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

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  • People are emotional. They feel things, and then make up justifications for it afterwards. We all do this to some extent, in some contexts or others, but some people seem to do it the majority of the time.

    Someone who smokes and has a choice between admitting they fucked up, they’re hurting themselves and those around them, OR denying it so they’re just a persecuted innocent? A lot of people will go for the latter. It’s weakness and cowardice, but saying that won’t change their mind. If results are wanted we have to do the very arduous task of massaging their emotions and I kind of resent that thankless, endless, work. Even though I almost certainly am the same way about other things.

    Humans are a mess.




  • I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they’d tried to do went sideways.

    But I’ve also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn’t read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like “wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like… Bite people?”. My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn’t retain anything about the different factions, so they didn’t really understand anyone’s motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.









  • 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.


  • Premature ejaculation is pretty common. I don’t have stats on how common on hand.

    I searched and found one plausible looking site that said

    The study collected data from 491 men, as some were excluded for not using the stopwatch or providing incomplete information. A total of 4,000 sexual events were timed, with a mean frequency of eight events per couple over the four weeks. The results showed that the average time from penetration to ejaculation was 5.4 minutes, with a wide range from 0.55 to 44.1 minutes.

    https://www.psypost.org/average-sex-time-psychology-research/

    There’s probably more data out there if you want to go down this tangent hole.

    The other part is that some men don’t do foreplay or oral or anything else, and that also makes them bad partners. Like, if you stick it in and cum after a dozen thrusts then go to sleep, you’re probably not making your partner happy, and it’s probably not a good sex tape either.



  • Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

    Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

    I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

    Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.


  • Right. No fast change will undo decades of damage.

    I guess I just want more concrete plans. Like, universal basic income, no more wealth exploits (eg: low interest loans against stocks, no tax), changing the election system to something like ranked choice, uncapping the number of representatives, statehood for DC and peurto rico… now I’m just rattling off ideas.

    Maybe policy can come later, and trying to nail it down would lead to infighting and failure? But it needs to happen eventually.