I put down my best friend of 20 years on October 5th and fuck it’s hard. I’m sorry. You know you’re making the caring decision and loving your dog until the end though, and that is a gift.

It’s going to be hard. I’m starting to feel like myself again between the moments of deep grief, but I am still fragile and sad and will be for a long time.

If you ever need comfort from a stranger, feel free to save my name or comment and shoot me a message.

This 1955 featurette interpreted it as re-gifting daily. It ends up being a LOT of birds.

A DMV is accountable for driving laws and practices in their own state, not educating people about every possible driving condition anywhere.

Wait, are you saying that Virginia not mentioning what to do if a moose is in the road is “bad”?

Considering that the northern-most part of Virginia is still about 350 mi south of the closest range of moose, it would be pointless if not absurd for them to include it.

Thank you <3

She was the best! My soul pet. I had her for over half my life since she was 4 months old. We had a great life together and I’m so grateful for that, even though losing her leaves a gaping hole in my heart.

Thank you. I’m sorry you’re also caring for an aging pet. It’s hard but they are so, so worth it! Love her and her howls. Try to get pictures and videos of her! And give her an extra head kiss or scritch or whatever she likes best from me, please!

My 20-year-old baby girl insisted I face her as well. She would paw at the back of my head until I rolled over or moved her in front of me. She only started doing that over the past two years or so, but for about five years she would paw at me to lift the covers so she could snuggle under them or to hold her in my arms.

I had to put her to sleep just over two weeks ago on October 5. I miss her waking me up all the time for snuggles. I would trade every night of solid sleep in the world to have her with me still.

Leadership definitely drives a lot, but even with bad leadership a PM can and should do a lot to help here. I spent 5 of my years of PMing with an operations org that drove every big decision and I still did everything I could to protect my devs. I ended up in major burn out from it multiple times, but I don’t regret it.

Alerts that are waking devs up in the middle of the night have a user impact too, and a PM can and should communicate that impact and risk to the business side as part of why it needs to be prioritized. Alternatively, there might be a reason that the UI change is ultimately more valuable, and it’s the PM’s job to communicate why that is the priority to their devs. If developers with a Product team ever truly believe the reason they’re building something is just “because [insert team here] is excited about it,” then the PM failed at a critical responsibility.

“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”

If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).

Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager

I’m friends with two siblings who frequently refer to any/all of their friends as ‘habibi’ and it makes me feel warm fuzzies every time.

Have you seen the panda that was raised by zookeepers? The zookeepers had to teach it to break bamboo, which was hard for them so they often grimaced while doing so. The panda learned to make a similar face, seeing it as part of the process. They’ve even caught the panda making the grimace after breaking the bamboo, like it realized that it forgot to do the thing and had to make up for skipping that step.

My dad wrote software in the 90s and developed a pretty good name for his business. He once got a call from Microsoft saying they wanted to package his software in their newest OS builds. Holy crap, right?! That would be a major break!

They told him they needed to do some deep interviews to set the plan in motion. I can’t remember if there were supposed to be 4 calls total or if it was on the 4th call, but after a couple conversations my dad realized the questions they were asking were to reverse engineer his software. They were never trying to make a deal; they were trying to learn what they could so they could rewrite it and not pay him a dime. He told them to pound sand.

There were a few other conflicts he had with Microsoft. I was young and didn’t understand it well, but my whole childhood I knew Bill Gates led a shady as fuck company and thought he was an awful POS. It honestly still kills me to admit that he (now) does some good in this world.

My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

Clover reminds me so much of my childhood cat, Boots! This picture of him is from 2005 and he was put down 3/1/07 when he was about 15-16 years old. He was a good boy.

Not the point of the graphic at all, but this is the second time recently I saw the spelling “Turkiye” and was wondering the context behind that change, wondering if it was anything like the change in the spelling of Kyiv (which has now been so engrained in my head that I had to go look up the Russian spelling “Kiev”).

I looked it up and it appears Türkiye has been their own spelling for over 100 years, and they just petitioned the UN to update the spelling of the country’s name in 2021.

Cool, so Türkiye it is! (Plus my phone automatically adds the umlaut, so that’s handy!)

Also in Türkiye they don’t own cats, the cats own them.

Remorse: “I am sorry for what I did and the impact it had on the victim. I made stupid choices that hurt another person, and while I can never take that back, I will seek to do better so no one needs to suffer from my actions again.”

Not sorry you did it, just sorry you got caught: “I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

I believe people can change and I think it’s important we hold space for people to do so. However, that hinges on the person actually growing, which often starts with showing remorse. I know you implied that this guy has done so, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Even the quote you posted somewhere else about it being the worst thing he’d done, or something like that? That very much sounds like a, “I’m not sorry I did it, I’m sorry I got caught” kind of statement.

Asked if van de Velde had ever expressed any remorse to him for rape, Immers [his teammate] said: “No, he doesn’t, he doesn’t explain it.” (source)

“I have been branded as a sex monster, as a pedophile,” he said. "That I am not — really not.” (source)

If there’s an apology or some actual statement showing his remorse, I’d love to see it, but I’m skeptical that it exists. This whole controversy he’s had a huge opportunity to step up, apologize, and rebuke his prior actions. Instead, he’s faced it all with silence and a reaction of ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ That is not the behavior of a person who acknowledges they were in the wrong, imo.

The assistant parallel is an interesting one, and I think that comes out in how I use LLMs as well. I’d never ask an assistant to both choose and get a present for someone; but I could see myself asking them to buy a gift I’d chosen. Or maybe even do some research on a particular kind of gift (as an example, looking through my gift ideas list I have “lightweight step stool” for a family member. I’d love to outsource the research to come up with a few examples of what’s on the market, then choose from those.). The idea is mine, the ultimate decision would be mine, but some of the busy work to get there was outsourced.

Last year I also wrote thank you letters to everyone on my team for Associate Appreciation Day with the help of an LLM. I’m obsessive about my writing, and I know if I’d done that activity from scratch, it would have easily taken me 4 hours. I cut it down to about 1.5hrs by starting with a prompt like, “Write an appreciation note in first person to an associate who…” then provided a bulleted list of accomplishments of theirs. It provided a first draft and I modified greatly from there, bouncing things off the LLM for support.

One associate was underperforming, and I had the LLM help me be “less effusive” and to “praise her effort” more than her results so I wasn’t sending a message that conflicted with her recent review. I would have spent hours finding the right ways of doing that on my own, but it got me there in a couple exchanges. It also helped me find synonyms.

In the end, the note was so heavily edited by me that it was in my voice. And as I said, it still took me ~1.5 hours to do for just the three people who reported to me at the time. So, like in the gift-giving example, the idea was mine, the choice was mine, but I outsourced some of the drafting and editing busy work.

IMO, LLMs are best when used to simplify or support you doing a task, not to replace you doing them.

I took that comment to be summarizing the platform’s perspective, rather than their own. I think it’s common sense that people will watch/engage with things they don’t like, but the algorithms don’t care about how you feel or why you watched something; they see engagement and they give you more of that thing to drive more engagement. As far as the unfeeling numbers go, engagement might as well be liking; they don’t need to distinguish a difference.