People should stop using Facebook products.

I’ve never paid a subscription for YouTube. It’s been, what, like $10/mo for ten years? Can buy a lot of media drm free for that $1200.

Centralized platforms have obvious and severe problems. Unfortunately, most people don’t care.

Off the top of my head …

• free public health care for all.
• forgive all medical debt
• free public education for all, including college.
• forgive all student loan debt
• universal basic income
• more public housing. Homes are owned by the people who live in them, or the state. No profit seeking private orgs.
• close the “buy borrow die” loopholes, where people get untaxed loans to access their wealth without paying taxes
• more tax on the wealthy
• look into making property tax progressive like income. That is, the first $nnn of your house is untaxed, the next chunk at some percent, the following chunk at a greater percent, and so on.
• all Republicans removed from office. They are barred from government positions for life, as well as any private role with decision making power.
• break up mega corps. Disney, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Their current leadership has their wealth seized, and they are barred from leadership positions for life.
• invest heavily in public transit and safety improvements to existing roadways. Cars are literally killing us as well as sapping our resources.
• mandatory profit sharing for employees.
• mandatory pay transparency
• maximum pay gap between roles. No more janitor making $7/HR while the CEO makes $300/hr
• accounting hijinks to pretend like your org made no profit, or “they’re not employees they’re contractors” are punishable by seizure of all wealth and a prohibition from similar roles for life
• come up with something so venture capitalist bros aren’t deciding the future, if the above doesn’t somehow fix it.

I just saw a play that has a plot point about how someone gets robbed by some racist, well connected shits, and the police won’t do anything to help. The closest he gets to justice is vigilantism, where he hunts down and shoots 3 of his assailants dead. Only then does anyone start to listen to him, but when he agrees to talk peacefully they shoot him dead.

I’m not sure “the only way you’ll get justice is with your own bloody hands” was the author’s intent, but that seems to be the message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation

Some people are very fragile and have poor emotional regulation. When they see other people doing good, it makes them feel bad, so they lash out.

Environmentalism, biking, veganism, all commonly evoke this behavior.

I’m never going to buy a PlayStation outside of maybe a yard sale second hand situation. Nor will I ever pay a subscription fee. So if they don’t want my money, fuck 'em.

Optimizing for million different hardware possibilities

I’m pretty sure modern development has APIs that abstract a lot of that away from you. It’s not 1999 when you need to talk directly to the hardware anymore

I switched to Linux a year or two ago. Pretty much every game I’ve played has worked fine. (Elden ring, guild wars 2, nioh2, pillars of eternity…)

Even non-steam stuff was basically click and go with Heroic launcher

Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away?

I read recently that “will power” doesn’t meaningfully exist, but it’s rather the result of many other factors. That said, many people seem to be bankrupt of what one would call willpower. I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s the capitalist hell scape. Maybe it’s the plastic in our bodies. Maybe people are just largely social followers, and with a large enough contingent of idiots many people who would behave better follow down into the slop.

We shouldn’t be doing more acquisitions. We should be breaking these companies apart.

We used to do retrospectives at one of my old jobs, because everywhere loves cargo-culting agile and scrum stuff.

I quickly realized that a lot of the problems were largely outside the team’s control. It was shit like “The CEO doesn’t believe in designers or UX, so he won’t hire one, so we spend a lot of time doing that work badly ourselves.” Or, “management is making us spend all this time in ‘planning meetings’ so we don’t get anything done”

Stuff that has easy solutions, but we can’t do because some idiot or powerful cry-baby is in the way.

My last job was pretty good about code reviews, when people actually spent time on them. My front end code got much better when the front-end expert actually reviewed it.

My current job, code reviews are a rubber stamp farce and I’ve seen total garbage sail though. The code base is a tire fire. These things are related.

I suggested at my current job that we adopt a policy of fixing things as we go. Boss wasn’t interested. He said his boss said “he doesn’t want people gold plating things”.

Okay. I guess we’ll keep this tower of bash scripts that breaks once a month.

Well, yes, though my direct manager isn’t the worst. He’s trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.

One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically “if stakeholders don’t care it’s not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem”. So. Here we are.

Well surely you can agree that letting men into women’s change rooms

If the idea is that that’s a no-no because men are sexually attracted to women, then I must remind you that gay people exist.

If the idea is that men cannot be trusted, then there are many other spaces where men have power that should be examined first.

I thought about it but people are so sensitive here. If they broke something and couldn’t merge they’d probably raise a big stink, and then there’s good odds the checks would be removed “because they’re adding friction” or some nonsense. My boss has already warned me about staying in my lane.

These people have never done any automated testing of any sort. No linter. No unit tests. And they don’t seem to want to.

Sounds about right.

I’m using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole “research spike planning meeting impact analysis” six week journey.

I took it from “there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that’s just invalid syntax” to… well, I couldn’t make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.

Skyrim. It was at best “fine” for me. I really dislike level scaling. The combat felt unsatisfying. I don’t remember the story. It’s not weird like Morrowind. The magic and enchanting was over-simplified.

But for many people it’s their grand joy. So I guess that’s good for them.

Did not expect caves of qud to be on anyone’s list, as I thought it was pretty niche.

I also really wanted to like the game, but it felt oddly empty. I wanted less lost in the wilderness, less static quests, more dynamic stuff to do and explore.