When making small talk I usually explicitly differentiate between “what do you do for money?” and “what do you do for fun?”

Sometimes people are surprised by the latter, but it’s usually a more fun topic.

Saw the comic and knew the thread would be a train wreck. So many dudes take this kind of thing deeply personally and throw up colored flags about themselves.

I make a list between shopping of stuff I realize I should get (eg: peanut butter). When I go, I sometimes just grab stuff that’s cheap or appealing.

I also live like 5 minutes away on foot from several grocery stores, so it’s not a big deal to go.

Maybe I should check out their grocery options. I’ve mostly been using Too Good to Go for like a pizza @ $4.

I’ve read your post a dozen times and I’m confused.

Are you at the $5 million cap in this scenario? You’re certainly not going to waste away with $500k/year coming in, labor free.

Or are you closer to median income of like $80k, and thus have no funds for a big passion project?

Either way, you can always pool resources and form an organization of some sort. We don’t really want a ton of power collected in individuals. Especially not if the only reason they have that power is because they had money.

No one needs more than $5 million. That’s enough for a conservative investment portfolio to give you a mid six figure income without doing any labor. Watch TV all day and eat chips, still net six figures.

Maybe then no one can afford mega mansions and mega yachts, but I’m okay with that. We don’t need that much concentration of wealth.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

Depending on how the html is structured, you might be able to use adblock or tamper monkey to filter it out (in a browser. Apps are less supportive of this)

Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it’s better.

Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn’t understand software development decided that we don’t do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

Should we compensate people well enough so they don’t leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!

I think out of hundreds of matches I’ve had like one person ask about my height. I’m pretty average, height-wise (under 6’)

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

I found feeld to be really disappointing. As a man who doesn’t date men, it was pretty bad.

I’d get about one match every 3 months. I didn’t pay for it, so that might be a factor. But I think the big factor is there are a lot of men, and the algorithm doesn’t show me to that many people.

Of the matches I did get, about 80% were instant duds. Either no reply at all, or a bad one. I remember this one woman whose handle was like “boobz”. After like three attempts to start a conversation about normal topics (books, music, the city) I asked something tepid about her boobs. Something like if she liked when people touched them. She got mad. “How dare you sexualize this conversation” or something like that. I was just like, I tried other gambits and you didn’t even half ass a reply, and you have it in your name and profile picture. What do you want? I didn’t say that to her. I just unmatched. But like come on.

The next ten percent I’d ask a normal polite question like “so what music do you like seeing live?” and they’d reply sexually. Like, “oh daddy what music should I listen to?” Or “I just want to hear the rhythm of you slapping my ass”. Okay. Strange but not the worst.

And the last ten percent were just normal people behaving normally. I had some nice dates and I’m still friend with one. Incidentally all of them said they’d just installed the app and hadn’t been on it long.

So yeah. Feeld kind of sucks.

Used hinge, tinder, okcupid, and maybe a couple others. I’m a guy who doesn’t date men, 30s, in a large urban area, average looks and fitness.

I found I could get about a date a week if I put in effort. Most people aren’t putting in effort. Most of your effort is going to go into the void. You just have to accept that most people kind of suck and aren’t going to respond. But just reading their profile and sending a message like a normal person puts you well above average.

Many people seem to just half ass it and I don’t understand why. Like, their profile says they love NK Jemisen. You write that you love her books and ask if they read her latest. They write back with “no”, and of message, no follow up. Like how do you expect that to work out favorably? If you don’t have time, don’t respond. If you’re not interested, unmatch. A dead end reply just wastes everyone’s time.

The apps themselves are not focused on good outcomes. They want money. That doesn’t always mean giving you the best match right away. But sometimes it works out anyway.

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

Not an RPG, but the ancient civ-like Output would have a “news” article pop up whenever you loaded a save game. “Entire colony plunged back in time - scientists baffled” or something like that.

They don’t think. They feel. They’re little better than toddlers. You wouldn’t ask a child how their blanket is going to protect them from ghosts.

I feel like there are places where double click is the only way to do a thing, but you’re probably largely correct. Apparently on the Mac you can do window->zoom to accomplish the same as double clicking on the window’s top bar. Never knew that. Also don’t think I would have naturally decided to double click on the window to change its size.

Mouse over is a bad interaction, except for maybe showing tooltips. You can’t do it on a phone. You’re going to create mouse tunnels (where the user accidentally mouses out and closes the menu). And yet I see them all the time.

Double click is kind of a bad interaction, too. A naive user looking at the device isn’t going to Intuit “if I push this button twice rapidly something different will happen”. There’s no double right click or double dual click. Nor is there a triple click. It never should have become a standard interaction.

So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.

This is one of the scary parts, yes. Reading and writing are fundamental skills that will atrophy if not practiced. Combined with anti-intellectualism, where people fundamentally do not value reading and writing skills, it’s pretty nasty.

I don’t know how to fix it. It’s a gap in values. I often find myself wondering about the people around me, “Why don’t you care?” I don’t know why they don’t care about things.