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.

trying to shame people into switching without taking into account these environmental variables just makes you a prick.

You’re right about how shame doesn’t work. It’s an enduring peeve of mine that you have to butter people up and manage their emotions to get them to do anything. It just feels like everyone’s a toddler that needs a shiny sticker so they won’t poison themselves. You’ll be like “smoking is bad for you and everyone around you” and they’ll be like “fuck you I’m going to smoke more now”.

However, in this case the person said they had viable transit. It was just ten minutes slower.

True on all counts. Unfortunately, there’s little to be done to change those things. Putting in the effort to be funny and interesting will have better outcomes than focusing on how it’s not fair you have to do more work. This might be one of the few scenarios where men are mildly disadvantaged

True. I had a very poor experience on bumble, where I didn’t get many interactions. Not being able to message first I think takes away one of my few advantages.

You are making the world worse by driving when other options are available.

You then responded to this claim by changing the topic to how billionaires are making the world worse. That’s a whole other topic. That’s probably a deflection to preserve your sense of self as a good person.

If you truly believe “other people are worse so I’m allowed to be bad too” then go ahead and say it. I don’t think that’s a great moral framework, but it would require you to admit that your unnecessary driving is in fact bad, so I’d take that as a win.

That depends on the app. On hinge, you can (and should) send a message with your like.

On tinder and close relatives, you can only work on your profile.

It’s funny in a sad way that Google et al let search get really bad, and then try to suggest we use LLMs instead of search. I was happy being able to type in like “react usememo hook” and finding the official docs, stack overflow, and maybe a blog or two. Now it’s so much more slop, the temptation to ask the LLM “how do I use usememo” is higher.

Because my driving to work in my car is somehow so much worse on our entire world compared to what billionaires are doing

That wasn’t the claim. My point was that driving makes the world worse. The presence of other people making the world worse to greater degrees or at greater speed is irrelevant.

You’re arguing against a made up claim, probably to justify feeling attacked. Your ego is threatened. It’s common for people to lash out when their sense of being a Good Person is threatened.

As discussed at length in last week’s planning meeting, we agreed to continue using isort at this time. Here is the decision document to review: {confluence link}. If you would like to relitigate the issue, which I would not recommend, please add it to the tech planning meeting agenda.

(More seriously, I started using ruff and have no complaints about it.)

Cop’s actions fit the colloquial definition of murder, but maybe the laws are strange in MA.

Either way, the cop’s life should be over.

“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.

You don’t need to be in amazing shape (though it probably doesn’t hurt) but you need to be way more interesting and emotionally mature than the average guy.

If you’re the kind of person who gets upset like in this meme that your newly non-monogamous wife got more dates than you did, you are not mature enough to be getting dates with other non-monogamous people.

✨ externalized costs ✨

You saved 10 minutes of time and some personal convenience, and made the world worse for everyone else.

Democrats aren’t especially left, so I’m not sure you can really look at states controlled by the democratic party as a fair comparison. The US doesn’t have much of a left. Many democrats are conservative, especially when its things close to home (eg: nimbyism, “i like black people i just don’t want to live next to one”, etc).

We have outliers like Mayor Mamdani who want to build more housing, but he’s notably a DSA member. He does have policies for housing which are more effective than “fewer regulations and the market will solve it”.

As such, if the argument is “Conservative controlled areas have fewer regulations, and thus more housing gets built”, that’s a very tenuous argument. The right wing ideology at play isn’t “We should build more housing” but rather the usual “No one tells me what to do” attitude endemic to right wing thinking.

Furthermore, conservative areas tend to be sparser, which makes for more room to build, with fewer restrictions New York City is already dense. Adding more stuff is going to be more difficult and complicated than adding another building to Tumbleweeds, AR.

Lastly, if you did somehow prove that “conservative solutions to the housing crisis are good, actually, and aren’t just deregulation and capitalist market solutions”, I guess I would have to update my statement to “Almost all right wing ideas are bad”. But as I’m not convinced this is the exception, I stand by my original claim.

Building housing isn’t a right wing idea.

I agree, play the class how you want, it’s one of the major appeals of the game

I remember the first time I encountered systems that aren’t strict class + level, and realizing I had so much more freedom to make the ideas I had. D&D (and close relatives) are surprisingly anti-creative.

“Public space in Paris is chaos,” right-winger Rachida Dati said recently

No right winger is worth listening to. I know nothing about Dati, but I am confident they are full of bad ideas.

Dati’s proposals for the city include making it cheaper to park and getting rid of the low-emission zone in the city centre.

As foretold.

Every right wing idea is bad, and people proposing them should at best be laughed out of the room.

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.