That’s not my observation. I could flip it around and accuse the author of defending massive if/else chains because my experience is that anything that needs more than a handful of lines of code is either a complex mapper or a nightmare of failed Boolean algebra.

That doesn’t mean the bad code I’ve seen is OP’s fault. It means there’s a lot of shit programmers and adopting a particular style doesn’t fix it.

I think this author has some points, but this is attacking the wrong thing.

Clean code is not the source of the problems described. If you see similar code and try to extract a common abstraction without further consideration, congrats, you’re thinking like a junior developer, and that’s not Clean Code’s fault, to pull one example.

Disagree. People bitch and moan about Joe Rogan or whomever platforming bad people and here we are doing the same with bad media. It’s rank hypocrisy.

Occupational therapy, very much so. Based on the context this sounds more like psychotherapy. Perhaps I’m misreading that though.

Fuck articles that are a bunch of Twitter links. Anyone who still has a Twitter account frankly deserves the shitshow they are supporting. For the rest of us, it’s just screenshots of tweets. I’m glad there was some descriptive text, but stop trying to push people into going to Twitter. Fucking enablers.

Therapists help you understand and contextualize your emotions so that you can choose differently ways of handling them. Are you confused or struggling with your emotions? Mate, you’re under existential threat with no clear way out. The best therapist couldn’t cheer up a prisoner in Auschwitz.

I feel for you and the situation you’re in, but I kinda feel like you’re not the problem here. Maybe you are. Maybe you have ways out that you’re too anxious to take or something, and therapy might help with that. But you describe a fairly bleak scenario with a sword of Damocles over your neck. Your therapist can’t fix your disability and they can’t teach you to fix your brother.

I’m hoping for a good outcome for you.

His electoral prospects? He has none. He can’t be reelected. As for fearing the consequences of his actions, that’s kinda the point of working with your opponents instead of attacking them. Treat them like the enemy and you’ll be the enemy when they’re in power. It’s too bad he’s too stupid to figure that out.

A moderator defines the boundaries of an online community. If content or a person don’t fit a community, they are removed. Not all content is appropriate for all places. If someone starts a fight in a bar, they will be removed. Disagreement must be kept within the rules of the venue or offenders will be removed. It’s a reasonable expectation.

You know it’s a figure of speech, right? Sometimes you have to figure out when you can retreat from a position and when it’s too important to cede ground.

A hill I’m willing to die on is a position you can’t or won’t surrender regardless of what you must face to hold it.

As metaphors go, it’s one of the better ones.

Is this an opportunity to self-publish my own book for $100k per copy and be guaranteed one sale?

Well, I have written in assembly. Once. I built a motor controller that ran off the serial port of… I can’t remember if it was an Intel or a Motorola. 😏

It was educational.

Your point is taken, though, thank you. I wouldn’t go back to that time because my job is so much easier now, but I do miss the days when it was filled with nerds and weirdos. You could talk to anyone in the room about Star Wars or D&D. The community was so much smaller and loved lifting one another up.

I started out with BBSes and then found my local college had an outbound modem bank you could use for free (local calls only) and so I connected to MSU and dialed into Detroit bulletin boards to pay games and find porn.

I explored other things on the college network, but it was mostly boring stuff. I got into IRC a little bit for trivia games. Newsgroups a bit. There wasn’t much until the advent of broadband and www.

There was a point of ideal bandwidth with DSL, though it still felt too slow at the time. It was fast enough to download stuff, but slow enough that you couldn’t have massive js files to track users or lock down the content of your site.

Cable modems were the beginning and end of internet perfection. Everything wasn’t shit yet, but the user base grew and so did the heavy, monolithic webpages. MySpace was half way between social media and individual sites. Once Facebook became the town square, the untamed beauty of the early internet was dead.

Not by much, but you predate me but a few years and I enjoyed getting your perspective on the rollout. When I graduated high school in 91, I felt like I had missed the boat on pioneering the internet. It was too well-established and I could never be an expert. I had no idea that pioneering was continuing on the backs of the giants of the day. These days, having had a thirty year career so far in software dev, I really feel pioneering is about done. Most things are just plugging together existing frameworks.

I remember having a personal code library of all the useful things I’d written to include in new projects. Now I don’t really have such a toolbox. Spring initializr and summon some dependencies and all of the hard, foundational stuff is done for you leaving you to basically write mappers and crud. It’s awesome and standardized and so much easier to read other people’s code, but I can’t help but feel something was lost. How do you understand some of these things if you’ve never had to write a half-assed implementation of a router or a parser?

Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience.

You could also be slower and more thoughtful and deliberate about conversation. You could think about what someone has to say while you were mowing the lawn or something, and reply back with something thoughtful instead of knee-jerk. They were also more topical, while modern social media is like 90% memes and shitposts (and I’m as guilty as anyone).

It was less performative. A place like this, sometimes folks don’t care about the person they are responding to, they are speaking to other readers. Sometimes OP is just a soapbox to shout something unrelated to their post.

But also due to the small sizes, even pseudonyms were well known. People got to know you and understand your words in a given context. You could use sarcasm freely, for example. Now if someone uses sarcasm you have to check their history to see whether they are funny or crazy.

it feels like most users lose interest in posts and comment discussions very quickly, usually less than a day

I think this is because everything is combined into a single stream. Remember how in forum threads every time one person said something it would push the thread back to the front so everyone saw it again? Social media doesn’t do that any more. If you had read the most recent comment in the more recent thread, you’re done reading until someone posts something. Here in ADHD land, there is an eternal stream of new content — no going backwards. You could probably delete posts older than 30 days and 98% of users would never know.

Again, I’m as guilty as anyone there. I sort posts by new. I look back at the posts I’ve made over the last day and look at other comments, but after my post ages to 1d, I assume the post is done and almost never revisit.

Wouldn’t one typically renovate first and then reveal the name change when the renovations are complete?

Obviously I get the real reason this is such a cluster fuck is because no one will perform there anyway, but… this whole presidency is such a cluster fuck. If the right was determined to do a fascism, I’m so fucking glad they are led by the stupidest person possible. His idiocy is the only thing standing between us and a much greater darkness.

I guess we should buy more Blu-rays. But I don’t have a good space to library all of them… wait a sec… I have an idea…

I sacrificed accuracy for brevity. I agree with your mild disagreement. I really wasn’t contemplating languages themselves, more the evolution of apps into meta languages.

FWIW, I’m happy to have context added to the humor in case there are any who don’t grasp it.

AI has a lot more surface knowledge about a lot more things than my parents ever did. I think one of the more insidious things about AI though, is that will a human you can generally tell when they are out of their depth. They grasp for words. Their speech cadence is more hesitant. Their hesitation is palpable. (I think palpable might be considered slop these days, but fuck haters it’s how I write — emdashes and all.)

AI never gives you that hint. It’s like an autistic encyclopedia. “You want to know about the sun? I read just the book. Turns out there’s a god who pulls it across the sky every day.” And then it proceeds to gaslight you when you ask probing questions.

(It has gotten better about this due to the advanced meta prompting behind the scenes and other improvements, but the guardrails are leaky.)