Jodjuya Yulm

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.

You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.

When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.

A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)

Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)

The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.

Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.

These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.

If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.

There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.

A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.

Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.

A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.

Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.

Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.

Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.

It feels insane to me that things like python and JavaScript are just…load bearing components of computers now.

You’re using interpreted languages for full scale application design??? Why????

Like, between the normalization of multicore processors and the enormously increased upper limit to RAM afforded by x86_64, it seems that making compiled, high efficiency, high performance software is just like, optional now?

Whatever happened to C? To Java? Why do you insist on making the poor cpu run everything on the fly?

In a lot of cases modern software development happens in smaller teams that are expected to do more. AI has only made this worse. While I personally refuse to use AI it negatively affects the whole industry. It produces absolutely horrendous code that looks ok at first but misses edge cases and/or doesn't do what it should at all. It produces technical dept ten times faster than any human could to the point where even human reviewed AI generated code tends to become unmaintainable.

The industry is also moving towards "devops" which in practice means that a lot companies don't have separate backend, frontend, and sysadmin teams. Anything to do with security has also been added to the list semi-recently. The aforementioned practices don't produce good maintainable code or software.

While interpreted languages have their place they aren't the silver bullet their advertised as. The biggest advantage tends to be ease of development, easier cross platform builds, and preventing certain vulnerabilities. However this doesn't make the languages any safer as all code is susceptible to human error. As we've seen in the past few years many interpreted languages also have package managers riddled with issues that have been exploited to include malicious code in packages that many others depend on. There are more modern low level languages like rust that have better memory safety than C and could be used instead.

Interpreted languages tend to falter when used for larger projects. Of course it's entirely possible to create a scalable a nodejs/python backend/desktop applications but maintaining them tends to be difficult to the point that a lot of maintainers start using a library for static typing. While the performance difference of for example typescript compared to pure javascript tends to be negligible nowadays I think it demonstrates the need for statically typed languages.

One of the largest issues with desktop application performance recently has been electron. Electron simply put is a wrapper that ships a full chromium browser and loads a website. The performance suffers when this is combined with large javascript frameworks and/or when electron is used without considering resource consumption. A good examples of this are discord before october 2023 and slack. While discord changed to tauri which is an improvement it still renders the application in a webview.

It's worth mentioning developing applications that run in a webview has a few advantages the main one being easy cross-platform builds. While an imperfect solution this has somewhat improved software compatibility.

While I believe that the software industry is moving in the wrong direction there are open source projects that are actually made by people who use them.

Red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus)

This guy doesn't even go here! Recent high winds blew him over to Iceland from his typical American homeland. Awww, kinda like me!

speaks for itself even without context

Watching the 2026 Tumblr Sexy Man Contest