There’s a recurring problem where the people who make decisions aren’t the people who should make decisions. And many of the people who should be making decisions are too bogged down to deal with everything.

• Bandcamp
• see who tours together. If you like A and they open for B, you might like B
• indie record labels
• see who’s playing at local venues.

Oof. I’ve had places that the pipeline was getting long. At one of my previous jobs I made it so all the tests could run locally, and we were keeping the full build as slow as possible.

We also didn’t do any browser tests (eg: selenium) because those tend to be slow and most people are bad at making them stable.

It’s important to know whats worth testing.

That’s the plan. Unfortunately the market is kind of meh. Lots of AI slop. Lots of getting ghosted.

There’s a lot of fear at my job about changing code. I’ve been trying to tell them to start writing automated tests. Or at least a linter to check for syntax errors. They’re all like “ooh that sounds hard maybe next quarter”

Meanwhile, a trivial change requires a whole day because the developer has to manually test everything.

I just unilaterally added checks to code I have ownership over, but anything shared I’m getting “maybe in two quarters we can prioritize this” from management.

My job has a “scrum master”. She’s nice, I guess, but as far as I can tell her entire job is sharing her screen so we can look at tickets. Then people tell her what to click on and what text to change. It’s excruciating because it would just be faster for the person talking to change it, instead of being like “remove the second bullet point. No, not that one”

On top of that they have all these tasks for “unit testing” but they don’t actually do unit testing. Someone just said, in the distant past, we should do testing so it’s there.

I almost got an in-office job recently that would have doubled my pay. I’d make that trade. But they went with someone with “more cross functional experience”, what ever that means.

Yep. I’ve been during linux as my main desktop for maybe a year or two now, and it’s been fine. I don’t tinker with it. Most things just work.

The only thing that’s been a little dicey is mods for games, but I think I just need to figure out how like wine and proton prefixes work. It’s probably not hard, I just haven’t had a need lately.

• read Bandcamp’s writeups. Sometimes they do a deep dive into a genre, city, or band. https://daily.bandcamp.com/
• if you find something you like, scroll down and there’s other users who bought it. Peek into their collections
• if you scroll down further on an album, there will be more recommendations
• you can search by genre or tag, too

The thing you need to weigh is the inconvenience of them putting in the effort to become tech savvy. That’s a big inconvenience. So, the inconvenience of dealing with ads and whatnot looks much smaller from their perspective.

Yeah, I can follow the train of thought. They don’t know that like an hour of reading now will save them decades of pain, I guess.

Like, there’s degrees. Learning how to compile Firefox from source with custom changes is way more work than “search: how do I get rid of ads? Search: best adblocker. Click install on ublock.”

Which brings me back to what I was trying to say earlier. People imagine dealing with these problems is way harder than it actually is, so they don’t even look.

Something like this is coming up at work. They’re like “oh it’s going to be like weeks of work to get a linter for our code” and I’m like “it’s fifteen minutes please just let me help you”.

I dunno, a lot of the people in my life that aren’t tech savvy are inconvenienced. The ads pop up and block stuff. But they don’t know how to do anything about it.

I guess it’s easier to just do nothing and suffer than learn what adblock is. It’s easier to use the shitty defaults.

There’s not to my knowledge a good way to run/test GitHub actions locally. So if I want to verify my change uploads the coverage report after the end of the pipeline, I have to run the whole thing. And then I find an error because on the GitHub runner blah blah is different

Well that’s fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Maybe read the study more carefully when I have more time

Many people have a sort of learned helplessness. They don’t really know computer fundamentals, they get scared and stressed so they stop thinking, and then they don’t want to deal with it.

People aren’t rational. They’re emotional.

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.

No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)

To many “smart” people have stood up and taken the credit for hundreds of others and generations of work.

Like CEOs taking credit for all the work their engineers did.

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

Microsoft 365 is a worse name than Microsoft Office.

People believe based on feelings, not facts. That’s all it is.