Still on Linux. Updated to the new pop!_os LTS. It’s been pretty good. The new desktop environment has had a few quirks where I had to fuss with hitting alt+enter to get some games appropriately full screen, but generally it’s been good.

Worth it to be free of microslop

Stop making people commute when they could work from home. That’s hours wasted on top of climate crime.

Break up Google, Facebook, and the other big platforms that let disinformation run rampant.

Hold decision makers at those organizations personally accountable.

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

Where are the consequences? Ruin their fucking life.

It’s hard to make a full judgment without knowing more details but “the pay is good and it’s easy” isn’t really a compelling justification for “and I help evil manifest in the world”.

I knew a guy who went to work for palantir a bunch of years ago. Was always friendly at work. I asked him “but what’re you going to do if they do bad stuff, like spying on people?”

He just shrugged. Didn’t care. The money was good.

I don’t know if this alone is proof that’s a bad person, but I think it precludes him from being a good one.

Also doing my part. Fuck Microsoft. It would have been a harder choice if Windows was, like, fast, stable, and efficient. But it’s not. It’s jank and AI slop. Fuck them.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

Yep. Infrastructure shouldn’t be privately owned.

Yes that is the legal justification. I am not interested in the legal justification. Laws are not inherently good. They were clearly paid less than their worth if there’s six figure payouts to be had here.

This is the fundamental injustice of capitalism. The owner pays you a small amount and keeps all the profits. A child would recognize that as unfair.

This feels like theft. Maybe not technically legally but the people who did the chatting aren’t getting the money. Capitalist hellscape

There’s also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.

# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on record

Kind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.

At work, the team isn’t very good at python. They’re mostly SQL people. Which is fine. I’m happy to mentor and guide.

The product lady said to me “can you write a guide on confluence about how to do python good?”

I’m like, people write whole published books about that you gotta pay money for. I’m not going to bang out a couple paragraphs and code blocks and suddenly people are heavy weights.

I wrote something anyway because I don’t want to further irritate the product lady.

It’s because leadership is a heady cocktail of stupid and selfish.

I really want to stress stupid. That means they draw bad conclusions from facts.

Sometimes selfish is a factor. They have an obscure reason like “my share value goes up because we get a kickback from the city for staffing an office here”. They don’t care if it’s bad for everyone else or the company long term. They’ll get their money and then leave.

Pop!_os has been fine for me. I’m not a tinkerer. It’s a machine for a web browser and video games.

Microsoft is probably salivating at the idea of being the only legal OS provider.

If you sell your game through Steam, you cannot have it cheaper anywhere else. Even DRM free version on your website. Even temporary sales.

I don’t see anything about this in their docs. The closest is “You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.”

That seems reasonable. If you’re selling DRM-free, you don’t generate steam keys, and valve has no stake in it.

I sincerely believe that being rich is bad some kinds of intelligence You don’t have to deal with problems. You just brute force your way through with money. You don’t have to practice restraint and delayed gratification. You can just buy the thing now.