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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The version that’s stuck in my head is Japanese so this is a translation.

    Watch. See how they’ve lived their lives with pride, and with their lives they’ve sang the ode to civilization. This is the story of those whom people called heroes, the unfinished journey of the 13 who chased the flame. But traveller, your journey continues on, isn’t that right? Then, follow your heart and move on. Follow the footsteps and witness that flame chasing journey to the end. And finally… walk across the graves of those who have fallen. And for that future which “we” could not create… GO CREATE IT!


  • One case where I find it useful, tho it operates in a more limited way, is code in block blocks within code comments in Rust, which are also printed out in the generated documentation. They essentially get ran as part of your unit tests. This is great for making sure that, eg, your examples left in code comments actually work, especially if they’re written in a way that functions like a unit test.



  • I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.

    When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.

    For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.

    That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.





  • This seems like a real knee jerk moment here. You aren’t wrong that there are predatory sellers that do exactly that, but it also seems to assume that people do not have the ability to do their own research, which tbf in a society where attention is apparently a rare commodity and heavily capitalized on, it’s not necessarily an unfair assumption. It’s just unhelpful and honestly pretty damn rude to make a blanket comment that seems to assume that people just won’t or will refuse do their research, and should just listen to your authoritative take.

    Wouldn’t it be better to just rephrase your comment into something like, “Please remember to keep an eye on price histories to make sure that the displayed prices are discounted as claimed.”?

    Or does it feel better to speak as if people are dumber than you are? I mean, if you need to feel smarter and better, there are other healthier avenues for that, and I would suggest that you try looking into those instead.






  • Comments get stale and over time transition from: accurate to outdated, to eventually flat-out lies.

    Sounds like some people aren’t doing their work enough then. Code comments are part of the work that a programmer should do, not an afterthought. Who else is gonna update that code if not the programmer? And if a programmer isn’t supposed to update their code and we can just all write clean code that would somehow make us all be better engineers (yeah, I use this title differently from programmers), then why are code comments even a thing?

    Self-documenting code is good and all, but so should there be good comments.




  • Hard disagree that documentation is a waste of time. I think you’re just failing to see and use documentation correctly.

    Tech documentation should never:

    • record implementation details; that’s what commits and PRs are for
    • be about the code, but about the solution, information, or provide guidance; use code comments when talking about code
    • be taken as 100% accurate or infallible, but the general direction or essence should still remain true (related to the 2nd point)
    • be expected to be up-to-date; readers should always look at the created / completed / last edited date and make a judgement how much salt to actually take from it

    Documentation can

    • be some kind of paper trail that shows how we got to where we are
    • provide guidelines for getting started on a project, or some part of a larger project, with more context with respect to the business, so that readers are equipped with sufficient context when diving into the code (READMEs can then just focus on setup and testing instructions)
    • go further into what goes around a solution, eg considered alternatives, what actually requires solving given a functional requirement (it’s not always the case that we can fit a solution within a sufficiently small ticket, so tickets might be too localized to give a bigger picture of how a problem is being solved)
    • record system architecture, with actual illustrations, which can be easier to grok than 50 Terraform files

    Writing these out is also good for people who don’t read code or don’t have the time to read code, eg your tech lead, your manager, Tech VP, etc, people who should have some idea of your system or solution, but not necessarily the implementation detail, so that they can do their work more effectively.

    There’s also a culture where a project, or a sufficiently complex problem, starts with a tech proposal, which would properly capture the problem and do solution planning. It’s easier and faster to change than a PR, and reviewers can read that for context. In any case, this democratizes knowledge, instead of creating more tribal knowledge.


  • Lots of moments in Honkai Impact 3.

    There’s literally a YT channel that collects tears from streamers playing the game.

    https://youtube.com/@Ollyt_

    There’s a lot of context needed to understand why anyone would cry playing through HI3 though. I’ll give a high level summary here, but I highly encourage people to play it, even if it’s a gacha game. You can really ignore the gacha and just play the game for the main story. Do be warned that the story isn’t something suitable for kids — it can be quite a bit too heavy for them.

    The theme of self-sacrifice is covered quite extensively, with the main character being the centrepiece of the theme. There’s also deep self-loathe, with an eventual self-acceptance, also from the MC. Mix that all in with some sense of duty.

    There’s also a tragedy, but from the tragedy, a narrow path to hope was born. The people in the tragedy mostly hoped only for a simple life, or to live their lives atoning for their sins, but circumstances forced them to become warriors against a great, unstoppable force of destruction. As if to make things harder to swallow, their digital clones that survived into the future have to experience yet another tragedy that would eventually destroy all of them, and the player will see this through. Yet, in the second tragedy, these clones further sowed the seeds of hope for the future.

    Chinese company or not, HoYo has pumped out a lot of very human stories that I think deserves attention and praise. Genshin Impact has also started to go down a similar path.