I think everywhere I’ve worked has said “we have 20% time for tech debt” but has never actually done that. It’s always “we need to ship this by end of week” and “the CEO wants us to add the thing we said we’d cut so we could make the deadline”.

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Right. You can’t pick the lesser evil in the election today, then go do nothing, and expect good outcomes.

Harm reduction has a place but it’s not the whole solution

Any modern robin hood would be vilified and most people would believe it.

Monogamy often allows some less healthy facets of people flourish. Sometimes people will be like “oh I’m just so jealous I can’t help it. I don’t like when he plays soccer on that co-ed community team, so I don’t let him”. Like, what. That’s so immature and untrusting.

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.

Every time I see this I think about opportunity costs. What got skipped in favor of this dubious effort?

Usually a brief “I just read/played/watched such-and-such”

If they know it, we can chat about it. If they don’t, and they’re interested, we can chat about it. Otherwise, the conversation moves on and the social rite is concluded successfully.

Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.

ICQ was a key part of my realization that most people are lazy, short-sighted, idiots.

Everyone I knew wanted to use AIM. ICQ had better features (offline messaging, style overrides, you could change your name without changing your account, file transfers worked better, etc etc). But no one cared.

It’s like how people won’t get off facebook or reddit. Sometimes you have to have a little inconvenience for the greater long term benefit.

Heh. A typo where I meant drive, but it’s funny so I’m going to leave it

Meanwhile, in the city I just get on the train. Going out and then having to drink your drunk/tired/etc self home is miserable.

I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

• I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
• there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
• a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
• I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
• more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
• stuff is open later.

Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

• it’s not constant noise
• I typically can’t hear my neighbors
• people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
• it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.

It’s kind of annoying and distracting. It makes me think they have some emotional damage (don’t we all?) and then I start wondering what else is going to break under stress.

A sincere apology and owning fault is a power move. Apologizing four times because the chair made a weird sound when you adjusted it makes you look sad and impotent.

I kind of hope that will have the bonus effect of making the ownership class ease up on return-to-office. Sure, have your executive meeting in-person. Oh shit, someone flew a drone in and it exploded, shooting nails everywhere and killing half the c-suite? Shit. Anyway. We’ll be working from home until at least they clear the blood out of the carpets.

(Though realistically, they’d make workers go in physically while being remote themselves. But maybe someone will bomb their house. No mercy for the ultra-rich.)

Maybe we should put the prosecutors to death instead.

As more people are laid off, “I gotta go to work” becomes less compelling.

People should organize. If management demands that people go back into the office for nonsense reasons (eg: control, spite), management should be removed. I don’t care if that’s because they resign, or because 20 of us showed up at their house just before dawn for a surprise party.

Meanwhile, the US is trying to go to 60 hour workweeks and 6-day workweeks.

Labor needs to organize, and the rich need to be broken.

I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.

Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.

You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.

These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.

Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.