I’ve sent this to many coworkers.

I wanted to introduce a jar where every time you sent a useless “hello” message you had to put double whatever you put in last time (starting at $1). People are empty headed idiots maybe losing +$1000 will wake them up.

Some CS rep said to me the other day when I was asking about a bogus charge on my account, “thank you for being part of our family”

I said “family doesn’t usually charge money, but go on”

I got a partial refund.

I imagine if all you do is watch films, you get tired of common stuff. You’ve seen it before. But if you only watch films sometimes, some of that is still interesting to you.

Kind of like how some video game nerds will be only “only double soj 2x blan Blah is viable” but like other builds do fine for everything except some optional mega bosses

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

I think most people are kind of bad with money, and I think that scales with income.

I think a lot about some old coworkers (six figure salary). We all wanted to go out for a party after work. A bunch of then paid like $80 for a car. I paid $3 for a subway ride. Got there at the same time.

Maybe that’s not so much “bad at money” exactly as have incomprehensible to me values.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

No one needs more than 5 million dollars. That’s enough for a comfortable life without laboring every again.

If they make a shit load of money doing concerts, that money needs to keep moving. Tax it so it can go into schools and infrastructure and such. They don’t need a mega yacht. People are starving and suffering from problems money would solve.

At least twice now I’ve had math nerds get really mad when I suggested “if people are misreading it, add parentheses”. Very much skinner “it’s the children who are out of touch”.

Some people would rather be right than understood, I guess.

No one’s going to die because you write x = c + (a * b) even though those parentheses aren’t strictly needed.

Much of this slots into time outside work rather than the workday itself.

• walk a different route to a destination
• pick an algorithm and walk with no destination (eg: straight until you hit a light not in your favor, then turn. Works in urban envs)
• go somewhere you don’t normally go. Eg: library, different coffee shop, that little art store you always see
• go to the library. Walk along the shelf with eyes closed and pick a book at random.
• pick a genre of music you never listen to. Listen to it.
• cook or prepare a meal unlike your normal fare
• go to a thrift store. Buy a cheap article of clothing you wouldn’t normally wear. Wear it. See how it feels
• find free or cheap art (music, theater, whatever) in your area. Go.
• journal. Spend a few minutes writing down your day’s details
• hit wikipedia’s random article button. Read it.

I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

For work, a Mac and vscode. I don’t love vscode but it’s what everyone uses.

Well, some of them develop on windows with like notepad++ and it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s no ci/cd, linting, or testing, so whenever I check out someone else’s branch it’s full of red squiggles.

My personal is pop!_os Linux where I’m also using vscode because I’m too cheap to pay for pycharm.

In my imagination, some sort of referral/voucher system might work. A invites B, B invites C. C turns out to suck. Ban C, discredit B heavily and discredit A lightly. Enough discredit and you get banned or can’t invite more people.

The other day I had to use a browser without any plugins to go to a site, and it was unrecognizable with all the ads. When I normally visit it’s clean and simple. These ads pushed content under the fold. Horrible.

Many years ago I had to explain to a coworker how progressive taxation works. He was like “that’s a great idea! We should do that! It’s stupid that now your pay goes up but you take home less because you get taxed more”

I had to tell him, yes it is a good idea. It’s how it works now. You don’t get more pay and suddenly your whole income is taxed more.

He’d had no idea