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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

    Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

    We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

    I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

    There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.


  • Premature ejaculation is pretty common. I don’t have stats on how common on hand.

    I searched and found one plausible looking site that said

    The study collected data from 491 men, as some were excluded for not using the stopwatch or providing incomplete information. A total of 4,000 sexual events were timed, with a mean frequency of eight events per couple over the four weeks. The results showed that the average time from penetration to ejaculation was 5.4 minutes, with a wide range from 0.55 to 44.1 minutes.

    https://www.psypost.org/average-sex-time-psychology-research/

    There’s probably more data out there if you want to go down this tangent hole.

    The other part is that some men don’t do foreplay or oral or anything else, and that also makes them bad partners. Like, if you stick it in and cum after a dozen thrusts then go to sleep, you’re probably not making your partner happy, and it’s probably not a good sex tape either.





  • Try not to think too hard about how most of the evidence points to shorter work weeks being better on pretty much every metric.

    Or that most of the “return to office” mandates are counter productive cruelty.

    I think I saw an article that claimed most office workers in the UK do like 3 hours of work a day, and the rest is puttering and looking busy.

    Our system is stupid and it’s stuck stupid because of people. It’s not physics. It’s not biology. Like there’s not much you can do to fix like humans need to eat and sleep, but the workday is just made up.



  • I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

    • I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
    • there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
    • a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
    • I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
    • more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
    • stuff is open later.

    Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

    • it’s not constant noise
    • I typically can’t hear my neighbors
    • people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
    • it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

    While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

    Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

    If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.









  • Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

    Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.