A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.

Time for the sartre quote again.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity

The assholes know what they are doing. They know they are hypocritical. They don’t care. You cannot engage in conservatives/anti-semites/fascists/et al with reason because they will not argue in good faith. They are bad people. Selfish, fearful, people.

All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price

Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.

If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷

Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.

Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead

Yeah my friend is dating a Google recruiter and he overhears some absurd offers. Like, a reasonable person could retire on a few years at that salary.

I have a hypothesis that rich people are bad at money

I’ve read that windows 11 uses react (a JavaScript view framework) for parts of the UI, and that seems insane to me. JavaScript isn’t a great language. It’s popular because it runs in the browser. The windows desktop is not a browser.

If more people had a backbone and spoke out / refused to implement shitty stuff, this wouldn’t happen.

Thus, it’s more than just the web developers 😄 . Product needs to have a backbone to stand up to their boss, too. I fought really hard to get rid of the mouse tunnels at that job, but was blocked by product and one of the directors of eng. It was mostly [office] political nonsense

Also, many design choices are entirely on the web developer.

Not at most of the companies I’ve worked out. There’s a design person or team. Eng can give feedback, but it’s pretty rare for them to be given a blank check.

I’m not gonna change my opinion until websites become usable again, you’re wasting your time on me.

That’s fine. Some web developers are morons, but some of everyone are morons. We can partially agree.

Most web developers are morons in the sense that most people are morons. They’re not especially moronic.

A lot of problems on the web aren’t coming from the developers. They’re management pushing for stuff.

Like, at an old company the UI had really bad mouse tunnels (mouse over menus and sub menus that close if you mouse out). Terrible interface. But someone in management liked it and no one would approve changing it. Easy to look at it and say we’re all morons, but most of the stupid there was from leadership.

Capitalism is a root cause. Let’s get rid of that, or if that’s too extreme that severely regulate it.

Jail all of Facebook’s decision makers. Seize it (investors get nothing), and either shut it down or revert it to a simple message board. Require moderators. Ban the trash (eg: sovereign citizens groups). Remember that time they tried to see if they could make people sad by changing the algorithm? Find those people and ruin them.

Pay labor more. Work them less. I’d just do basic income, personally.

Make more walkable spaces. Fuck car culture. You don’t meet anyone when you drive. Everywhere could have local spots where you see regulars.

More free public events. Brooklyn does “movies under the stars”. There’s also like yoga classes, bird watching, concerts. More of that.

Offer free education for anyone who applies in good faith. Offer classes on a range of subjects, but honestly I think a lot of people would benefit from lessons and practice on “how to talk to people” and public speaking.

Kind of a ramble. But I think if you leave capitalism in place, you’re going to have problems. “Everything has to make the owners as much money as possible, immediately” isn’t a formula for a good life.

I don’t know man, i think the simpler answer of “capitalism and profit motive create incentives that don’t yield good outcomes” is compelling. Okcupid was better and more feature rich before Match bought it.

There is some user error on the apps, though, as you say.

I would prefer basic, subtle, black. I don’t want rainbows and lights. I’m very function over form.

I’d also rather play a game on medium settings where it runs flawlessly and doesn’t make the fans go hard, than at high settings with worse performance.

Yeah I think people are too stupid on average to understand. Like how kids think pouring water from a short wide glass into a tall glass means there’s more water, people think one long line means longer wait times.

I feel like education could mitigate this but at least in the US our education isn’t a priority

Perhaps a universal icon for “pick language” would be helpful, like we have a icons for volume control and share. Good luck getting it adopted though.

For some reason getting a passport is like $200, plus whatever it takes to get the required supporting documents (eg: birth certificate, the photo). That’s not much by many metrics, but a lot of people in the US just don’t have $200 to spend.

Fine needs to be much bigger. All the decision makers that approved it need to be removed and barred from working in the industry

So many places seem to be run by idiots, if your metrics are other than “personal enrichment”.

Like, one of my old jobs, the CEO laid off almost everyone and is now banging hard on the “return to office” drum. Like, my guy, how is making people do a 2 hour commute going to help? It’s a small company, he knows most of the people live that far away. And then they go into the office, and they end up doing these like hour+ long lunches. Or they leave early for drinks.

It’s fucking stupid. It’s the CEO driving with his emotions. He wants to feel like a big business man with an office, and he wants to have fun socializing. Idiot. Fun guy to hang out with, but he’s making pants on head stupid business decisions. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

You have to remember it’s not about facts, it’s about feelings. As I always say, we’re all susceptible to that to some extent, but the republicans have it bad.