Many years ago I had to explain to a coworker how progressive taxation works. He was like “that’s a great idea! We should do that! It’s stupid that now your pay goes up but you take home less because you get taxed more”

I had to tell him, yes it is a good idea. It’s how it works now. You don’t get more pay and suddenly your whole income is taxed more.

He’d had no idea

I did a lot of stupid stuff as a teenager but most of it is forgotten.

Someone tricked me into stealing my unique gloves in diablo2 once. Felt real stupid after but they just blocked me and I never saw them again. (I think it was that if you die when the item was being moved it drops onto the ground, so they told me to swap my gloves in a pvp fight and then killed me)

I had an ex partner get upset because I used a period at the end of an innocuous text. This is among the reasons why they are my least favorite ex. Just a mess of anxiety and arrogance, where they’d worry about bullshit but be completely convinced that they were right and their way of thinking about things was the only sensible way.

Unfortunately they’re still distantly connected to the friend group, but luckily I haven’t run into them in years.

I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

it’s the tens of millions of people who actively and aggressively support full-blown fascism

Since I don’t routinely hang around with stupid people, it’s easy to forget how profoundly stupid so many people are. Not just that they don’t know stuff, even though that’s a big factor as well. Just their ability to reason is toddler level. Like patrick in that meme with the wallet.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

I’m getting a friend a box of adhesive googly eyes.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

It’s also “No one tells me what to do. I tell you what to do.”

Not every law is just or sensible. “It’s illegal” is a far weaker claim than “it’s morally wrong” or similar. People conflate the two.

Neither. Cutting down a healthy tree for a little ritual seems extremely wasteful to me. I don’t care much about Xmas so I don’t have a fake tree, either. I do have lights up in the apartment, but they’re up year round. I like the colors.

It’s the only MMO I felt was good. Feels like a real game. No level or gear grind.

I didn’t do the latest expansion yet but I’ve done all the others.

That’s how I read it as well. People who say there’s no ethical consumption, and then act like all wrongs are equally wrong so they might as well do the worst thing.

I remember a bunch of coworkers leaving during COVID and I was like “ok but what’re you going to do after? It’s fucking boring where you’re moving to.”

I’m a Republican

In 2025? Why on earth? No Republican policy is good. Their policies don’t align with their marketing.

He’s not even in office until January , so anyone sincerely saying that has an extra layer of idiocy.

I buy music. Drm free. I don’t want to rent it from Spotify. It’s Bandcamp Friday today btw, where the people making the music get a bigger cut.

People get mad when things make them feel bad. They don’t want to fix anything they just don’t want to feel bad.

Yeah if AI was actually good you wouldn’t need to mandate it. No one was like “everyone here must use Google search”.

On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.

On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.

On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.

Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.