The ability to grasp the simplest social truth: that other people are just as real as you.

To take the briefest moment and live in someone else’s world.

To feel someone else’s pain inside your own body.

It stops just before action, which transforms empathy to compassion. To feed the hungry because you can’t stand to see them starving, to ease others’ suffering because you know what that pain is like and want it to stop, to comfort someone in distress because you wish someone would do the same for you in the same position, that is empathy in motion.

My grandmother was part of the reason for satanic panic about D&D, rock and roll, etc. She was part of the rumor mill in California regarding made up tales of “satanic abuse” at schools. Then converted to Mormonism and spread it there too.

This person got so so close to the real answer as to why most software today sucks.

Money.

Capitalism.

Line go up - Forever.

It’s the systems we choose to live in, not the leaders who take advantage of them.

Really cool software has been coming out all the time for the last decade or so, and then the second it goes public and starts trading stocks, it immediately starts going south. A company, making cool stuff I love, goes public, and I know to immediately start grieving for its death. Money makes all creative endeavors so so much worse. And I truly believe software is a creative pursuit. It’s been hijacked by capitalists to automate every living being on this planet out of work. Right now the list of people truly put out on their ass for good by automation isn’t very big. But we’re accelerating very quickly to a future where nothing fun ever happens again. Useful, functional, problem solving software, from now until forever, will be made and used to kick your ass, stomp you into the dirt, and sell your stupid crying face to anybody who wants to purchase it. Then while we’re at it, it’ll take the things you love to do and do them for you. And then make you pay money just to see it.

If you want to see and participate in some of the most unique and amazing uses of software engineering in our time, there are so many open source projects that achieve incredible and fun things for absolutely $0

• Video Game Randomizers
  • And their decomp partners
• Mod Communities
• Free Digital Art Programs
• Open up Github, sort by most Starred projects, and just fuckin scroll until you can’t scroll anymore
  • And even this has been captured. Code made freely for everyone to use, instead being fed to machine learning bullshit. To what end? To fully replace the need for any human to ever write software ever again.

It’s endless. There are truly too many projects for me to list in one post. I’d spend weeks editing this comment, adding all the coolest things software has done for us and can do for us. But it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. I am 100% confident society and its leaders will abuse the good will, passion, and creativity of many a programmer from now until the end of my life. It’ll do that to every profession. As long as we cling to the idea that we only do work to make profits, as long as the only way we can survive is by making money, this will be our fate.

Capitalism

I think I’m about to take liberties with the term “strategic play.” But I’ll tell this regardless.

I have a friend who is only hyper competitive when playing games, especially board games. In the moment, he wants to win so badly that he will do anything to win. He manipulates, gaslights, he’s dangerously intelligent and he’s good at making it seem like he’s just playing casually. And then once the game is over? He doesn’t care at all whether he won or lost. It’s infuriating sometimes.

Thanks to also being an extremely competitive person, I saw through it pretty quickly the first few games I ever played with him. But nobody else does. It seemed like nobody ever tried to win by comparison. So when he and I are in the same game, I know I’m going to lose. And he’ll use the other people at the table even if I can see it happening. Even if I made comments about it mid-game, nobody would believe me.

So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game. Instead, I turned him into a meme. When he ever looked like he was behind, and someone noticed, I’d say in a light-hearted conspiratorial way, “[his name] is always ahead.” Repeated it whenever he would take the lead and eventually when he won the game. “You see? [His name] is always ahead.”

It caught like wildfire. Our other friends started using the catchphrase, even in games where I wasn’t there. People started using attack cards on him more often. They’d be less friendly with him about trading. People would snub him even when he was so far behind there was no catching up. The day I realized how much it got to him, was one day he told me how much that phrase impacted his ability to play games with friends. It ruined a lot of his fun. Sometimes new friends who didn’t even play with us that often would use it. I didn’t realize how much damage it caused. All I wanted was for people to be more wary of his manipulation tactics. But instead I took something fun from a good friend and made it miserable.

