The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like “{Coworker} says this test case is important”. Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could’ve gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.

I would have questions about how they work with a team and structure.

Are they going to be okay with planning work out two weeks ahead? Sometimes hobbyists do like 80% of a task and then wander off (it’s me with some of my hobbies).

Are they going to be okay following existing code standards? I don’t want to deal with someone coming in and trying to relitigate line lengths or other formatting stuff, or someone who’s going to reject the idea of standards altogether.

Are they going to be okay giving and getting feedback from peers? Sometimes code review can be hard for people. I recently had a whole snafu at work where someone was trying to extend some existing code into something it wasn’t meant to do*, and he got really upset when the PR was rejected.

Do they write tests? Good ones? I feel like a lot of self taught hobbyists don’t. A lot of professionals don’t. I don’t want to deal with someone’s 4000 line endpoint that has no tests but “just works see I manually tested it”

I’ve definitely had some coworkers that in retrospect we should not have hired. But I’ve also had people I was iffy on that turned out great. Hiring is hard.

Surely there’s a couple people still working there.

Yes. And no one’s going to do anything about it.

Most people are too lazy and thoughtless to stop using it .

The engineers that work there certainly aren’t going to stage a coup.

And no one’s going to just do violence to Musk.

best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.

You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)

Yes. What’s blocking you? What circumstances are you in where you want to talk and aren’t?

Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”

One of my friends wanted kids. She has a full time job in software and does side gigs like bartending. Can’t afford kids, so she didn’t have any. It’s sad.

Meanwhile the ultra wealthy have more money than they can spend.

Nationalize health care. Basic income. Public housing. Enforce existing tax laws. Tax or prohibit bullshit like “I’ll get a loan against my assets but that’s not technically income so I don’t pay anything”. Break up monopolies.

It’s not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

It’s nearly impossible to do anything good when you have a major conservative party set on doing bad.

You could have a position of “We should provide food to all children so they can learn without being distracted by hunger” and people would be like “that’s communism i’d rather those kids starve”

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.

I think of my cat as a lovable, kind of stupid, little brother. He usually wants to be involved in whatever I’m doing , follows me around the apartment, and so on. But also sometimes he just decides to do something ridiculous like climb into the dresser and get stuck.

I’m not sure how he thinks of me exactly. Seems affectionate!

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

A stupid argument I was having about how DND isn’t the best tool for many stories that aren’t about combat + resource management. I know people can have fun with anything but it bugs me when people are like “I do a political intrigue game about secret modern vampires in DND 5e” the same way it might bother some of you if someone was like “I put in my screws with a hammer” or “I add up the numbers in my spreadsheet by hand and type them into the totals row one at a time” or “I don’t use copy-paste I just retype everything”

Like, it doesn’t matter but it bugs me a little.

But I was getting down voted into oblivion so I gave up after someone begrudgingly admitted that yes different games have different focuses.

Been happy buying music from Bandcamp and not having a subscription. Didn’t even make it onto the chart :(

A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.

No, it’s not awful all the time. Cruising down a highway or familiar streets can be kind of zen. I say this as someone who despises car-culture and believes most transit should be mass, public, transit options like buses and trains. But I have fond memories of cruising down the highway at night by myself singing along with my favorite music.

I live somewhere that’s walkable and has a subway system now, and it’s much better. Don’t have to worry about parking, insurance, fuel, drinking too much. So if you really hate driving, you could look into living somewhere that doesn’t require it.

ll take a very extreme example. Our culture’s racism would be inherently better with better transit. There’s reasons why more urbanized cores are more open to other people and cultu

I’ve also thought about this. Being on the subway with other people humanizes them in a way being stuck in traffic doesn’t. When you have the shared experience of everyone groaning over the “being held in the station by the dispatcher”, that makes a difference. It’s a lot easier to hate people you never see.