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.

Maybe we should, like, storm one of these ice facilities, have our own bastille day.

I am skeptical of things that sound too good to be true, and also I feel like the current US government would fuck it up, but maybe things won’t be terrible forever.

true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things

Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
  this_variable = True
else:
  this_variable = False

Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.

We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.

I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

• Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
• Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
• Get them to trust you.
• Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.

Oh my gosh the conspiracy theories would be so much if Trump died because a Tesla caught fire with him inside.

Seems like a recipe for subtle bugs and unmaintainable systems. Also those Eloi from the time machine, where they don’t know how anything works anymore.

Management is probably salivating at the idea of firing all those expensive engineers that tell them stuff like “you can’t draw three red lines all perpendicular in yellow ink”

I’m also reminded of that ai-for-music guy that was like “No one likes making art!”. Soulless husk.

Yeah, wake me up when they start arming and actually resisting.

Rallies are fine but they’re not enough. Conservatives need to be removed from power.

The capitalist systems that created this living hell need to be dismantled. We shouldn’t settle for homeless people on the street whole the ultra wealthy have private yachts and multiple mansions.

I feel like a lot of people look at a bad system and go “We should change!” and then accept any change. But that’s stupid. If you have a machine that often breaks down, yeah you should change that. But you shouldn’t replace it with a machine that shoots rusty nails out every couple minutes while filling the room with toxic gas. Yeah, that’s a change, but a change for the worse.

Or like if you realize you got on the wrong train. You should change because you don’t want to go where this one is going. But don’t go on an express train going to the same wrong place!

I believe French does this as well. To answer in the affirmative to a negative question, you use “si” instead of “oui”

“Si” is also the word for “if”, which has probably confused people.

(top search hit, not sure if good, but on a quick glance it looks correct https://www.commeunefrancaise.com/blog/si-in-french )

I think at least New York now requires jobs to post a range. I haven’t even seen bullshit like “$50k - $500k” - maybe the law was written strongly enough that they can’t loophole it that way.

Been doing the job search and it’s frustrating how bad most of the job postings are. There’s so much filler nonsense.

I pretty much just want to know like

• tech stack
• team size
• big picture what the company does
• if they’re assholes about in-office mandates
• salary range

Some postings are like “must know Java, go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, or rust” and I’m like do you use all of those?

I see a lot of posts for typescript, but every job also says 100+ applicants. Job market is not looking good

Plus all these places want people to go into the office just-because

• Get accepted as goon for “Patrol” app
• Go to CEO location, armed with lethal weapons
• ???
• Profit

Belief is social. They believe what their social group does. We all do this to some extent. Some part of the brain still feels like if we reject the social group’s belief, we’ll die alone in the woods. Going with the group feels good.

You can probably change minds if they see you as in-group, but it won’t last if the rest of their in-group has contradictory ideas.

Getting people off Facebook and other hellscapes might help.

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.