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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • This is a good answer.

    At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

    We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

    Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.


  • I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

    Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

    I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.













  • There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

    One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

    There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.


  • This pains me.

    One time in a tabletop DND game, the party wiped over bad rolls. It was partly my fault for over tuning the fight, but also bad luck. The party had a potion that was like “you can make an extra full attack this turn, all your hits do an extra 1d10, and you’re hasted. Afterwards, you are paralyzed for 1d4+1 turns”.

    Fighter drinks it and proceeded to miss like 6 attacks in a row. I think he needed to roll above like 13 and just couldn’t do it.

    This is also why I prefer games that give players more tools to tell the dice to fuck off, like fate points in Fate or willpower in CofD.





  • Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

    Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.