I would guess that many people have never lived in a good, dense, location. My parents would vote for farther apart, but when they think of the city they think of The Warriors

It’d be interesting to poll only people who have lived in a variety of places.

I grew up in a car-focused suburb and never want to go back.

Being able to admit fault, admit being wrong, updating their worldview, emotional regulation.

You’ve probably all encountered the kind of person who when challenged has a whole melt down. You say something like “I’m not eating meat today because it’s bad for the environment and animals” and they have a whole name-calling meltdown. Too stupid to handle their sense of being good person threatened.

The rich are famously bad at money. “It’s one banana Michael” resonates for reasons.

Someone who’s low on money is going to look at the unit price of paper towels. A rich person probably isn’t going to think about it at all.

One of my old bosses complained I asked too many questions about requirements. They’d give me poorly defined tasks and I’d be like “what do you want it to do when the user has no name in the system?”. Then they’d get annoyed.

But if I just made a decision, like sorting my ID, they’d be like “that’s stupid why didn’t you sort by sign up date?”

It won’t make things better all on its own. The things that enable and create him are still around. I mean, unless there was like a plane with a whole lot of republicans and billionaires all together and it went down in a fiery crash with no survivors. That might make a big enough vacuum for change.

Republicans are villains

Most of the people don’t want to be convinced. They come adamant that they won’t change their opinion

I link this comic a lot but I think it’s often relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Basically, people don’t believe things or accept facts that conflict with their emotions.

I don’t know. A coworker years ago said to me “you have to make what you want people to do the easy thing”, and I think he was right. But someone still has to do work. Back then, it was me changing the deploy script to automatically run tests and open the report so people had to go out of their way to skip all that.

I’m not sure what that looks like for the fediverse. Linking them directly? Some sort of “sign up with Google” SSO mechanism? Just make the account for your friend and give it to them?

Ideally we’d go up one level and address why people are so mentally depleted they can’t handle a sign up form.

I’ve been using Linux with Nvidia for a few years now without any problems. I don’t play the most cutting edge stuff at high resolution, but like path of exile 2, elden ring, expedition 33 all ran just fine.

Yeah, that could be some of it. We can’t all be perfect all the time. It’s impossible.

I’d appreciate more honest appraisals, though. “I know Twitter is garbage run by a Nazi, but I got linked to it and scrolled a bit” is far better than “well other people are worse so who cares”. There’s this childish whataboutism that a lot of people bring out to justify their poor behavior.

Also engineer here. Please, listen to engineering. I’m so tired of product coming in with ideas fully detached from reality.

At one job, they got it into their head that “our system has no concept of an account. There’s just projects floating around, and nothing unifying them. We need to do a bunch of work to create this”. I said to myself, that’s crazy. There is an account. Every project has a foreign key relationship with it. It’s just not named “account” for some reason.

Listening to me took what could’ve been a clusterfuck of wasted weeks into a one day find-and-replace project. Personally, I would’ve just left it with the slightly weird name and called it a win, but I think product needed to feel like they were adding some value somehow.

Or the time they wanted to fully rewrite the internal tool for scheduling work. We had operations people that managed the field workers schedule, using some home-grown tool written years ago and never really updated. They wanted a full rewrite. I talked to the people who actually use the thing and asked them what their biggest pain points were. Looked at the code. Yeah, one of those can be fixed today, the other in a couple days. This doesn’t need to be a two month project. We did it my way and operations was delighted.

One time I wasn’t in the room, and product and one less good engineer got it into their head that there’s no way to tell which work orders go with which set of outputs. They thought that the output just appeared, and you couldn’t tell where it came from. Unfortunately, this spun up into a “we need to rewrite the entire system!” project. Some months later (of delivering no value to anyone) there were layoffs, and at great personal cost I was able to convince them that yes, there is a foreign key, and we can make significantly smaller changes to solve the actual problems. I regret not killing that initiative earlier, but I think people wanted it as a big line item on their resume.

That’s all startup land.

