I stopped thinking about desk-problems for a while.
I found solutions to problems which we're blocking me when I left my desk countless times on my way back.
So there might be some kind of Ballmer Peak which isn't directly caused by alcohol consumption, but by a break from thinking about a problem.
And it's kind of obvious that I stop caring if I'm past "some drinks" and just go straight to bed. So there's definitely some upper BAC threshold to the peak ;).
schlowmo commented on Paperless-ngx – Open source document management system nerdyarticles.com/a-clutt... · Posted by u/thunderbong
It's perfectly legal (and common) for a decade now to scan documents and destroy the paper original as long as you follow some guidelines. Keyword is "ersetzendes Scannen".
And yes, they care about those rules and that you provide "originals" according to that definition - in particular that you didn't modify digital documents in any way. You can (and should) comply with that and there are service providers to help if you are to small to set that up yourself.
Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules).
I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.
schlowmo commented on Paperless-ngx – Open source document management system nerdyarticles.com/a-clutt... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. That makes for folders upon folders of documents and it's actually worse than back in the 20th century because generating and mailing documents has become way easier and cheaper, so things that would have been a one-page typewritten letter back then now are five ten-page ones full of automatically generated crap. One lengthy illness in the family alone filled hundreds of pages and it can be very hard to know what can be thrown away at which point.
> Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real.
I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse.
Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium:
If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't.
If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't.
So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.
schlowmo commented on Weird things you can buy online hillelwayne.com/post/weir... · Posted by u/marvinborner
I'm enjoying the bed bugs store faq: https://www.cheapbedbugs.com/faq
>How do I keep the bed bugs alive?
>Bed bugs eat blood and blood only. They aren’t picky to a particular animal. At Cheapbedbugs.com, we use a custom made blood feeding machine.
>How do you feed bed bugs?
>Unfortunately this is one of the things I cannot share.
TIL bedbug sniffing dogs are a thing. I would never dare to train one, spilling the training material at the wrong place would be a very unpleasant experience.
After reading just the bedbug headline I couldn't imagine any non-shady use of living bedbugs besides science. I know some people which worked for or owned hostels - it's kind of a don't ask don't tell arrangement. This is why I would always take reasons which hostels give why you have to switch a room (pipe burst, issue with the electricity that needs immediate fixing...) with a grain of salt. You probably won't hear the word bedbug until you're the one reporting them to the hostel.
schlowmo commented on How (not) to apply for a software job benhoyt.com/writings/how-... · Posted by u/nalgeon
> Don’t use flowery prose.
I find this advice kind of ironic. The most people I know don't use flowery prose in their cover letters because they consider themselves some kind of overachieving artists, but because it appears to be expected. Writing cover letters is bullshitting time, although this is probably country/culture dependent. Fortunately I didn't have to write an applciation for a long time, but reading my own old applications gives me the chills, even though I got invited to an interview almost every single time.
If you don't want flowery prose, you have to set the expectation when writing the job posting. If your job posting appears to be written by your PR department you get cover letters written by your applicants personal PR departments. Or in other words: bullshit me in the job description and I will bullshit you in my cover letter.
This behavior is reinforced if you don't make it clear who will gonna read my application first. If I get the impression that my application will land on a desk of a hiring manager who doesn't know much about the job I might turn the BS to 11. If you communicate clearly that the person reading the application first knows what you are really looking for, I'll dial down.
schlowmo commented on Ways to capture changes in Postgres blog.sequin.io/all-the-wa... · Posted by u/chuckhend
If you go the "audit table" path, just use "pgaudit" , it's a battle-tested extension, that is even available on RDS if you use AWS
https://github.com/pgaudit/pgaudit/blob/master/README.md
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Appen...
There is also the temporal_tables extension [0], which was already discussed in HN. [1]
[0] https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26748096
schlowmo commented on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it basta.substack.com/p/no-s... · Posted by u/robdimarco
> “The city teams only know how to use Excel, just make it like Excel.”
> “Why can you see the formulas?”
> “You said to make it just like Excel.”
I can't keep up with the espionage story that followed but I had this conversation more than once in my professional career.
The first time I sat as a junior dev on a multi-month project replacing a excel spreadsheet for financial controlling of data centers that only one person who was going to retire understood with a web-based solution.
They were quite proud that they were going to get a "modern" solution.
Then they wanted me to make it like excel. What followed was evaluating every fricking excel JavaScript library out there at this time, going for one and started duct taping all the missing pieces.
They were pleased but the look was off. It wasn't excel. I slapped some styles on it coming quite close.
I was not prepared for what happened during the next presentation: They hated it because they wanted a modern web based solution (their words, not mine) and what they got was a poor excel knockoff running in their Internet Explorers. Tables are so 90s.
I remember the pain so vividly that I regard "just make it like excel" as some kind of forming meme for my career till today.
schlowmo commented on So you want to modify the text of a PDF by hand (2020) gist.github.com/senderle/... · Posted by u/mutant_glofish
PDF is such a weird format. Not so long ago I had to write some Java code for manipulating PDFs: find a string, remove it and place an image at the former string position. I should have known better as I thought "Well, how hard can that be?”
What followed was a deep dive down the rabbit hole, a lot of fiddling with the same tools the author of this gist is using trying to make sense of it all.
The final solution worked better than I thought while at the same time felt incredibly wrong.
I'm very thankful for all the (probably painful) work that went into those open source PDF tools.