We’ve been saying that about new devs since there became a second generation of devs

Except when I was a new dev, it was blindly copying stuff from stack overflow

2024 was kind of a break. It wasn’t that bad (comparatively), a few things happened that brought us hope, a lot of things happened that suggest things are going to get much worse

Might be the best year of the decade, honestly

All of them, this is a QuickTime event. You have to feel out what they’re looking for. You have to hit the buttons in order and with the right timing

First - that sucks. Show empathy and active listening, see if they have more to say. Let them get it out

Next - you have to decide, are they more upset, or more stressed

Upset - story time, show sympathy. Keep it light on the details, and don’t try to draw comparisons - keep it at the emotional level.
Then advice time - again, keep it brief and vague

Stressed - advice, lay out options rapid fire and see if they latch onto any. If they don’t, story time - tell them about similar situations, without drawing emotional comparisons, where you got past it more easily than expected

That’s what always gets me. You can’t spend a billion dollars on yourself - you could live in the highest possible luxury, waited on hand and foot by the best, and you’re barely going to eat up half of it in a lifetime - even if your money earned no interest

They’re not even happy. They’re hated by many, idolized by others, and the rest want to leech off them. They don’t even have good relationships among their peers, it’s like a never ending dick measuring contest

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it

Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead

You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

Yeah, but like, everything is like that. The fact your not falling through the floor requires a similar explanation. The fact you can see requires a far more complex one

I remember a flashlight I had, where you could remove the reflector. I could see the little sunbeams coming off them, and I told my friend maybe I wanted to study light. He told me it’s just photons… Which later in life I realized says nothing, but at the time totally killed my enthusiasm

Magnets make sense to me though. Maybe since I’ve been playing with them since i can remember - maybe I can’t see or feel a magnetic field naturally, but I can feel it holding a magnet. Magnets make sense - they’re weird, but they make sense.

Light doesn’t… Our understanding of it is so clearly wrong, but sure let’s pretend it’s normal for something to be a wave that turns into a basic unit of energy when you look too closely. The universe loves inconsistency, right?

I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

You guys have numbers? I have the infinity sign on every new device within days

I just remember the day, as a software dev with a solid understanding of Blockchain, my older dev neighbor started explaining how NFTs worked

I thought he was confused or stupid or something.

“Wait, so like you have these super rare images, proof you own it on a Blockchain, and a link to the place they’re all publicly hosted?”

Him: “Yep”

“And the only use for these right now is as a profile picture?”

Him: Shrug, “yeah, people use them for discord and stuff”

“But… Couldn’t you just download the image and use it anyways?”

Him: “Yeah, it’s all publicly hosted”

And it was about then my brain locked up. I did multiple hours of research later, sure I had to be missing something

There’s many reasons people pirate - sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Some people would surely buy some games if piracy wasn’t on the table (assuming the terms were unacceptable to them), but I used to rewatch the same things and play the same games endlessly. I think the vast majority would do without

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest.

This seems to be our core difference. I don’t think capitalism is a moral system, and “enlightened self interest” only works with equity of opportunity and fierce competition - that’s not the world we live in. And even then, I don’t think it’s a very ethical moral framework

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

I’m not going to say pirating is some morally superior act, but there is something to be said for refusing to support companies that have user-hostile distribution

And I don’t think that act is cheapened by accessing the content anyways - yes, you are not contributing to the creators while enjoying their content. If you weren’t going to pay into the stream that they get a small part of anyways, then you’re not costing them anything - if you wouldn’t have bought it and didn’t, it’s the same result on their end either way

Ultimately it goes back to piracy being a problem of accessibility, and rejecting an inaccessible service is the moral part, I see the piracy in this context as just neutral

Source?

Steam, case in point. You can find cracked games fairly easily, there’s even games entirely lacking drm that could be passed around effortlessly

But steam is very convenient, the prices are reasonable, and they have good customer support. That’s enough that even people who pirate switch games buy pc games on the same device

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code

It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money

(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)

Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks

This is the world I want to live in

The world is absurd, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not