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Joined 28 days ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • I don’t know. A coworker years ago said to me “you have to make what you want people to do the easy thing”, and I think he was right. But someone still has to do work. Back then, it was me changing the deploy script to automatically run tests and open the report so people had to go out of their way to skip all that.

    I’m not sure what that looks like for the fediverse. Linking them directly? Some sort of “sign up with Google” SSO mechanism? Just make the account for your friend and give it to them?

    Ideally we’d go up one level and address why people are so mentally depleted they can’t handle a sign up form.




  • Also engineer here. Please, listen to engineering. I’m so tired of product coming in with ideas fully detached from reality.

    At one job, they got it into their head that “our system has no concept of an account. There’s just projects floating around, and nothing unifying them. We need to do a bunch of work to create this”. I said to myself, that’s crazy. There is an account. Every project has a foreign key relationship with it. It’s just not named “account” for some reason.

    Listening to me took what could’ve been a clusterfuck of wasted weeks into a one day find-and-replace project. Personally, I would’ve just left it with the slightly weird name and called it a win, but I think product needed to feel like they were adding some value somehow.

    Or the time they wanted to fully rewrite the internal tool for scheduling work. We had operations people that managed the field workers schedule, using some home-grown tool written years ago and never really updated. They wanted a full rewrite. I talked to the people who actually use the thing and asked them what their biggest pain points were. Looked at the code. Yeah, one of those can be fixed today, the other in a couple days. This doesn’t need to be a two month project. We did it my way and operations was delighted.

    One time I wasn’t in the room, and product and one less good engineer got it into their head that there’s no way to tell which work orders go with which set of outputs. They thought that the output just appeared, and you couldn’t tell where it came from. Unfortunately, this spun up into a “we need to rewrite the entire system!” project. Some months later (of delivering no value to anyone) there were layoffs, and at great personal cost I was able to convince them that yes, there is a foreign key, and we can make significantly smaller changes to solve the actual problems. I regret not killing that initiative earlier, but I think people wanted it as a big line item on their resume.

    That’s all startup land.

    At the megacorp I worked at, trying to convince management that we should have automated tests is like trying to speak french to someone who only speaks italian. I think they understand some of what I’m saying, maybe, but most of it’s not getting through. A good chunk of the IC engineers know the system is bad and has a bunch of “we could improve this in a day” tasks we could do, but management doesn’t understand. So we keep having multi-day deploys with “omg it’s broken again”.


  • People don’t really care about anything other than convenience. Twitter could be grinding up puppies live on camera and most people would just shrug and be like “well the good memes are here”.

    Personally I think that’s downstream from how we’re all too polite about shit like this. We just smile and change the topic instead of doing the intensely uncomfortable “You really shouldn’t use twitter” conversation. But also we’re all too… childish, I guess, because most people if someone says that will not respond with “You make a good point and I will change in accordance,” but rather with “Fuck you for saying things that make me feel bad. You suck. I’m not listening to anything you say.”

    So I guess we’re fucked because people are immature, fragile, little shits.


  • This has been my experience as well. The default mode of monogamous relationships has a lot of bad habits and anti-patterns, too.

    There was a good blog post I read a while ago I can’t find now (it was a title like “the missing step”, but most blog posts with that title are about toxic people in communities that are ignored like a missing step on a staircase you avoid without fixing). It essentially argued that when people are monogamous, they tend to slide towards a sort of all-access codependence, where you just kind of assume your partner is there all for you the time. When such a couple tries to open up, and your partner suddenly has plans without you, people don’t know what to do. You always used to just do stuff together, and now your partner is out somewhere with Alex? Fuck Alex! Who do they think they are??

    It’s pretty bad, but happens frequently.

    The post’s advice was to make plans with your current partner, before you “open up”. Even if you never open up. Make plans together, but also explicitly and intentionally keep time for yourself. Even if you don’t actually do anything, take a day a week that’s just yours to do what you want. Go out of the house. You don’t have to tell them any details. Maybe you’ll go for a hike. Maybe you’ll go bowling. Doesn’t matter. It’s your time. Personal. Private.

    Once you both get used to that, where the other person is just off doing stuff without you sometimes, it’s much easier to slot “they went on a date” into that space.





  • “years of pleading” for an open relationship is kind of a flag. Maybe not a red one, but certainly a warning of some sort.

    Also, not to repeat myself, but I think a lot of guys are kind of bad at dating and dating apps. There’s a lot of self sabotage and then blaming external forces. A message of “hey” isn’t going to win any prizes, and yet that’s all some people can muster.



  • It is kind of sometimes a can’t-win situation.

    If you don’t fluff them up first, then they get upset that you’re too blunt. But if you do add the fluff, then other people get upset that you’re wasting their time with fluff.

    Personally, I think a healthy person should be able to accept an email that says like “Please update SomeLibrary to 9.0.2 (or later) by Friday. The maintainers fixed a security issue, and we should upgrade” without crying about how you hurt their feelings, but many people are not healthy.



  • Yeah, dnd’s “armor as avoidance” is really unsatisfying to me now. That and how you can beat their AC by 15 and then roll minimum damage. At least pf2e addresses that.

    I want to be able to mechanically distinguish between “hard to hit” and “hard to damage”, and DND generally doesn’t deliver.


  • Ok clearly it’s not literally about making CDs and people saying “just make your own streaming service” are both missing the point and vastly over estimating the capacity of the average person.

    The important part that’s largely missing from today’s music environment is the personal touch and investment. Many people, as the author says, just comfortably coast through an algorithmic smoothie of familiar music. That is inferior to a friend saying “I made you this mix” and then you actually listen to it, attentively, more than once.

    It doesn’t have to be a CD. It can be a zip file. But the intention and focus was important.

    I’m an outlier in that I never let “the algorithm” choose what plays. Sometimes I still make mixes for friends, though lately they’ve just been a collection of links. That process of choosing is meaningful. My friend still listens to the mix I made for them when their job laid them off, sometimes.