People are making these decisions. Shitty people. And engineers are implementing it.

Can’t we stop them? Why can’t we stop them? I’m so tired of people going out of their way to make things worse. I just want to backhand someone

I had an argument about this with a friend once. I was saying if we just abolish the police, private enterprise will probably step in to fill the gap. I don’t want that. I don’t want amazon offering policing services (as part of Prime. vomit).

I think the police need to be split up into smaller institutions, and have a lot less murder powers.

Someone needs to address the “Someone broke into my house and stole my TV” problem, without a profit motive and with accountability.

There should be something to address “My neighbor is screaming at his wife and I think he’s hitting her” that doesn’t involve some low empathy assholes with guns rolling up to mock the woman.

I don’t know how to fix this.

The guys in those hypothetical lynch mobs are the cops today.

At least in this scenario you could get your buds and shoot back at the klan fuckers, maybe.

I looked it up, it’s $15 currently. Suburban NJ to Manhattan.

$15 is still kind of a lot when you’re a kid

Part of why I moved to the city was wanting to escape the car based nightmare of the suburbs. Couldn’t do much of anything without a car or an extremely risky walk.

I could have walked a mile to the train station with no sidewalks , and then paid $20 for a ticket into the city on a train that stops at like 10pm, but all of that sucks. I stayed inside and played a lot of video games.

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.

Also today we do have systems like social security.

Not for much longer at the rate things are going.

There’s a shared theme with like all of humanity’s woes: people don’t care that much.

From pollution to injustice to shitty websites, if people cared just a little more the problem would be dramatically reduced or even eliminated.

But so many people are just apathetic. Overwhelmed and checked out.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.

We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.

I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

• Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
• Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
• Get them to trust you.
• Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.

I feel like in this kind of thing it’s not enough for the bigots to lose the case. Something needs to happen so they don’t just turn around and do more of the same. Like, the people on the board that made this decision should be removed and barred from holding office.

Seems like a recipe for subtle bugs and unmaintainable systems. Also those Eloi from the time machine, where they don’t know how anything works anymore.

Management is probably salivating at the idea of firing all those expensive engineers that tell them stuff like “you can’t draw three red lines all perpendicular in yellow ink”

I’m also reminded of that ai-for-music guy that was like “No one likes making art!”. Soulless husk.

I pray that Saint Luigi will visit some of these groups.

i feel like we should… do something about Liberty Counsel, then?

Like, the right wing protests abortion clinics and murders people. Why don’t we find where Liberty Counsel’s leadership lives and… uh… you know, we just wanna talk to him.

He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years – reduced on Friday after an appeal – for organising road blocks on the M25.

This is exactly what myself and many others said would happen. If you punish peaceful (but disruptive) protests as hard as, say, murdering the CEO of exxon, you might as well go for the murder.

I don’t really want to live in a world where vigilantes are murdering the entire board of oil companies, but i also don’t want to live in a world with big oil companies destroying our climate.