At the megacorp I worked at, trying to convince management that we should have automated tests is like trying to speak french to someone who only speaks italian. I think they understand some of what I’m saying, maybe, but most of it’s not getting through. A good chunk of the IC engineers know the system is bad and has a bunch of “we could improve this in a day” tasks we could do, but management doesn’t understand. So we keep having multi-day deploys with “omg it’s broken again”.

People don’t really care about anything other than convenience. Twitter could be grinding up puppies live on camera and most people would just shrug and be like “well the good memes are here”.

Personally I think that’s downstream from how we’re all too polite about shit like this. We just smile and change the topic instead of doing the intensely uncomfortable “You really shouldn’t use twitter” conversation. But also we’re all too… childish, I guess, because most people if someone says that will not respond with “You make a good point and I will change in accordance,” but rather with “Fuck you for saying things that make me feel bad. You suck. I’m not listening to anything you say.”

So I guess we’re fucked because people are immature, fragile, little shits.

This has been my experience as well. The default mode of monogamous relationships has a lot of bad habits and anti-patterns, too.

There was a good blog post I read a while ago I can’t find now (it was a title like “the missing step”, but most blog posts with that title are about toxic people in communities that are ignored like a missing step on a staircase you avoid without fixing). It essentially argued that when people are monogamous, they tend to slide towards a sort of all-access codependence, where you just kind of assume your partner is there all for you the time. When such a couple tries to open up, and your partner suddenly has plans without you, people don’t know what to do. You always used to just do stuff together, and now your partner is out somewhere with Alex? Fuck Alex! Who do they think they are??

It’s pretty bad, but happens frequently.

The post’s advice was to make plans with your current partner, before you “open up”. Even if you never open up. Make plans together, but also explicitly and intentionally keep time for yourself. Even if you don’t actually do anything, take a day a week that’s just yours to do what you want. Go out of the house. You don’t have to tell them any details. Maybe you’ll go for a hike. Maybe you’ll go bowling. Doesn’t matter. It’s your time. Personal. Private.

Once you both get used to that, where the other person is just off doing stuff without you sometimes, it’s much easier to slot “they went on a date” into that space.

trying to shame people into switching without taking into account these environmental variables just makes you a prick.

You’re right about how shame doesn’t work. It’s an enduring peeve of mine that you have to butter people up and manage their emotions to get them to do anything. It just feels like everyone’s a toddler that needs a shiny sticker so they won’t poison themselves. You’ll be like “smoking is bad for you and everyone around you” and they’ll be like “fuck you I’m going to smoke more now”.

However, in this case the person said they had viable transit. It was just ten minutes slower.

True on all counts. Unfortunately, there’s little to be done to change those things. Putting in the effort to be funny and interesting will have better outcomes than focusing on how it’s not fair you have to do more work. This might be one of the few scenarios where men are mildly disadvantaged

True. I had a very poor experience on bumble, where I didn’t get many interactions. Not being able to message first I think takes away one of my few advantages.

You are making the world worse by driving when other options are available.

You then responded to this claim by changing the topic to how billionaires are making the world worse. That’s a whole other topic. That’s probably a deflection to preserve your sense of self as a good person.

If you truly believe “other people are worse so I’m allowed to be bad too” then go ahead and say it. I don’t think that’s a great moral framework, but it would require you to admit that your unnecessary driving is in fact bad, so I’d take that as a win.

That depends on the app. On hinge, you can (and should) send a message with your like.

On tinder and close relatives, you can only work on your profile.

It’s funny in a sad way that Google et al let search get really bad, and then try to suggest we use LLMs instead of search. I was happy being able to type in like “react usememo hook” and finding the official docs, stack overflow, and maybe a blog or two. Now it’s so much more slop, the temptation to ask the LLM “how do I use usememo” is higher.

Because my driving to work in my car is somehow so much worse on our entire world compared to what billionaires are doing

That wasn’t the claim. My point was that driving makes the world worse. The presence of other people making the world worse to greater degrees or at greater speed is irrelevant.

You’re arguing against a made up claim, probably to justify feeling attacked. Your ego is threatened. It’s common for people to lash out when their sense of being a Good Person is threatened.