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.

Python.

• It’s pretty easy to get going.
• the debugger is very good. Being able to put a breakpoint and interactively fuss with it is so much better than print statements and crying
• you can (and should) use type annotations, but they are optional
• it’s on most machines already, but you don’t want to fuck with the system install of it. On Linux and Mac you can use pyenv or similar if the system came with a version you can’t use. (Don’t teach anyone python 2.)
• the standard library is very good.

You could also do JavaScript, as that’ll work on any modern browser. However, JavaScript is a deeply cursed language. It’s really bad at like every level.

I don’t recommend it unless your top priority is “it is definitely available everywhere” and “these are future web developers”.

120 feet seems pretty far. I guess you could shout, awkwardly.

SCP to prod, or ssh in and copy paste. Devops only removed write access to prod machines this month, and people complained. (No, we don’t have docker)

I think they used Amazon CodeCommit for a while, but I don’t know what that’s like.

I’m getting a friend a box of adhesive googly eyes.

This almost makes me appreciate my current job, where most stuff has been in place for years and any changes take forever.

It’s kind of a bummer that it’s going to take like six months to add a linter, and they only started using git like last year.

Many people need to accept that they are not perfect, and be open to learning. Instead, many people lash out. Gotta protect their ego.

I’ve tried both. I think part of it is friction from little behaviors that I expect to be like Google sheets but aren’t. I don’t even know what they are until I hit some keys and excel does the “wrong” (but probably reasonable) thing.

I feel like Google sheets is a better experience than Excel, at least for my personal usage. I’m not enterprise though, and not trying to run it like a database or anything crazy.

Colloquially, racism means prejudice based on the perception of someone’s “race” (ie: ancestry, physical characteristics such as skin tone).

That covers things like assuming a black man knows about gangs and rap based only on their skin color.

There’s also the institutional level where individuals might not really think or feel anything about race, but it still is a factor. Stuff like closing polling places in predominantly black neighborhoods, or individual police officers who are given a quota and only assigned to black neighborhoods. Housing in the US has a long history intersecting with the idea of race. “The Color of Law” was a pretty good read on it.

Wikipedia puts it nicely:

Racism can also be said to describe a condition in society in which a dominant racial group benefits from the oppression of others, whether that group wants such benefits or not.

That seems like how it is in the US too.

“Racism is only a thing very bad evil people do. I’m not an very bad evil person. Thus I cannot have done racism.”

It can get pretty crowded in some places at some times. Major transit hubs like Penn station, herald square, times square, all get pretty dense.

I’ve been working from home so I don’t need to go to the busier parts at often.

Neither. Cutting down a healthy tree for a little ritual seems extremely wasteful to me. I don’t care much about Xmas so I don’t have a fake tree, either. I do have lights up in the apartment, but they’re up year round. I like the colors.

It’s the only MMO I felt was good. Feels like a real game. No level or gear grind.

I didn’t do the latest expansion yet but I’ve done all the others.

Do I just get one shot or can I keep trying until I get it right?

Basically anything that reduces Republican power in the US is probably a win overall.

That’s how I read it as well. People who say there’s no ethical consumption, and then act like all wrongs are equally wrong so they might as well do the worst thing.

There might be meetups near you doing games. There’s one here in NYC that’s very friendly I’ve been to.

I buy music. Drm free. I don’t want to rent it from Spotify. It’s Bandcamp Friday today btw, where the people making the music get a bigger cut.

People get mad when things make them feel bad. They don’t want to fix anything they just don’t want to feel bad.

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.