• 0 Posts
  • 560 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment.

    I don’t think this is unique to sex. Sex is often special-cased in ways I don’t think it really needs to be. We probably agree more than we disagree here.

    By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

    No argument here. Basic income and the essentials guaranteed would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. Certain members of the wealthy would be upset, though


  • 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.


  • This is a good post.

    What we’re really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you’re selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you’re selling involves sex worker’s services, we realize what we’re advocating is human trafficking.

    This is a good point in particular. However, it slams into my go to hypothesis for why so many things are kind of bad: People are emotional first and sometimes exclusively so. It happens to all of us. But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

    I don’t really know how to fix this. Dismantle conservative power structures that are centered around placating fear and disgust maybe? If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.


  • 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”




  • This is a good answer.

    At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

    We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

    Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.





  • I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

    Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

    I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.


  • I think sometimes people just throw out the accusation of “echo chamber” because their ideas are bad and the community rejects them.

    Someone will be like “I don’t think we should have child labor laws but the eChO cHaMbER won’t even consider it”

    Sometimes this gets said even when the alleged echo chamber responds with facts and history about why their take is a bad one.

    Ultimately, here and in like all other human endeavors, emotions are primary. People feel a thing, and then reach for words to justify it.

    Someone’s ideas being rejected by the group? Feels bad. Is it me? Am I wrong? No, that feels worse and the ego won’t accept this. It must be them. But why? Must be an echo chamber. Cool. Now I don’t have to feel bad about myself. I don’t have to change my beliefs. I can just blame them and move on.

    So someone saying it’s an echo chamber has only very tenuous relationship to reality.

    To your actual point, there’s also the “jaq’ing off” and “for me it’s Tuesday” problems of community management and health. The first being someone asking questions in bad faith. The latter is similar - someone in good faith is asking really basic questions that the community has seen a thousand times before, and people respond with exasperation. From the new person’s perspective the community is unwelcoming. From the community’s view, this is the third guy today that’s stumbled upon the idea that “maybe capitalism is bad” and walking them through that journey is tiresome.

    Community is hard.








  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoMemes@sopuli.xyzBumper sticker
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    13 days ago

    I’m not going to try to change your mind here. Changing someone’s mind means taking care to massage their emotions, make them feel good about themselves and you, and get them to make the decisions on their own for their own reasons. It’s a lot of work. I’m going to skip it.

    Have you considered that you might be stupid? I’m not joking. Seriously. Because “I haven’t personally seen it, so I don’t think it’s real” in this kind of context, maybe most contexts, is weapons grade stupid. What else don’t you believe in? Bacteria? France? Submarines?

    When you’re done being mad about being insulted, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_transgender_people might be a good entry point.