Cass // she/her 🏳️‍⚧️ // shieldmaiden, tech artist, bass freak

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That’s been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I’m not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.

    I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that’s not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.




  • Ow, well that hits me right in the childhood hah.

    I think it’s important to note that this kind of parenting not only sucks once the kid reaches adulthood, but can be actively abusive to the kid as a form of control tied to an expectation of ownership. By being the one to meet every one of their child’s needs, the parent can make that support very transactional and conditional in private. I’m thinking of a particular model of parenting common in rural Christian communities in the US, which is echoed in “parent’s rights” rhetoric.

    In that environment, not only is a parent expected to meet every single one of their child’s needs, but a child is also expected to not have needs their parent can’t meet in the moment. If they do, too bad, they don’t and are really just being ungrateful of how hard their parent works to raise them already. Children are isolated from each other in highly car-centric communities where their only way of seeing another kid is by asking to be driven, which allows a parent to decide who their child interacts with. Boys are expected to be especially unemotional, so even things like suidicidality and SA are swept under the rug and the child has so few other people to bring that to other than their parents. Girls get their own flavor of emotional negligence that I can’t speak to but I think few would be shocked at the themes of reproductive control inherent there.

    As an adult this has all sorts of knock-on effects, one of which can be an overinflated sense of how much the outside world will serve them - but the reverse can be true at the same time, one can also learn that the outside world will never rise to meet their unmet needs, which makes relationships pretty difficult among other things. It can also lead to alexithymia as one learns to only feel how others expect them to feel.





  • That’s a good question! It’s definitely very rare that a birth name is entirely necessary to use in conversation, but an occasional situation comes up where I’m talking to an old friend about someone who’s since transitioned and I need to use a deadname to let them know who I’m talking about. Generally I say something like “so I ran into Denise, you knew her as Brett back in the day, etc etc etc” and just use Denise from there on. If the person I’m talking to isn’t caught too off guard by that, it’s a very smooth and natural way to handle that as a matter of circumstance and move on to using the preferred name quickly.



  • Generally, using their current preferred name/pronouns (or neutral pronouns) is best. She’s still the same person, so it’s true to say Caitlyn Jenner won the 1976 Olympic Decathlon. If any other facts about the event itself were directly relevant to the conversation, that’d be ok - e.g. it would be accurate and inoffensive imo to say she won the men’s division.

    But name/pronouns change all the time otherwise so it’s more normal to use the current ones. If Ms. Jones gets married and is now Mrs. Smith, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to talk about Mrs. Smith’s car breaking down last summer.


  • As much as I pretend to be one, I’m not really a fighter. I think this war may not need me to be one. The time to respond has already begun, and while front-line protests aren’t my strong suit, supporting protestors in my community is the place for me right now. If a greater conflict escalates, I’m probably not like doing the active fighting, but I can sure as shit help with supply lines as well as helping people who need to recover in the backlines. If I ever need to be in a fight I intend to be prepared, but there’s a lot more to do in a war than fight. And by the time anything like that would happen, I hope to have a resilient community around me who can support each other through hell. The fight’s already begun to an extent, and it’s important to remember that our best place may be “back-of-house” so to speak.


  • While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

    On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.


  • I used Copilot for a while (in a Rust codebase fwiw) and it was… both useful and not for me? Its best suggestions came with some of the short-but-tedious completions like path().unwrap().to_str().into() etc. Those in and of themselves could be hit-or-miss, but useful often enough that I might as well take the suggestion and then see if it compiles.

    Anything longer than that was OK sometimes, but often it’d be suggesting code for an older version of a particular API, or just trying to write a little algorithm for something I didn’t want to do in the first place. It was still correct often enough when filling out particular structures to be technically useful, but leaning on it more I noticed that my code was starting to bloat with things I really should have pulled off into another function instead of autocompleting a particular structure every time. And that’s on me, but I stopped using copilot because it just got too easy for me to write repetitive code but with like a 25% chance of needing to correct something in the suggestion, which is an interrupt my ADHD ass doesn’t need.

    So whether it’s helpful for you is probably down to how you work/think/write code. I’m interested to see how it improves, but right now it’s too much of a nuisance for me to justify.