People are weirdly, emotionally, invested in meat. Like it’s part of their identity.

I enjoy the taste of meat but I recognize it’s not good for the environment or the animals. So I avoid eating meat. It’s not a big deal. But for some people they act like you’re going to eat them and bury their bones in an unmarked grave.

This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

It went basically like any reasonable person expected it to. Unfortunately many people in the US are unreasonable

Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.

Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.

Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.

I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.

We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?

No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.

I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.

This is a capitalist hell

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.

I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.

But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.

I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.

I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

Yeah I was going to say. It’s like that “no take only throw” meme with the dog. Capitalists want us to spend money, but they don’t want to pay us enough money. Just spend what we don’t have.

If I had a nice job I’d be out spending a lot more money. But they want to replace everyone with AI, or off shore, or whatever.

It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

• upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
• related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
• a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.

One of the reasons UBI games are trash

I parsed that as “universal basic income games” and was really confused. Ubisoft makes more sense

I found the solo play of both Remnant games really unsatisfying. Slow pacing, uninteresting enemies. Is it much better with friends?

I found a free port of Civilization (unciv) on the phone and immediately lost like 3 hours. That shit is dangerous. There are better phone games, but there’s certainly a lot of slop.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

I think Jane Jacobs talked about this in like the 1960s. People in cars are less likely to stop and shop. If you’re on foot (or a bike) it’s a lot easier to stop and pop into an interesting shop. If you’re zooming by at 45mph, or stuck in traffic with nowhere to park, you’re less likely to see if that bookshop has something interesting

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/