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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.














  • 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.






  • Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?

    The answer to all of those I think is no.

    There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.

    There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.

    That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.


  • Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist.

    Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.

    Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”