Google should be broken up and its leadership fined into oblivion for anti competitive behavior

I had a job that paid stupid well. I’d give some money to almost anyone who asked on the street. They need it. I have plenty. I’m not going to notice the $1 or $5 or even $20 that I gave away. I make more than that in interest every day.

Rarely, I’ll talk with them a little. Ask their name or their story. There’s a regular around me that seems delighted that I remember his name.

Sometimes someone will seem unsafe, but most people are alright. It helps that I’m a bearded man, so certain classes of danger and harassment are rarely pointed at me.

I got laid off in February. I still give to people who ask, but I carry less cash so sometimes I don’t have anything to give.

When I’d be out with coworkers, before we all got laid off, none of them would give anything to people asking. I know they made as much or more than I did. I don’t judge people for not giving cash out when they’re in debt or struggling to pay rent, but I do judge my coworker for like wearing a high five figure watch and never helping the poor.

That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.

It doesn’t matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.

“We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!”

“Customers are complaining about how they can’t save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?”

“No that’s not a priority”

Make sure you speak clearly with minimal slang, or they might willfully misinterpret what you’re saying to deny your rights. Like to think you want a lawyer dog.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for-a-lawyer-dawg-judge-says-he-asked-for-a-lawyer-dog.html

Well, for one, they know they’re lying but they don’t care. It’s a tactical advantage for them to lie because a lot of people aren’t going to know.

If you’re pretty smart, imagine being drunk. All the time. Just moderately sloshed. That’s what I think it’s like for an average , kind of stupid , person. Poor memory, surges of emotions, incoherent thought. And they can’t ever sober up.

Everything Bethesda does is kind of bad. I’ll probably get them when they’re on sale, but I don’t expect anything good.

Get Larian to make a fallout game

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.

All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price

Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.

If you had been buying games you’d have a library 🤷

Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.

Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead

Yeah my friend is dating a Google recruiter and he overhears some absurd offers. Like, a reasonable person could retire on a few years at that salary.

I have a hypothesis that rich people are bad at money

I’ve read that windows 11 uses react (a JavaScript view framework) for parts of the UI, and that seems insane to me. JavaScript isn’t a great language. It’s popular because it runs in the browser. The windows desktop is not a browser.

If more people had a backbone and spoke out / refused to implement shitty stuff, this wouldn’t happen.

Thus, it’s more than just the web developers 😄 . Product needs to have a backbone to stand up to their boss, too. I fought really hard to get rid of the mouse tunnels at that job, but was blocked by product and one of the directors of eng. It was mostly [office] political nonsense

Also, many design choices are entirely on the web developer.

Not at most of the companies I’ve worked out. There’s a design person or team. Eng can give feedback, but it’s pretty rare for them to be given a blank check.

I’m not gonna change my opinion until websites become usable again, you’re wasting your time on me.

That’s fine. Some web developers are morons, but some of everyone are morons. We can partially agree.

Most web developers are morons in the sense that most people are morons. They’re not especially moronic.

A lot of problems on the web aren’t coming from the developers. They’re management pushing for stuff.

Like, at an old company the UI had really bad mouse tunnels (mouse over menus and sub menus that close if you mouse out). Terrible interface. But someone in management liked it and no one would approve changing it. Easy to look at it and say we’re all morons, but most of the stupid there was from leadership.

Capitalism is a root cause. Let’s get rid of that, or if that’s too extreme that severely regulate it.

Jail all of Facebook’s decision makers. Seize it (investors get nothing), and either shut it down or revert it to a simple message board. Require moderators. Ban the trash (eg: sovereign citizens groups). Remember that time they tried to see if they could make people sad by changing the algorithm? Find those people and ruin them.

Pay labor more. Work them less. I’d just do basic income, personally.

Make more walkable spaces. Fuck car culture. You don’t meet anyone when you drive. Everywhere could have local spots where you see regulars.

More free public events. Brooklyn does “movies under the stars”. There’s also like yoga classes, bird watching, concerts. More of that.

Offer free education for anyone who applies in good faith. Offer classes on a range of subjects, but honestly I think a lot of people would benefit from lessons and practice on “how to talk to people” and public speaking.

Kind of a ramble. But I think if you leave capitalism in place, you’re going to have problems. “Everything has to make the owners as much money as possible, immediately” isn’t a formula for a good life.

I don’t know man, i think the simpler answer of “capitalism and profit motive create incentives that don’t yield good outcomes” is compelling. Okcupid was better and more feature rich before Match bought it.

There is some user error on the apps, though, as you say.

I would prefer basic, subtle, black. I don’t want rainbows and lights. I’m very function over form.

I’d also rather play a game on medium settings where it runs flawlessly and doesn’t make the fans go hard, than at high settings with worse performance.

Yeah I think people are too stupid on average to understand. Like how kids think pouring water from a short wide glass into a tall glass means there’s more water, people think one long line means longer wait times.

I feel like education could mitigate this but at least in the US our education isn’t a priority