ICQ was a key part of my realization that most people are lazy, short-sighted, idiots.

Everyone I knew wanted to use AIM. ICQ had better features (offline messaging, style overrides, you could change your name without changing your account, file transfers worked better, etc etc). But no one cared.

It’s like how people won’t get off facebook or reddit. Sometimes you have to have a little inconvenience for the greater long term benefit.

Heh. A typo where I meant drive, but it’s funny so I’m going to leave it

Meanwhile, in the city I just get on the train. Going out and then having to drink your drunk/tired/etc self home is miserable.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via “well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not”

It would never even occur to me to eat at fast food (unless you count like the pizza by the slice place on the corner).

I just feel so alienated from everyone else sometimes. Just… The food isn’t good, isn’t good for you, isn’t cheap, isn’t fast. The org isn’t environmentally or politically friendly. Just stop eating there. Be mildly inconvenienced if you have to.

But I guess that will slam right into the constant problem of “someone feels bad and now they’re not going to listen”

If we’re waving magic wands around, change the tax laws to limit how much you can inherit.

Changing the step up basis thing is actually pretty low hanging fruit.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp

https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes

I don’t want to be a goat farmer but I do find people that work hard to make management richer are insufferable.

“”" A man is walking into the office when he sees his boss pull into the parking lot in a brand new sports car. “Wow! Nice car! How’d you afford that?” he says.

The boss smiles at him and says, “Listen. If you work hard, hit all your numbers this quarter, put in some overtime, then I can buy another one next quarter.” “”"

The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like “{Coworker} says this test case is important”. Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could’ve gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.

I would have questions about how they work with a team and structure.

Are they going to be okay with planning work out two weeks ahead? Sometimes hobbyists do like 80% of a task and then wander off (it’s me with some of my hobbies).

Are they going to be okay following existing code standards? I don’t want to deal with someone coming in and trying to relitigate line lengths or other formatting stuff, or someone who’s going to reject the idea of standards altogether.

Are they going to be okay giving and getting feedback from peers? Sometimes code review can be hard for people. I recently had a whole snafu at work where someone was trying to extend some existing code into something it wasn’t meant to do*, and he got really upset when the PR was rejected.

Do they write tests? Good ones? I feel like a lot of self taught hobbyists don’t. A lot of professionals don’t. I don’t want to deal with someone’s 4000 line endpoint that has no tests but “just works see I manually tested it”

I’ve definitely had some coworkers that in retrospect we should not have hired. But I’ve also had people I was iffy on that turned out great. Hiring is hard.

Surely there’s a couple people still working there.

Yes. And no one’s going to do anything about it.

Most people are too lazy and thoughtless to stop using it .

The engineers that work there certainly aren’t going to stage a coup.

And no one’s going to just do violence to Musk.

No one made the “pee v pee” joke yet?

You don’t seem to understand how things or people work, so I don’t think engaging with you further will be fruitful.

Street performers aren’t the same as people watching videos on their phone.

You can’t be serious. Or you don’t spend a lot of time in public.

Most people’s conversations in public are fairly quiet. People often do get annoyed of people are having a screaming or otherwise disruptive conversation on the subway. Most humans don’t find a quiet conversation that distracting though. Hearing half a conversation annoys most people- I think it’s because the brain keeps trying to figure out what’s happening.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hearing-just-one-half-of-a-conversation-is-really-really-annoying-2657804/

It’s not really “”“arbitrary lines”“”. The shared theme is “don’t distract other people in public”. Whistling fails this check. So does singing. As does a phone alarm going off. But also like most things that annoy or tolerate are arbitrary.

This is especially true if you need to hear announcements like what stop this is or that this train is going express.

Anyway, my current thinking is you’re doing some sort of “bit” as a selfish child, or you just don’t spend a lot of time in public.

As I understand it, people mostly change their mind (and thus behavior) for two reasons.

The first is in-group beliefs. If someone sees other people in their in-group believing a thing or behaving in a way, they’re more likely to adopt that. Possibly the people who play audio in public, their friends and peers are the same way. But if you also might be in one of their groups, like a college kid to another college kid, or a junior professional to another, talking to them might make a difference. But if you’re like a 59 year rich old white guy, telling a 16 year old non-white poorer kid is unlikely to land, because they probably see you as outgroup.

The other thing that changes minds is horrible trauma. Like, if you smashed their head into the bus window, took their phone and transferred all their money (via venmo or whatever), then tossed the phone out the window, they might change their mind about being a public irritant. Maybe. They might also take some other lesson instead. But either way you’d go to jail for several crimes, so probably don’t do that.

They might be a literal child, as implied by their name.

Bugmenot sometimes has LinkedIn credentials https://bugmenot.com/view/linkedin.com

Don’t click any of the scam ones though