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

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  • 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’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

    Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

    But…

    spoiler

    You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.

    Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.




  • Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

    SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

    You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

    It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

    You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

    It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

    You can do transactions.

    There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.


  • Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

    It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

    But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.


  • There are some people who want to be wealthy to the tune of flaunting it, making other people figuratively or literally bow down to them. Those people should not be allowed to have power.

    If I was somehow a billionaire, I like to think I’d be spending my money on socially useful stuff. More libraries. More infrastructure. Housing. Can an ultra rich person essentially run public housing and transit, at least on a city-wide scale? Probably. but the kind of person who gets to be ultra rich is probably an asshole.