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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I think it depends on how often they’re coming up with dubious takes, and how often there are repeats.

    Like if you have to explain that gay people are just trying to live life, and that’s fixing misinformation they got as a youth, fine. Good, even. But if you have that talk and then have to have to again a month later because they “forgot” or picked up more bad ideas? Concerning.

    Friend of a friend was always getting talks to patch up his dicey world view, but then he’d go back to the same YouTube or shitty friends and come back two weeks later with a fresh batch of bad ideas. Really have to get to the root of the problem




  • People are emotional. They feel things, and then make up justifications for it afterwards. We all do this to some extent, in some contexts or others, but some people seem to do it the majority of the time.

    Someone who smokes and has a choice between admitting they fucked up, they’re hurting themselves and those around them, OR denying it so they’re just a persecuted innocent? A lot of people will go for the latter. It’s weakness and cowardice, but saying that won’t change their mind. If results are wanted we have to do the very arduous task of massaging their emotions and I kind of resent that thankless, endless, work. Even though I almost certainly am the same way about other things.

    Humans are a mess.






  • At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

    Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

    We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

    I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

    There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.



  • I kind of hope that will have the bonus effect of making the ownership class ease up on return-to-office. Sure, have your executive meeting in-person. Oh shit, someone flew a drone in and it exploded, shooting nails everywhere and killing half the c-suite? Shit. Anyway. We’ll be working from home until at least they clear the blood out of the carpets.

    (Though realistically, they’d make workers go in physically while being remote themselves. But maybe someone will bomb their house. No mercy for the ultra-rich.)