Capitalism is giving bad outcomes. Labor is divorced from the results of their work, and people who contribute little to nothing (or less than nothing) grow wealthy.

We don’t need to go all the way to full communism in one shot, but I’d like to think most of us can agree the current system is unacceptable

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.

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

I had the same thought, mostly because distracted driving is such a present threat that it’s hard to find humor in it.

But whatever. Someone’s probably going to be reading this while driving. Please stop.

I rarely use a cart anymore because I do more frequent, shorter, trips and just bring a tote bag. But the other day I went with someone to a store and we used a cart. I returned it to the cart return place and she was like “good. You can learn a lot about someone by what they do with the cart”

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”.

True. I mentioned my whiteness in my comment intentionally, but maybe I should have made it more explicit as you have.

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

I got questioned by the police when waiting for the train in New York (state) once. I’m a white guy, though I had really long hair at the time. They came up and said someone had reported someone suspicious. I was like, well, I’m waiting for the train and my friends. They were like someone saw you looking in that car suspiciously. I said, that’s my car. They asked if I had proof so I opened the door with the key.

Then my friend and her shitty little brother showed up. The brother yells “YO YOU GOT MY WEED??”

Luckily the cops realized that was an idiot 13 year old white kid, and they left.

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.

Every day I’m happy I live somewhere I don’t need a car. Even if housing costs were $1000/mo more (they’re not), I’d be getting something worth having for that money.

One time I saw critically acclaimed author N. K. Jemisin give a talk, and someone asked her about climate change. She said something like, “There’s a few hundred people responsible for this problem, and we know where they live.” The crowd burst into applause and the moderator scrambled to distance the org from this idea. Good times.

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.