I’ve seen some garbage slide through code reviews. Most people don’t do them well.

I’m doing contract work at a big multinational company, and I saw a syntax error slide through code review the other day. Just, like, too many parenthesis, the function literally wouldn’t work. (No, they don’t have automated unit tests or CI/CD. Yes, that’s insane. No, I don’t have any power to fix that, but I am trying anyway). It’s not hard to imagine something more subtle like a memory leak getting through.

In my experience, people don’t want to say “I think this is all a bad idea” if you have a large code review. A couple years ago, a guy went off and wrote a whole DSL for a task. Technically, it’s pretty impressive. It was, however, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary for the task at hand. I objected to this and suggested we stick with the serviceable, supported, and interoperable approach we had. The team decided to just move forward with his solution, because he’d spent time on it and it was ready to go. So I can definitely see a bunch of people not wanting to make waves and just signing off on something big.

One of the first times I took the path train (it’s a light rail in NJ/NYC. Basically another subway line). I sit down, and an older guy in a suit sits down next to me. He’s got like a box in a plastic bag in his lap. No big deal.

This was in like 2002. He didn’t have a cell phone or earphones. Just sitting quietly, waiting for the train to leave.

He started to giggle. Little chuckles. And then escalated to full laughs. It rises and rises until he’s like cackling. And then he calms down, reverses all the way through giggles and back to silence. Never said a word.

I don’t know what was in the box. I didn’t ask. I assume he just got away with a killer heist.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

Yeah I just… Don’t need that much stuff. Most of my money goes to food and shelter.

Conservatism, probably. It’s cruel and often self destructive.

That humans (all of us) are such emotional creatures and that we do often can’t rise above it. You tell someone a fact they don’t like and the brain just shuts that down.

These feel related somehow

I get my clothes from the thrift store. Sadly, even that’s getting more expensive. Used to be could get jeans for $5 and now it’s more like $20

I’m not friends with some old coworkers in large part because they just don’t go to protests or do anything. They’re comfortable just staying home and playing video games. Extremely basic bros.

The problem is most people are lazy and don’t understand anything. They just use the app they know, even if it sucks.

If you got it to be popular it could work , but I don’t see how you could.

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I’d expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

People have suggested web rings, but most people don’t care much.

Most users are kind of learned helplessness and don’t really try much different.

Have you talked to a lot of tech workers? I feel like there’s a set of left wing ones, a larger set of libertarian types, and an even larger set of people who are shockingly ignorant of politics and history.

It’s wild to me how some places I’ve worked are like locked down, all the infrastructure is in terraform or whatever and can be deployed immediately… and other places are like “ssh into prod with the credentials from confluence, edit the config in vim, and paste the new code into a new file”

This should be a climate crime and the management responsible forced to pick up trash or some other appropriate punishment

Facts don’t matter. Emotions do. Many decision makers feel that in-person is better, and that’s the end of the discussion.

I hated how the office I used to work in kept the cold air blasting. I had to wear layers in August. And because of how bad the building’s HVAC was, it was still warm on the other side of the office.

I bring this up whenever people suggest working in the office is more productive. Being physically uncomfortable is not good for focus, Jeff.

I don’t think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

My friend has a toddler and I always spoke to her like a regular person who just happened to not know things. She seemed to respect it a lot.

What are people ordering so much of from amazon? I apparently haven’t ordered from them since late 2024, and those were a handful of small orders.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

What’s with the weird censoring of the post metadata? Do we not want to credit the original poster for some reason?