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

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  • Much of this slots into time outside work rather than the workday itself.

    • walk a different route to a destination
    • pick an algorithm and walk with no destination (eg: straight until you hit a light not in your favor, then turn. Works in urban envs)
    • go somewhere you don’t normally go. Eg: library, different coffee shop, that little art store you always see
    • go to the library. Walk along the shelf with eyes closed and pick a book at random.
    • pick a genre of music you never listen to. Listen to it.
    • cook or prepare a meal unlike your normal fare
    • go to a thrift store. Buy a cheap article of clothing you wouldn’t normally wear. Wear it. See how it feels
    • find free or cheap art (music, theater, whatever) in your area. Go.
    • journal. Spend a few minutes writing down your day’s details
    • hit wikipedia’s random article button. Read it.


  • There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

    The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

    Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

    Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.


  • Say four guys are sitting in a bar having a sports argument—talking about the upcoming college football playoffs, say. They begin by agreeing that Ohio State is the favorite because it is currently ranked number one in the polls, which it in fact is.

    But one of them says: No, Texas A&M is number one. The other three look at him like he’s insane. They reach for their phones, they tap, tap, tap, and they show him the rankings. But he keeps insisting. Those polls are fake. It’s Texas A&M. Everybody says so.

    The conversation stalls. The liar has “won” the argument. Not in the sense that he is factually correct; he is not. But he has won in two senses. First, he has shut down what might have been a rational, interesting, spirited debate that proceeded from shared factual premises. Second, he has forced the other three to waste time and mental energy debating a proposition that is not remotely up for debate, and in the process has succeeded in making himself the center of attention and controversy whom everyone else talks about.

    Sounds like they should remove the liar from the bar. Maybe not beat the shit out of him and leave him in a sobbing pile of piss and vomit in the back alleyway, but certainly not just letting it slide.

    Liars and such get by because people are too polite to do anything about it. This goes for other bad behavior, too.

    Someone in my extended friend group got a divorce, and her ex-husband started acting like a creeper. He was bothering the other women in the group. Eventually, another dude in the group pulled him aside and said if he doesn’t behave, he can’t hang out with them anymore. The guy didn’t change, and now he’s out of the friend group.

    Of course, there’s so many shitty maga-hats that maybe he went and found a new group of misogynists .







  • It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”






  • I’ve read this kind of thing before and I believe it. People mostly change to conform to their in-group.

    The other thing that changes people’s minds is trauma. Massive, life altering, trauma.

    Like if some maga hat gets the absolute shit kicked out of them by the police they worship, like “will never walk again and is blind in one eye”, that might be enough to overload the brain and throw out the 'cops are good, actually ’ belief. Might be.

    And I think it has to happen to them, not just someone close. There’s news stories about like people’s husband being deported but they still support trump. I think conservatives particularly are bad at empathy, so they won’t get it until something happens to them