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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • This is a good answer.

    At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

    We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

    Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.




  • I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

    Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

    I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.




  • I think sometimes people just throw out the accusation of “echo chamber” because their ideas are bad and the community rejects them.

    Someone will be like “I don’t think we should have child labor laws but the eChO cHaMbER won’t even consider it”

    Sometimes this gets said even when the alleged echo chamber responds with facts and history about why their take is a bad one.

    Ultimately, here and in like all other human endeavors, emotions are primary. People feel a thing, and then reach for words to justify it.

    Someone’s ideas being rejected by the group? Feels bad. Is it me? Am I wrong? No, that feels worse and the ego won’t accept this. It must be them. But why? Must be an echo chamber. Cool. Now I don’t have to feel bad about myself. I don’t have to change my beliefs. I can just blame them and move on.

    So someone saying it’s an echo chamber has only very tenuous relationship to reality.

    To your actual point, there’s also the “jaq’ing off” and “for me it’s Tuesday” problems of community management and health. The first being someone asking questions in bad faith. The latter is similar - someone in good faith is asking really basic questions that the community has seen a thousand times before, and people respond with exasperation. From the new person’s perspective the community is unwelcoming. From the community’s view, this is the third guy today that’s stumbled upon the idea that “maybe capitalism is bad” and walking them through that journey is tiresome.

    Community is hard.




  • I guess what I took away from my upbringing is the rewards are intrinsic. You don’t get a cookie for cleaning your room, but now your room is clean. You don’t get $20 for passing your math test, but now you (hopefully) learned some math and don’t have to worry about it anymore.

    The owner in your example is the same. His rewards are inherent to the action.

    Covering someone with praise and rewards when they do stuff they’re supposed to do anyway I guess works, but seems unsustainable. If they’re only doing it for external validation, how are they going to feel when that’s absent?

    Saying “thank you” for doing chores isn’t what I had in mind. It was an overly effusive “omg you did so good I’m so happy here’s a pony you didn’t throw your cigarettes on the ground! You’re such a good boy and very handsome!”


  • I know intellectually that’s true but in my cursed heart I really don’t want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.

    It’s just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I’m sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you’re not nice to them, they might shoot you.

    edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like “You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you”, so that’s probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.