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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In the US I think it varies a lot from town to town and teacher to teacher.

    I had a history teacher in like 10th grade (age ~15). He spent the first bulk of a lesson one day telling us stuff. Everyone was wrapped up in what a good story this was about whatever. Then, in the end of the class he was like “everything I just told you is bullshit. It’s alterations, omissions, and lies to make the story sound better for the victors.”

    I don’t remember what the actual subject was, but it was a good lesson in not blindly accepting what a charismatic guy in a suit tells you.



  • Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

    Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it’s better.

    Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn’t understand software development decided that we don’t do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

    Should we compensate people well enough so they don’t leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!







  • 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.


  • I found feeld to be really disappointing. As a man who doesn’t date men, it was pretty bad.

    I’d get about one match every 3 months. I didn’t pay for it, so that might be a factor. But I think the big factor is there are a lot of men, and the algorithm doesn’t show me to that many people.

    Of the matches I did get, about 80% were instant duds. Either no reply at all, or a bad one. I remember this one woman whose handle was like “boobz”. After like three attempts to start a conversation about normal topics (books, music, the city) I asked something tepid about her boobs. Something like if she liked when people touched them. She got mad. “How dare you sexualize this conversation” or something like that. I was just like, I tried other gambits and you didn’t even half ass a reply, and you have it in your name and profile picture. What do you want? I didn’t say that to her. I just unmatched. But like come on.

    The next ten percent I’d ask a normal polite question like “so what music do you like seeing live?” and they’d reply sexually. Like, “oh daddy what music should I listen to?” Or “I just want to hear the rhythm of you slapping my ass”. Okay. Strange but not the worst.

    And the last ten percent were just normal people behaving normally. I had some nice dates and I’m still friend with one. Incidentally all of them said they’d just installed the app and hadn’t been on it long.

    So yeah. Feeld kind of sucks.


  • Used hinge, tinder, okcupid, and maybe a couple others. I’m a guy who doesn’t date men, 30s, in a large urban area, average looks and fitness.

    I found I could get about a date a week if I put in effort. Most people aren’t putting in effort. Most of your effort is going to go into the void. You just have to accept that most people kind of suck and aren’t going to respond. But just reading their profile and sending a message like a normal person puts you well above average.

    Many people seem to just half ass it and I don’t understand why. Like, their profile says they love NK Jemisen. You write that you love her books and ask if they read her latest. They write back with “no”, and of message, no follow up. Like how do you expect that to work out favorably? If you don’t have time, don’t respond. If you’re not interested, unmatch. A dead end reply just wastes everyone’s time.

    The apps themselves are not focused on good outcomes. They want money. That doesn’t always mean giving you the best match right away. But sometimes it works out anyway.


  • 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.)







  • Mouse over is a bad interaction, except for maybe showing tooltips. You can’t do it on a phone. You’re going to create mouse tunnels (where the user accidentally mouses out and closes the menu). And yet I see them all the time.

    Double click is kind of a bad interaction, too. A naive user looking at the device isn’t going to Intuit “if I push this button twice rapidly something different will happen”. There’s no double right click or double dual click. Nor is there a triple click. It never should have become a standard interaction.