Yeah I think DND 3e had some wacky stuff with templates. Big effective level penalties if I recall for most of them

People are emotionally driven. Admitting something scary is more emotionally taxing than pretending it’s fake.

It’s not really that different from like

my_get_mock = Mock(side_effect=Some exception("oh no"))
result = some_func(http_getter=my_get_mock)

There’s many ways of writing bad code and tests, but mocks and patches aren’t always a bad tool. But sure, you can definitely fuck things up with them.

Javascript has mocking with jest: https://jestjs.io/docs/mock-functions

There’s an example there of mocking our axios (a common library for network requests, a la python requests)

It’s been a long time since I’ve used java, but mockito exists: https://site.mockito.org/javadoc/current/org/mockito/Mockito.html#2

(Usage note for anyone unfamiliar, but despite the name java and JavaScript are radically different languages.)

I vaguely remember Java also has mocking libraries, as does JavaScript. (Though JavaScript isn’t a language I’d hold up as the ideal.)

with patch("some_file.requests.get", side_effect=SomeException("oh no")):
  result = func_using_requests()

Though not every language makes mocking as easy, and multiple responsibilities in a single function can quickly get messy.

I used to be better at math and coding. If I pulled up my old project euler solutions I’m not sure I’d understand them anymore.

Pretty much every time I go to one of the local grocery stores I see a crew of firefighters roll up in their truck buying food.

I just link people to good posts I find on here.

You’re not going to get a typical apathetic person to change anything.

…what? Go do something else instead of watching YouTube-style content then. Read a book. Take up knitting. Do crosswords.

You can live a full life without Internet videos.

• Bandcamp
• see who tours together. If you like A and they open for B, you might like B
• indie record labels
• see who’s playing at local venues.

Oof. I’ve had places that the pipeline was getting long. At one of my previous jobs I made it so all the tests could run locally, and we were keeping the full build as slow as possible.

We also didn’t do any browser tests (eg: selenium) because those tend to be slow and most people are bad at making them stable.

It’s important to know whats worth testing.

That’s the plan. Unfortunately the market is kind of meh. Lots of AI slop. Lots of getting ghosted.

There’s a lot of fear at my job about changing code. I’ve been trying to tell them to start writing automated tests. Or at least a linter to check for syntax errors. They’re all like “ooh that sounds hard maybe next quarter”

Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to manually test everything.

I just unilaterally added checks to code I have ownership over, but anything shared I’m getting “maybe in two quarters we can prioritize this” from management.

My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”

On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.

That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.

The thing you need to weigh is the inconvenience of them putting in the effort to become tech savvy. That’s a big inconvenience. So, the inconvenience of dealing with ads and whatnot looks much smaller from their perspective.

Yeah, I can follow the train of thought. They don’t know that like an hour of reading now will save them decades of pain, I guess.

Like, there’s degrees. Learning how to compile Firefox from source with custom changes is way more work than “search: how do I get rid of ads? Search: best adblocker. Click install on ublock.”

Which brings me back to what I was trying to say earlier. People imagine dealing with these problems is way harder than it actually is, so they don’t even look.

Something like this is coming up at work. They’re like “oh it’s going to be like weeks of work to get a linter for our code” and I’m like “it’s fifteen minutes please just let me help you”.

I dunno, a lot of the people in my life that aren’t tech savvy are inconvenienced. The ads pop up and block stuff. But they don’t know how to do anything about it.

I guess it’s easier to just do nothing and suffer than learn what adblock is. It’s easier to use the shitty defaults.

Well that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Maybe read the study more carefully when I have more time

Many people have a sort of learned helplessness. They don’t really know computer fundamentals, they get scared and stressed so they stop thinking, and then they don’t want to deal with it.

People aren’t rational. They’re emotional.