At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

…what do you mean by using dev containers? Are your people doing development on their host machine?

Depends on how strange and impactful their choice is.

If it’s something that I think should be in the style guide, I’d promise try to achieve consensus. I’d prefer not merging in the dubious code because then other people may take it as precedent.

One guy really wanted to write his code differently than the existing code and how others were doing it. It kind of sucked. Not that his way was bad, but no one else on the team subjectively liked it. I relented and let it go, and then had to deal with that unpleasant code for months. Eventually he moved on and a lot of that code got replaced. I retrospect I would have preferred if we had somehow convinced him to keep in the style we preferred. I’m sure he wasn’t happy that the rest of the team wasn’t keen on his style choices.

If it’s just a little weird, mention it as a non blocking comment. Like one guy would have weird line breaks in his longer comments. It technically followed the guide (under max line length) but it was weird. We asked him to stop, he said ok, no problem. But I didn’t block a merge over it.

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via “well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not”

Huh. That’s neat I guess.

My initial guess was it would somehow capture the energy from hitting keys. I guess that’s implausible? Too little energy without making the key press resistance too high?

I don’t disagree with anything here, really. As we both said, some responsibility remains on the user.

I do think Match is aggravating the situation. Men aren’t getting traction so they search for why. They find right wing MRA stuff saying that it’s women’s fault blah blah blah, but really part of why they’re not getting hits is because Match is hiding them unless you pay (and even then maybe).

Part of why may also be they’re creeps or bad at dating. It is not wholly the apps’ fault. But I do think they’re making it harder for people to connect, and that can be the top of the funnel for far right ideas.

And I do think a lot of people are on the apps when they aren’t really ready. People of all genders. But that’s a separate topic, probably.

Anyway. Good talk. Amusingly , I’m heading out to meet someone from a dating app. Here’s hoping they don’t think I’m a creep!

There was a meme the other day about how Aragorn from lotr is the kind of male role model men need. Kind, shows his emotions, strong without being cruel.

I was thinking the other day there’s probably a pretty straight line between Match group owning so many dating apps, men’s unhappiness, and violence.

Like the apps create the illusion that you can meet someone and be happy, but their primary goal is to make money. They don’t try very hard to introduce you to good matches. They also haven’t solved the experience from the woman’s point of view. So men feel like they’re just shouting into the void, that people don’t like them, etc etc. Some of those people likely go on to become incels or do violence.

This isn’t to say that violent men are not culpable. They are. They retain agency. But Match group (that’s tinder, okcupid, hinge, match, plenty of fish, and more) is making the problem worse.

It’s like if there was a food shortage, and someone bought up all the grocery stores. Then they made all of them mazes and had half the cereal boxes empty.

Morrowind. Every once in a while I reinstall it, but I can’t get over the “it looks like an action game but it’s a stats game” thing anymore. And I never liked Oblivion or Skyrim. But when I was a kid, Morrowind was so full of wonder and stuff to discover. I also wasn’t playing with a guide, so discovering stuff like “You can enchant an item to have 1-100 strength, duration permanent. It picks the bonus when you put the item on, and it stays that until you take it off. So put it on and off until you get a big number. Much cheaper than trying to enchant it to +100 straight out” felt more personal.

All of those people suck and I wouldn’t be mad if they were shot dead

It gets trickier when there’s multiple viable options. Like “save a child or save two adults” kind of stuff. Most of what people are mad about isn’t that. It’s just the rich trying to make even more money.

Author is perhaps overly humanizing the CEO while not humanizing all the victims of the health care system enough.

One could write an article that was simply short biographies of everyone who died because of health insurance profits. I imagine, like the wealth to scale page, people would have an emotional journey reading it as it kept going and going.

I think we also need to put the fear into the rich.

Like, if the result of someone having their factory dump mercury into the town drinking water was that guy was beaten to death, then the rich would maybe behave a little better.

If the guy who steals his employee’s tips got up one morning and found every window in his house was smashed, maybe he’d think again.

Some people operate only at the most basic level of moral reasoning: “Will I be punished?” They don’t care about other people. They don’t care about laws.

At the end of the day, might makes right. If you can’t enforce your will, there’s no cosmic ref coming to call a time out. Unfortunately, the rich have a lot of might via the police and such. But they’re still just bags of meat like everyone else.

We need more Luigis, and we need enough solidarity that no jury would convict.

I’ve been playing it and enjoying it. It could be better. Most games could. I had kind of low expectations, honestly. I’m glad it’s a single player game with no live-service and no season-pass. I’ll probably play it a second time. Runs kind of like crap, so I might play it again in the distant future where I have better hardware.

I imagine a lot of internet duds are mad about how there’s a queer subplot, but they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, this creates a problem where if some random guy is bashing it I have to try to suss out if they’re really just mad about queer stuff. It’s hard to tell. And because we’re all just emotional idiots, some people might be mad about the queer stuff and not realize it, and the words that come out of their mouth will be “boring characters”.

But also a lot of their games have problems. Mass Effect 3’s ending is so bad it has its own wikipedia page.

Guild Wars2 is very good.

It downscales your level if you go back to older areas, so you can play with lower level friends. (Though it’s still pretty generous, and the high level friends will be more effective). So if your friends aren’t playing much, you can still coop with them when they do play.

There’s a lot of content. Most of the maps have stuff just happening. There’s also instanced content for 5, 10, or … I think private convergences can go up to 20?

There’s not really a gear grind. When you hit max level (which is pretty easy) good-enough gear is very easy to get. A smidge better than that is a little expensive but still very feasible. The fanciest gear is numerically the same, but let’s you reskin and swap stats for free, which is nice.

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.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.

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.