Don't count on the promotion
I took my advancement test today and it was by far the worst performance that I have ever given on any examination in my whole entire life. My mind was boggled by the questions and I feel like I completely bombed it.
However, I am not surprised. As I have been writing about all month I went into that test completely unprepared and am willing to face the consequences of my laziness.
It is just so difficult to study for. There are two hundred questions that are picked at random from references numbering in the thousands of pages. How in the world are you supposed to:
1. Learn that amount of information
2. Decipher what is important and what is not
3. Retain that information until the next advancement exam.
Even though I have not made the best effort this time around I am determined to not repeat this performance the next time that the advancement test comes around. This is just one of many many tests that I am going to have to take for the rest of my life so there is no sense in letting this one failure bring me down. No matter how difficult it may be, the next time that the advancement test comes around I am going to be well prepared.
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Using cgit
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its prede...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 16, 2026“I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Ge...
via Unsung August 16, 2026Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026
Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026 My best bird photo from this morning is a dragonfly (Eastern Pondhawk, I think). Least Sandpiper Green Heron Red-headed Woodpecker. It's a juvenile, so its head is not actually red yet.
via O'DonnellWeb August 16, 2026Generated by openring