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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.





  • Nothing really is speaking to me :(

    Nine Sols is supposed to be very good, but it’s a slim discount and I’m not really in the mood for the genre.

    I think I want a like party RPG like bg3 or pillars of eternity, but I think I’ve played all the acclaimed ones.

    At least I’ve still got guild wars 2 keeping me company. It’s old, but reliable. No subscription or power treadmill, so I keep going back to it. Highly recommend




  • Why would you add two arrays like that? Because I want to combine two lists.

    The is operator is for identity, not equality. Your example is just using it weirdly in a way that most people wouldn’t do.

    No because I am not using Python to make a web app. That’s not the only thing people write you know… Most of what I’ve worked on has been webapps or services that support them :shrug:

    Typescript and Python there’s absolutely no way I’d pick Python (unless it was for AI).

    Agree to disagree then. We could argue all day but I think it’s mostly opinion about what warts and tradeoffs are worth it, and you don’t seem like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Sometimes I meet junior developers who have only ever used javascript, and it’s like (to borrow another contentious nerd topic) like meeting someone who’s only ever played D&D talking about game design.





  • I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

    Some exceptions:

    I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

    I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

    Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

    I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

    I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

    Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.