I feel like, if there’s stuff happening out there that you haven’t heard of today, it’s because you’re not looking. We’re assaulted daily by what everybody is up to across the world. This tweet tried really hard to be deep and profound and instead, to me, kind of sounds like somebody who is just generally out of touch and got completely blown away to learn that desk bikes exist and kids love Minecraft.

Nobody in this goddamned world has ever heard the term “preventative” I swear to God.

You don’t brush your teeth when you start getting cavities. You brush to prevent them.

You don’t install seatbelts after you’ve been ejected from your car. You get a car that already has seatbelts and airbags.

Vaccines, healthy foods, routine hardware maintenance (cars, computers, etc), exercise and stretches… You’re supposed to do and get things BEFORE you have the problems they solve.

We really really need to get into the habit, as a species, of trying to prevent bad things before they happen.

This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.

Money.

Capitalism.

Line go up - Forever.

It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.

Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.

If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0

• Video Game Randomizers
  • And their decomp partners
• Mod Communities
• Free Digital Art Programs
• Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
  • And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.

It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.

You can’t logically argue your way out of bigotry. They don’t care whether they’re actually correct or not about trans issues. They already wanted to harm us and remove us from society where possible, and will find any reason to do so. See: the bathroom debates.

I’d rather people just stood up for us at all than act like they need to make good points in order for us to exist. You’re all playing kickball and we’re the ball.

Capitalism

There are too many people on the Internet (and likely also generally the world) who don’t know how successful sex strikes have historically been, and it shows.

This is exactly right. Taking obviously thoughtless statements/insults seriously is a stupid move. It gives a bit more life to lies and accepts completely baseless criticisms as debatable. In debate club you might earn a lot of points. In front of a bully, you’re reacting exactly how they want you to react. You’re giving them the attention they want. Hitting the bully back is common sense. And that’s why they’re whining. The bully always cries when you fight back. Don’t dish out shit if you can’t take it.

I don’t disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.

The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.

Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn’t break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we’re not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.

When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you’re fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it’s equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

I’ve done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn’t anymore.

Guys… This is not a complicated discussion. I’m a trans woman. I’ve been the man. And now I’ve been the woman. I’m telling you without question I’m picking the fucking bear. Men are scary motherfuckers. A sizeable number of you are cruel, calculating, and downright uncaring. If you’re debating women about why they’d pick a potentially dangerous animal to be alone with in the woods instead of you, you have entirely missed the point.

Go talk to every woman you know in your social circles and in your family, and ask them if they have been assaulted or sexually assaulted by men. The number of them that says yes to that question is going to be depressing. Some of them might even confide in you that they’ve been raped. My own sister didn’t tell me until I asked her why she was so upset with my brother one time. She had recently been raped by a boyfriend and when men got angry around her she’d flip out. Those acts, when inflicted on you, poison your default view of your fellow man. If you can’t imagine a man being more dangerous than a bear, then you’ve never had to.

A bear can’t break my trust. A bear can’t gaslight me into thinking all the shitty things he does are because he loves me. And if I told someone I got attacked by a bear, at least they’d believe me. They wouldn’t need to bring out a bear assault kit to prove it. The bear is predictable. Men are not.

Some stay dry and others feel the pain

The term AI being used by corporations isn’t some protected and explicit categorization. Any software company alive today, selling what they call AI, isn’t being honest about it. It’s a marketing gimmick. The same shit we fall for all the time. “Grass fed” meat products aren’t actually 100% grass fed at all. “Healthy: Fat Free!” foods just replace the fat with sugar and/or corn syrup. Women’s dress sizes are universally inconsistent across all clothing brands in existence.

If you trust a corporation to tell you that their product is exactly what they market it as, you’re only gullible. It’s forgivable. But calling something AI when it’s clearly not, as if the term is so broad it can apply to any old if-else chain of logic, is proof that their marketing worked exactly as intended.

My friend and I post cute pictures of animals or characters to each other throughout the day.

Only one I can give you is bisexual girlfriend. Take it or leave it

By choice

I don’t have a more polite way of putting this, and as a woman I just can’t sympathize.

She fucked around and found out.

What was she expecting? I’m going to snoop into my boyfriend’s most intimate moments with their ex, unprompted, and… THEN WHAT? CRY ABOUT IT? Your girlfriend is a dumbass. She hurts herself and then she takes it out on you? Not a single bit of this is your fault. If she’s giving you grief, ignore her or exit the relationship if she can’t get over it. Holy fuck I’m annoyed by this story.

GUIs are a useful tool to give common users an accessible way to understand how they’re interacting with technology. They’re best utilized,I think, when the point of the technology is to be viewed. Like imagine you had to browse and launch Netflix shows in a terminal. That would be incredibly annoying.

In contrast, its really goddamn slow to perform routine server maintenance and commands through a GUI. I save so much time managing my servers through CLI, scripting, and automated tasks. Almost everything I’m dealing with is text based information.

Quite literally you are your brain, trying to account for the entire body and mind as the self simultaneously. But you may catch yourself thinking or saying things like “I can’t wrap my brain around this.” Isn’t that odd? Your brain refers to itself as my brain. Is that a linguistic issue or is your sense of perspective off?

“Don’t you have a heart?” Why do we imply that our sense of compassion is only located in an organ that just pumps blood? That clearly can’t be the case.

We know cases where someone gets a brain tumor and suddenly becomes violent or unfeeling. When the brain is damaged either during life or during gestation, we know that we can lose all manner of things: cognition, motor skills, memory, emotions, etc. It’s all the brain.

What confuses the issue is everything the brain is attached to. What I think all conscious humans do is try to make sense of the mind-body connection. I feel tired, that’s not just my brain feeling tired. I can feel tired in every single part of my body independently or all together. “I” am the brain. If I lose an arm, I don’t lose my sense of self. But losing important functions can damage the self I’ve constructed of myself. If I lose my eyesight I will be a very different person when I’m unable to visually enjoy video games, movies, art, nature. But clearly blind people still have a self. If it sits behind their eyes, will it move? Adapt to their ears?

All this to say, your self is self constructed. It’s malleable. But make no mistake that the source of where self and consciousness are maintained is the brain.