As if the best people won’t leave once the layoffs start

I absolutely love the scene in “Interview with the Vampire” where Lestat is found hiding away in a room, distraught by all the creations of modern civilization.

I doubt you’ll find any proof that he is against free speech. More like, he cares about other things more than he cares about free speech. Such as his bank account.

Kagi (the search engine) recently launched pretty cool T-shirts in their merch store, and to their first 20k paid subscribers they gave one away for free. What struck me is that the measurements were so off: I’m usually somewhere between a medium and a large, but according to the size guide I needed a size small. So I warily selected small and sure enough, when I received it I found that the height and waist are the right dimensions for me. However, it is way too small around the shoulders.

Kagi is an American company and I’m Swedish. I’m kind of fed up with people bashing Americans for their weight and that’s not what I’m trying to do, but I found it interesting how the difference between countries has become ingrained into the very shape of the clothes. There apparently exists no size of an American T-shirt that will fit me because not only are Americans bigger on average, they have completely different body proportions.

It’s just something a person who wants to see everyone as a unique individual instead of putting them in a box says. Doesn’t matter if it’s about skin color, gender, age, etc. Make it okay to be somewhere vague on a multidimensional spectrum instead of having to make everything black or white. In the end none of these factors even matter when we’re discussing which Bionicle is best.

No, I’m not “assuming I’m cis”. I’m trying not to assume, period. I don’t need a label to know who I’m attracted to and it’s none of your business either.

Which IMO is a good thing. I don’t mind people having their own identity, but if nobody tracks pronouns (including traditional pronouns) then life becomes easier for everyone and there’s less drama. We need fewer pronouns, not more.

I’m a faithful follower of never using your real name in social parts of the internet. We don’t need to know and we don’t want to know.

Corollary: there are no girls on the Internet. The simplest way to promote gender equality is to not disclose gender in arbitrary conversation or in the profile. If you still do in an anonymous forum, you are likely trying to take advantage of privileges that the patriarchal societal structure offers you in that situation, and in doing so you are upholding it.

Don’t top post.

Too bad nobody can understand what they are saying

Narrator: They didn’t like it here.

“Punching down” is in the eye of the beholder, and kind of supports my point about having empathy in the way you speak. I guarantee that steel workers feel like they got the short end of the stick in life, and that feminist academia is the elite.

The Onion does something really clever: they simply show what the world would be like if feminists actually succeeded in convincing people with their arguments. The end result is comically bizarre and obviously extremely unlikely. The joke/criticism is how disconnected feminists are from the real world with their overly complicated, academic and abstract language, despite the fact that they ostensibly have a goal of influencing ordinary people into being better.

I’ve had this beef for a long time with feminists: they lack empathy and insight into the actual lived experience of the people they want to convince. They’re caught up in an authoritarian, entitled worldview where they imagine they can just coerce others into becoming better through force and shaming, using language that is so far above most people’s heads that it all just seems imaginary. Whenever I try to raise these concerns I am met with hate and am called a misogynist even though my intentions are to help. They have virtually no ability to listen. There are exceptions, but they are drowned out among all the (in my opinion) misguided people.

Second place goes to Memorial Honors Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster.

Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Theory. Important commentary and funny at the same time.

It’s a compliment. You’re skilled and valuable enough that the company won’t dare to give you any bullshit for leaving on time.

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers

They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.

SQL was explicitly designed to allow “normal humans” to query the database. Nowadays even “normal developers” aren’t able to use it properly.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

I’ve only heard this phrase from Americans, so I think “all over the world” is a stretch

The Godfather. It would be crazy to go through my life without ever seeing it, given that it’s considered one of the best movies of all time. But I know I’m going to be disappointed because I can never empathize with or care about what happens to gangsters or unlikeable characters in movies. I saw Goodfellas and thought it was boring. I pushed through all of Breaking Bad waiting for it to get good, but it just got more and more tragic. Same with The Departed. So, I have no hope for The Godfather.