“request desktop site” usually gets rid of the app nag.

I never post there anymore but there’s a lot of useful stuff from the old days.

I think if I was making a game I would really strive to make it so every upgrade is meaningful and easily noticed.

I liked pillars of eternity, but I didn’t like trying to think about if 3% more damage was even going to survive rounding.

Imagine a context where the reader is looking at the news for the first time that day. They think they missed news in the morning, perhaps the US starting aggressions, and now China has dropped another bomb.

I’m sure you can imagine such a scenario

Because I thought China had literally bombed the US for a very tense moment before I finished reading the headline. Especially because of how the words wrapped. I didn’t need that stress.

Can we please not write headlines like that when we’re on the verge of ww3 and literal bombs might be dropped on the US in the coming months?

Cool. Fuck Microsoft

I wouldn’t do it based on join time. Age doesn’t always map to quality, and it might encourage people to make sleeper accounts to age up.

I would do it based on a graph of trust.

Let’s say you’re user 0. You trust yourself. You can then invite or vouch for a user. If they misbehave, it should reflect badly on you. If they post good content, you should share some of the glory. If one of those users invites someone, the good and bad flow upstream.

People no one has vouched for have very little power. You can filter them out with a toggle.

You’d be able to see the web of behavior. If someone keeps inviting or endorsing assholes, then they’re a problem.

Endorsing is different than upvote. You can upvote whatever, but endorsing is saying you trust this person and you’re willing to put your own reputation and access on the line.

Something like that.

I can’t tell if people who do that kind of thing are lazy and malicious, actually stupid, or stressed beyond their capacity to be decent.

I do think a lot of people are actually only semi literate, and asking them to write is legitimately difficult and embarrassing for them.

I had an interview a few weeks ago (one of like 3 this year) where it was revealed they still write these.

They asked how we kept all the stuff organized at my last job. All the cucumber stuff. I said we just kept the tests next to the file they’re testing- foo.py has a sibling test_foo.py- and we didn’t find much value in adding extra layers. If you want to test the API returns 403 when you request another user’s file, you can just write like

def test_403_when_requesting_other_user_file() -> None:
  response = requests.get("whatever/etc")
  assert response.status_code == 403

You can be pretty to the point.

We used docstrings to explain non-obvious things. Swagger shows the API docs in a nice webpage for anyone curious and authorized.

He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.

I kind of intensely dislike that whole… natural language wrapper thing. It adds at least one whole extra layer to maintain for no real benefit. No one non technical is going to read it. If they were some magic competent person, they could just read regular doc strings.

But on the flipside, it’s hard for me to stay concentrated while at home.

While I believe that is true for you, I don’t believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.

The office is super distracting for many people.

Oh, I read your thing backwards then.

I can’t imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).

Can’t relate to it. And I’m a very social person that likes interacting with people.

Every day I’m a little surprised there’s no news story of some workers beating their “no, you have to come into the office” manager to death. They’ve got means, motive, and opportunity, and it’s extra funny because if they’d been allowed to work at home they wouldn’t have at least two of those.

But really we’re ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.

Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming “you made this possible” until they can’t even cry anymore.

Working from home doesn’t appeal to the emotional needs of fragile managers.

100%. I think a lot about one of my friends when trying to think about that kind of user. Smart lady. Advanced degree. Has her life together. Would absolutely not want to try to install an OS. Wouldn’t even know how to start.

But I’m confident if I handed her a Linux laptop, she’d use it just the same as a Mac or Windows machine.

Right. Inertia is the metaphor I used to express that idea.

I don’t think that’s actually very many people. Not for their personal computers. Most people don’t run much more than a web browser, if they don’t play games.

Good. Fuck Microsoft. No regrets about running Linux for the past few years.

It’s not the PC games keeping people so much. Proton solved a lot of that problem. It’s inertia.

Most people don’t care about things. They just don’t. Their brains just don’t have the juice.

My leading hypothesis is “management is stupid”. It explains a lot of this sort of thing.