One of the many things being a cheapskate protects me from.

Sparse areas have other costs. Like, you can’t get anywhere without a car, there’s fewer jobs, less social stuff. Cities have much higher potential on most metrics that matter.

“Use a different language” is a common defense of javascript, but kind of a weird one.

Yeah. My last job, a PR with commented out code typically wouldn’t get approved. Either leave it in version history, or stick it on a branch

I think a lot about a post I saw that said “you hate every piece of capitalism but refuse to connect the dots to see that picture”

Meta should be broken up and its leadership barred from working in tech (or politics)

This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.

Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.

Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.

I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.

We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?

No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.

I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.

This is a capitalist hell

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I had a director of eng once who asked me to mind my language when I said “For fuck’s sake it returns 200 OK even when there’s an error”.

So I started naively replacing “fuck” with “fudge”. “That’s pretty fudged up.” “Well, fudge it, we’ll deal with that next.” “Fudge if I know.”

He didn’t really like it, but he can go fudge himself.

They’re never satiated.

They’re broken people and aren’t addressing the actual problems.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

Lots of people don’t get anything resembling a speedy trial in the US.

To be right wing is to be ruled by emotions. Humans are all emotional creatures, but for some people it reaches a point where emotion alone creates reality. Facts are there to be picked up or set aside to support feelings. When their guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a man of the people. When your guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a baby. Facts don’t matter. It’s feelings.

And most of their feelings seem to be fear. Fear of loss. Fear of humiliation. You can show them stats and history demonstrating how, like, a diverse workforce leads to higher productivity and greater happiness, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not looking at facts. They’re feeling feelings.

Imagine trying to talk to someone who’s drunk. That’s the right wing, except all the time and they can’t really sober up. Honestly, it sounds like hell.

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.