Stephen Castro-Starkey

My friend Mike said, “There is something wrong when the scariest thing about Halloween is the November election.”

Today I learned about “learning debt” in which code reviews cause negative feedback cycles discouraging people from taking the time to deeply learn a code base. This is due to biases around how people reading your code only seem to value the code that you wrote instead of the effort you put into learning what was necessary to make that code change effectively.

If only there was a method that flipped that narrative on its head. Some way to get code reviews while also encouraging and amplifying learning!

I continue to wonder when people will be mad enough to organize themselves around repealing the second amendment? I have never liked the idea of anybody but our military having such destructive weapons.

The fun part about tech debt: the cost cannot be quantified until it comes time to pay it. And the longer you wait, the more uncertain it becomes.

Don't write the devil a blank check.

while mowing the lawn
played tag with a grasshopper
could we be friends now?

Today has sucked so much. Power has gone out 3 times in the last 24 hours. Though I am grateful the outages haven't lasted very long.

But it has lit a fire under me to get whole house battery backup going!

Not having power has an impact -- I can't sleep without my CPAP. And we can't have the house get too hot, especially if the car isn't here to use the air conditioning.

Do NOT trust Twitter. Here is a good note about why: https://journa.host/@lolgop/112909214344514852

Lawn mowing again. Lots of exercise and bits of meditation made for a lovely experience.

Yesterday I discovered that SQLite isn’t all that reliable at maintaining integrity of FTS5 virtual tables. Following their documentation to create a content backed virtual table with the recommended triggers lead to database corruption after just 5 operations.

More exercise yay! Plus a bit of meditation. Very noisy mind tho!

Happy to be continuing to lose weight on the new medication. I can’t wait until my blood pressure starts to show the difference.

Surprising how little I’ve been reporting on my coding adventures. Coffee Time is making good progress! Have been working on little things after getting feedback from conversations. Also started thinking about wiki!

My new inquiry: how much default mode network activity is too much? And: would answering this question and somehow training my brain to have the “right balance” mean enlightenment?

It is comfortable to continue in the rat race. I don’t like how comfortable I am.

This update from Scott Santens is worth quoting:

When folks argue that a Universal Basic Income would deter working, think about those million-dollar CEOs. If a modest $15k is enough to make one quit working, wouldn’t multi-million dollar packages make CEOs practically comatose? Yet, here they are, still CEOing. Weird isn't it?

Yes. Quite.