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Profile image for Avi Flax 🇺🇸🇮🇱 אבי פלקס

Avi Flax 🇺🇸🇮🇱 אבי פלקס

@avi@flaximus.net

Feminist, futurist, father. XL biomachine, he/him. Modern Hebrew. Zionist. Aphantasiac. Black Lives Matter. Trans rights are human rights. Bicycling enthusiast. Space enthusiast. Earth enthusiast. Coffee. Speculative fiction! Technology! History! What the hell is this list, even‽

506 Posts Posts & Replies 354 Following 96 Followers Search
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Hey everyone!

My current gig might be wrapping up soon, so it’s time for me to figure out what’s next.

If you or someone you know could use some help with software tools or systems — architecture, implementation, deployment, operations, data pipelines, CD, DX, etc — maybe get in touch? I’ve been doing this a while and I’m pretty flexible.

I’m open to short-term or long-term, part-time or full-time. I’m US-based (NYC area) and a US citizen.

General CV: aviflax.com/resume/

Energy-specific CV: aviflax.com/resume/energy/

Thanks in advance!

A note from some recent conversations on how to adopt a style guide:

A style guide doesn't produce consistency. It is the artifact of a culture that values consistency.

Any mutuals in North America have an M1 Mac Mini they might want to sell to me?

My first interaction with Azure tech support and I am decidedly unimpressed.

Messaging:

- Telegram
- Slack
- Discord
- Whatsapp
- Signal
- iMessage

Social networks:

- Mastodon
- Twitter
- Bluesky
- Threads

Can we go back to unified world again, the one with open protocols and interoperability? I want one app per problem, not ten fractured partial apps for each problem

Dismay. Bleak, grim, ashen dismay.

Voting is not about perfection, it’s about direction.

Harris is pointing forward, Trump is pointing backward (to the 1930s, specifically).

Vote for the direction you wanna move in.

Anyone else into comics?

If so, check out this fantastic YouTube channel, matttt. He makes video essays about comics creators. Their biographies, backgrounds, influences, challenges, etc. Every single video is informative and entertaining.

youtube.com/@mattwith4ts

There is a solution. We're 61 electoral votes away from neutralizing the Electoral College. Most of the blue states have passed this but we need the battleground states to get past 270.

www.nationalpopularvote.com
www.threads.net/@motherjonesma

Because it apparently needs to be said:

Being Jewish does not mean belonging to a particular region.

Israel being a Jewish nation does not mean that it is a theocracy.

Jews are a people with a shared history, culture, and variety of languages. People of all races. People of a variety of religions, even.

As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan put it: Judaism is a civilization.

To know someone is Jewish is not to know what they look like or what they believe, but it is to know that they likely have to worry about antisemitism, violence, and ostracization no matter what relationship, if any, they have with Israel.

: This stunning photograph captures the most violent moment during an eruption of the Calbuco volcano in Chile. Volcanic lightning occurs in the plumes of eruptions when volcanic ash particles collide, generating static electricity. Additionally, water vapor in the plume condenses and freezes as it rises, adding ice to the mix. And voila! The eventual electrical discharge causes lightning. Credit: Francisco Negroni, www.francisconegroni.com/index

Edited 72d ago

Turns out I’m **extremely** rusty with SQL — especially with DDL. 😅

Steve Jobs loved the metaphor “A bicycle for the mind.” So do I. It’s redolent with implications, all of them positive. It speaks to leveraging the power we already have.

And then there’s AI. At no time has AI ever promised to leverage my creativity or intellect. Above and beyond my objective misgivings…It doesn’t capture my imagination. It doesn’t motivate me. It simply feels like… “Dig where the money is right now.”

What paucity of human ambition.

👨‍🎨 Clement Mok

Edited 74d ago

YAML really is the gift that keeps on giving.

tmendez.dev/posts/rng-git-hash

@simon I’ve been pretty skeptical of LLMs and have used them very little for my own work as a programmer. But lately your output, and the steady decline of Web search engines, has me thinking it’s time to give them a real try to help me with my programming.

I think I understand the basics like models, prompts, etc. But I’m unsure how to get started with the mechanics of it all. So I’m curious: do you use any LLM integrations in your code editors? Or do you mostly copy and paste to and from your llm CLI? Or a Web chat UI?

I’m thinking my starting use case is: I have a file open in my editor in a language with which I’m either a beginner or rusty, like C# or even SQL. And I want to ask a question about how to do something specific in the context of the code I have.

For example if I’m working on a sophisticated DB migration in SQL, and I can’t remember the syntax for creating a variable and storing an ID in it. How would *you* ask that question today? I mean mechanically, what steps would you take?

Thank you in advance!

I’m looking forward to the YIMBYs for Harris call in a couple of hours!

yimbysforharris.com/

Google: Whether tripe is kosher depends on the religion of the cow.

Lisa: They can't seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.

Developers: „Lisps are unreadable!“
Also developers:
fuckingblocksyntax.com/

Wife & I are eating more beets recently.

Kroger-owned supermarket: sad, ugly beets for USD$3.99/lb ($8.80/kg).

Asian supermarket: glorious, ugly beets for USD$1.69/lb ($3.73/kg).

Tell me again about consumers "feeling the pinch" and avoiding rapacious, predatory businesses when they can.

Begging leftists who would never consider themselves to be antisemitic to make sure they don’t accidentally sound that way when criticizing Josh Shapiro, the only Jew in the running to be Kamala’s VP. Support for Israel is the Democratic Party position and all the potential VPs have the same basic position. So if you’re only screaming “genocide” at the Jew, well, that’s something you should maybe sit with for a minute and think more deeply about. Your Jewish friends might appreciate it.

Edited 110d ago

I see the sports folk are getting upset that a bimodal distribution doesn't neatly map to a pair of disjoint sets. Nature be awkward like that.

The idea that CEOs have to be evil racist assholes in order to succeed is a myth perpetuated by evil racist assholes. In reality, being an evil racist asshole is very bad for business.

Edited 118d ago

I hope in 2024 we can stop caring what right wing attention freaks say about things. Oh, some guy hated the olympic ceremonies? Who fucking cares? It was beautiful, surprising, and joyful.

I'm done opening news apps and seeing stories about "the backlash" to popular things when you dig down and find out it's one weird christian complaining on instagram. That's not a real backlash!

Stop caring what random jerks think. Stop broadcasting their bad faith readings of everything.

“The remote meeting isn’t the cause of the problem: rather, the unwritten caucus rule is the cause of the problem, and remoteness happens to exacerbate that problem to the point that even people with high caucus scores notice the friction.”

— Chelsea Troy

chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why

Via @joeposaurus
chaos.social/@joeposaurus/1127

Edited 135d ago

“When I start an artwork, I forget I’m in prison,” says Moath al-Alwi, presumably recorded from within Guantánamo Bay. A short documentary zeroes in on the incarcerated artist's elaborate ship sculptures. Watch it now on Colossal:

www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/07

After 18 years at Red Hat, it’s time to move on. Tomorrow, July 4 is JRuby’s Independence Day! I’m going to need your help to keep the JRuby project going. Sign up for a sponsorship or contact me about commercial support today. JRuby needs you and so do I! ❤️

ruby.social/@JRuby/11272380355