In the physical world, you can randomize your vegetables by joining a Community-Supported Agriculture farm, which will deliver a box of produce to you every week.

feliicityrampant:

imagine if you were hanging out with your pals and you blurted out some shit like “it’s fucking dumb how you can’t buy just one shoe at a time,” and one of your friends was like “ha ha hang on” and they wrote that down on a piece of paper and passed it to a stranger on the street and that stranger passed it to another and then suddenly every single person in the entire city of topeka, kansas had read your stupid thought and the newspaper was like ‘LOCAL IDIOT WANTS TO BUY JUST ONE SHOE’ and every once in a while some asshole will just come up to you on the street and hand you a single shoe and be like “is this you? is this your fucking brand???? i hate your fucking guts. you disgust me.”

thats what it’s like to have a popular post on tumblr.com

(via zoobus)

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

Reblog with your most controversial coding opinion.

Basically all discussions of software design and methodology make a fundamental mistake by treating a piece of software as “a black box that implements some desired behaviors,” noting that the list of behaviors never uniquely pins down the design of the black box, and then trying to fill the gap with generic principles of “good design” and “good practices” that are supposed to apply generically across all black boxes.

IMO it should be considered actively desirable for your internal representations to match the reality they are trying to model, even when nothing outside of your code will be able to tell (…for now).  It enables you to respond quickly and gracefully to future demands (because these demands come from the real world and inherit structure from it), it makes failures more legible to the user (because the component that failed will look like a part of their existing mental model of the situation), and it will make the code easier to pick up and to maintain because external domain knowledge will automatically double as implementation knowledge (”where is $THING in the code? oh, there it is” vs. “where is $THING in the code? well, actually it’s distributed over these five things plus half of this other one”).

Any decent list of good practices ends up implicitly encouraging this, but in an awkward and over-generalized way, where “imagine you had to change something that can vary independently in the real world, wouldn’t it be nice if that was really easy” motivates conclusions like “everything should always be done in one place by a tiny encapsulated unit with only that job that knows nothing about anything else” instead of “the code should decouple things that are decoupled in reality.”

If you want something more down-to-earth: pipenv is pointless.  It’s basically a version of pip freeze with an extremely slow and useless (see fn2 here) reproducibility feature, combined with a strictly worse version of virtualenvwrapper.

We typically associate procrastination with laziness or avoidance behavior, but it can just as easily spring up in people (or computers, or vampires) who are trying earnestly and enthusiastically to get things done as quickly as possible.

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

broke: parasocial relationships with non-existent deity who wants to torture you forever
woke: parasocial relationships with organizations using social justice language to get you to buy dumb crap you don’t really want
bespoke: parasocial relationship with the crows outside your window, who want neither your soul not your money but merely the freedom to devour your garbage

If you’re a baby, putting every object in the house into your mouth is like studiously pulling all the handles at the casino.

an AI risk effortpost

… because we surely don’t have enough of those yet.

Keep reading

Who needs celebrity feuds when you can have the drama, controversy, and debate that surrounds toothpaste ingredients instead?