I didn’t recognize the source and thought to myself this is either archaic or amateur. It feels purple by modern standards.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

Maybe the design is bad, then.

Javascript could throw an error to alert you that the input is supposed to be a string, like most languages would do.

Javascript is like Dungeons and dragons. It’s a mess, weighed down by legacy decisions, too heavy in some places and too light in others, and used in far more places than it should be. It also has some diehard fans, and some diehard fans who have never used anything else.

I guess riots break out all around the world?

I feel like this idea that people are just going to riot and do mass violence is some right wing fear.

Most people, most of the time, are pretty social cooperative creatures.

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

I won’t use a urinal unless it’s an emergency and no other options are available. They’re uncomfortable.

I remember some bar I was at once only had urinals, and I was like “what do you do if you gotta shit??”. Apparently the bathroom on the bottom floor had full stalls, but still. Yuck.

Parents often take time off from work to grieve. Classes are often disrupted when a student dies abruptly. This isn’t Skyrim where someone dies and forty seconds later it’s “Must be hearing things”. Plus, as I said, letting the kid die means the resources spend raising and educating them are wasted.

My point is that “oh if he dies it only affects the family” is stupid.

If I’m on my land I’m gonna do whatever I want. I’ll get drunk and do donuts on my lawn. Maybe I’ll set off 10 pounds of tannerite in my backyard because that’s what people do in the middle of nowhere.

[mean words] Edit: I take that back. I’m hangry. I don’t like rugged individualism but that was uncalled for

Should my mom not have allowed me to practice my drums in the barn because the audio was escaping the property and the neighbors could hear faint drumming in the middle of the day sometimes?

Non sequitur.

If it’s on private property who gives a shit. If your idiot son wants to build a structurally questionable tree house and the parents don’t do anything about it and he dies that’s on them.

it’s on all of us, because all the money and effort that went into educating and raising that kid is wasted. Plus the rippling effects outward from everyone who knew the kid grieving.

Also the more exceptions you have to rules, the more confusing it is and the more likely people are going to fuck it up.

“Always wear a hardhat on site” - easy. simple. minimal room for interpretation.

“Always wear a hardhat on site when any of the following conditions are true: [a, b, c, d] unless [e, f]” is going to lead to errors, and then people will get hurt.

People aren’t that smart. Especially when they’re not motivated, or distracted.

Looks pretty typical to me (longtime nyc resident). It’s rare to see trash, and graffiti is pretty uncommon. People sometimes think the subway is still like The Warriors where it’s just a wall of spraypaint, but not so much.

Software engineer.

Morning meeting that’s supposed to just be “what you did yesterday, what you’ll do today, and if you need help”. People fuck that up and go off on tangents. What should be a ten minute meeting takes 30.

Product owners at some point told you what the features to work on this month will be. For example, we need to add the ability for some reasons to bulk delete appointments.

Chat with product and other engineers about what that entails. Product probably won’t give complete, clear, requirements so you need to pull it out of them. (Hard delete or soft delete? Do you need an audit log? Are you sure with no take-backs you don’t need an undo? Do you want to notify anyone when it’s deleted? One email per request or per event? Do you have designs for that email? No? Of course not. And what do you want the UI to look like? If I “just put a button somewhere” we both know you won’t like it. Give me details or that blank check in writing.)

At some point sit down and make code changes to do the thing. Change the backend server code to accept your new request. Write automated tests. Change the frontend to make the request. Write more tests. Manually bang on it. Probably realize some requirements were missed (you guys know there’s a permissions system, right? I hooked this up to the existing can-delete permission. What do you mean CS doesn’t use permissions? You made them all superusers??)

Manually bang on it a little. Deploy it to dev or some non-production environment. Have product and other stakeholders look at it and sign off. Probably get feedback and either implement it, or convince them to do it “later” (or: never, because they’ll forget and it’s not actually important).

Get code approval from other engineers. Make changes as needed.

Merge and deploy. Verify in production.

Meanwhile, do code reviews for other people’s work. Context switch. Feels bad. Other guy is working on a progress report tool that’s in a whole other part of the code, so every time you look at it it’s a shifting of brain gears.

Also look at dependabot for libraries that need updating. Read release notes. Make changes if needed. Test. Pray.

Also periodic meetings to go over work in the backlog. A meeting to discuss how the team is doing that usually doesn’t produce results, but can be a vent session.

I imagine from the product owner it’s something like:

Get a mess of contradictory ideas from leadership. Try to figure out what they actually want and in what order. Manage their emotions because they have all the power and don’t like being told no or otherwise feeling bad.

Talk to customers and other users. Try to figure out what they want. They say things like “make it go faster” or “can you make the map bigger?”. There’s no map on the website.

Talk to engineering. They ask so many questions. Why can’t they just do the thing? They’re always going on about stuff that doesn’t seem important (like security and permissions and maintainability). This needs to go out Friday because the CEO wants it out.

Write tickets (a short document describing work to be done). People don’t read them. Or maybe don’t finish writing them, and leave a vague “as a user I want to be notified about changes to my project”, without specifying any details. (Notified how, Ryan??)

I don’t know what else they do.

Startups are a mess. Anyone who says they want to run the government like a startup should be banished from the land.

It’s kind of hard to take the NYT seriously after they’ve spent more than a decade failing to really take a stand against the right wing, but I guess better tepid and late than never?

North Carolina already was a blood soaked stain on US legitimacy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_massacre

I don’t drive anymore because I live someplace with transit and sidewalks, but when I drove I always signalled turns. Low effort, high safety.

People are kind of stupid and lazy, and if there’s no immediate benefit for doing something or punishment for skipping it, they’ll do whatever’s easiest. We’re all like this to some degree, in some contexts or other.

It is a little funny to me that some people just don’t have professional standards. I would make a good faith effort to respond completely to a work email because that’s the job. But I don’t think that’s it for a lot of people.

There’s a lot of ADHD and friends in the world, and a lot of it is untreated. They’re not skipping questions out of malice. They’re probably trying their best. Still failing, but trying. That counts for something.

A lot of people also don’t read well. They won’t likely show up on a texty medium like this, but they’re out there. It may be uncomfortable and embarrassing for them to try to read your email, especially if the level of diction is high and the vocabulary extensive. Most people are emotionally kind of fragile, and won’t put up with that shame for very long. I think that’s why a lot of people want to hop on a call or have a meeting when it could’ve just been an email. They can talk fine, but communicating in written words is harder.

Are you familiar with automated testing? From the subject line I thought this was going to be about that, but the body of the post is something else.