One recurring problem is there are a lot of people who don’t really want democracy. They want hierarchy. Many of them don’t need to be at the top, so long as there are people below them.

It’s conservatives. Conservatives are the problem.

I leave my PR in draft until the checks pass. I don’t want anyone reviewing it when it’s broken.

The other day I saw some dude throw his cigarette on the ground before getting on line in front me to get carded to enter a bar. For a long moment I considered picking it up and going “hey, you dropped this” and handing it back to him.

But I didn’t, because there’s no way that ends happily.

But man, fuck people who litter.

I have a recurring fantasy of a honey pot for this sort of thing. You advertise like an exclusive doodad that no reasonable person would buy. Maybe extra-large cars. Maybe horse armor. Could be anything. Everyone who goes to buy one goes straight to therapy, and they don’t leave until they’re no longer a fucking moron. Kind of like The Good Place.

Unfortunately, no. I think it was a semi-obscure but not terribly so word like “esoteric”. We were all native speakers from the same region. From what else I remember from the conversation, her general practice was to avoid looking things up. If she couldn’t figure it out from context, it wasn’t worth doing more.

Unfortunately most people use very flawed arguments like trying to appeal to emotions or strawmaning my point (or one of the many fallacious things we all have to deal online). And that will not convince me, in fact it only proves you have absolutely no argument

One thing I struggle to remember sometimes is someone can make a bad argument, but what they’re arguing for can still be true.

I used to work with a guy that would argue with me, and sometimes at the end he’d be like “I actually agree with your point, but I wanted you to be right for solid reasons”

Of course, it’s also very common for people to be making bad arguments because they’re just feeling stuff, and they’re pulling together whatever words come close to capturing that right now.

This reminded me of a person I used to know. She adamantly refused to look things up. We were having some casual conversation about work, and I was like “I think that’s not what that word means.” She just refused to look at the dictionary or engage with trying to find out the answer. I don’t know if it was pride, or an insane commitment to a bit, but it was frustrating to deal with.

Incidentally, she was the worst D&D player I ever had, and was deeply dysfunctional in her romantic relationships. I can only imagine what madness she’s up to now.

I think it was Diablo 3 (not a game I recommend) that had like “5% more damage” and “5% more fire damage” as buffs, but due to esoteric maths, the latter was significantly more impactful on the damage equation. Not a fan of that kind of secret maths in games.

I remember once when I was a kid, my uncle asked me something or other. I dithered for a bit, and then admitted I didn’t actually know. He said something really nice about how it’s much better to just say you don’t know than to dig deeper into bullshit. Really stuck with me, for some reason.

I was talking about this with someone a while ago and they suggested that some people’s lived experiences have been more… abusive. Like as a child if they made a mistake their parents treated them like shit. Now they have that untreated trauma deep in their personality. When they make a mistake like making a reservation at the wrong time, they subconsciously think it’s going to be like when their dad screamed at them, smacked them, and sent them to bed without dinner. So they lie and prevaricate to avoid that.

I don’t know how often that kind of early childhood trauma is the root of the behavior, but if that is happening that’s really sad.

Teachers should be paid more than, say, marketing people at a blockchain AI startup. Teachers add value to the world.

Also it’s one of the things destroying politics.

That’s often the previous stop on this train of thought. There are maga people that in their secret heart know they’ve made a mistake, but they struggle to come to terms with that. Though that also carries the fear of losing all their social bonds and being rejected by the group.

Market the company and, for smaller companies that want funding, beg and network.

Leadership is often removed from how work actually gets done. This is part of why they often make bonkers decisions.

They don’t understand that most of the time isn’t going into typing code into the computer. It’s figuring out what the product guy and CEO actually want. It’s pulling answers out of them (eg: what do you want to do if the user’s name is null?) or dealing with it when they don’t like your decision (eg: you didn’t say what to do when I don’t have their name, so the email just says “hey”. I really don’t think this is a crisis)

I sometimes think about how things are so bad in part because there are so many people making unnecessary bad decisions. Like, just don’t buy the horse armor. Do something else.

But there are so many idiots that bad things remain profitable

I’ve met two of my neighbors, but don’t know them well. One might even have moved away- haven’t seen her in months.

I have two friends that live nearby. Three if you stretch what’s considered the neighborhood. All walking distance.

Conservative groundlings often identify a problem (I don’t have enough money to live a comfortable dignified life, I can’t find meaningful labor) and then settle on a really stupid source and solution. It’s not the capitalists fault for squeezing labor, it’s the brown guy trying to survive.

I don’t think the graphics are a big part of the problem. It’s more the math.

Pillars of Eternity, for example, has it so every point of Might above 10 is 3% more damage. This is a little hard to reason about - my sword says it does 17-24 damage. So if I have 15 might, that’s 15% more damage , so the sword is now… 19-27? I had to use a calculator because I’m kind of bad at math. If I take one more point of might, my max damage becomes…28? Does it round?

This is not very quick and easy.

Now imagine instead of every point of might was just +2 damage. Or +5 damage. Much easier to reason about. If you want might to matter more for some weapons, slap a double might bonus on them. You might (pun intended) just need to scale the rest of the system around this new range of values.

I accidentally swerved a little from “impactful stats only” to “easily understood stats”, but they’re kind of related.

It’s the usual “there must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out groups for the law to bind but not protect” thing as always.

They wanted small government when it suited their desires. Their desires, as conservatives, are usually bad. Pollution, exploration, segregation, etc.

“request desktop site” usually gets rid of the app nag.

I never post there anymore but there’s a lot of useful stuff from the old days.

I think if I was making a game I would really strive to make it so every upgrade is meaningful and easily noticed.

I liked pillars of eternity, but I didn’t like trying to think about if 3% more damage was even going to survive rounding.