So I haven’t said it for years since. But our other friends still remember and will say the phrase from time to time. He’s always ahead.

Literally moved everything to Linux (Nobara) like 3 weeks ago and the only thing I can’t get to work is Bizhawk which I can easily get around. It’s insane how far Linux has come for gaming and whatnot.

I use a similar example.

If I went to a restaurant and ordered a 3 meat sandwich, and they gave me a hotdog, I’d be fucking pissed. Likewise if I ordered a hotdog and they gave me a taco with solidified beef and relish, I’d be confused, and concerned that I got somebody else’s weird special taco order.

Categories aren’t limited only to the forms and functions, but expectations. You can redefine or consolidate terms all you like but all you’re doing is causing confusion. If that’s what people are after then good troll I guess.

I’m reusing a blade server I managed to snag from a company I worked for in 2008. It’s perfect as a media server for friends and family. It is only recently degrading slightly but hey, it lasted a long time!

Point is you can use almost anything. Do your homework on compatible parts and make what you can afford

I don’t disagree with there being tradeoffs in terms of speed, like function vs network requests. But eventually your whole monolith gets so fuckin damn big that everything else slows down.

The whole stack sits in a huge expensive VM, attached to maybe 3 or 4 large database instances, and dev changes take forever to merge in or back out.

Every time a dev wants to locally test their build, they type a command and have to wait for 15-30 minutes. Then troubleshoot any conflicts. Then run over 1000 unit tests. Then check that they didn’t break coverage requirements. Then make a PR. Which triggers the whole damn process all over again except it has to redownload the docker images, reinstall dependencies, rerun 1000+ unit tests, run 1000+ integration tests, rebuild the frontend, which has to happen before running end to end UI tests, pray nothing breaks, merge to main, do it ALL OVER AGAIN FOR THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT, QA has to plan for and execute hundreds of manual tests, and we’re not even at prod yet. The whole way begging for approvals from whoever gets impacted by anything from a one line code change to thousands.

When this process gets so large that any change takes hours to days, no matter how small the change is, then you’re fucked. Because unfucking this once it gets too big becomes such a monstrous effort that it’s equivalent to rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.

I’ve done this song and dance so many times. If you want your shit to be speedy on request, great, just expect literally everything else to drag down. When companies were still releasing software like once a quarter this made sense. It doesn’t anymore.

There are lots of parasitic bugs in this story, including Elon Musk

I approve of this expanded answer. I may have been too ELI5 in my post.

If the OP has read this far, I’m not telling you to use docker, but you could consider it if you want to store all of your services and their configurations in a backup somewhere on your network so if you have to set up a new raspberry pi for any reason, now it’s a simple sequence of docker commands (or one docker-compose command) to get back up and running. You won’t need to remember how to reinstall all of the dependencies.

It’s virtual machines but faster, more configurable with a considerably larger set of automation, and it consumes less computer resources than a traditional VM. Additionally, in software development it helps solve a problem summarized as “works on my machine.” A lot of traditional server creation and management relied on systems that need to be set up perfectly identical every deployment to prevent dumb defects based on whose machine was used to write it on. With Docker, it’s stupid easy to copy the automated configuration from “my machine” to “your machine.” Now everyone, including the production systems, are running from “my machine.” That’s kind of a big deal, even if it could be done in other ways naturally on Linux operating systems. They don’t have the ease of use or the same shareability.

What you’re doing is perfectly expected. That’s a great way of getting around using Docker. You aren’t forced into using it. It’s just easier for most people

The term AI being used by corporations isn’t some protected and explicit categorization. Any software company alive today, selling what they call AI, isn’t being honest about it. It’s a marketing gimmick. The same shit we fall for all the time. “Grass fed” meat products aren’t actually 100% grass fed at all. “Healthy: Fat Free!” foods just replace the fat with sugar and/or corn syrup. Women’s dress sizes are universally inconsistent across all clothing brands in existence.

If you trust a corporation to tell you that their product is exactly what they market it as, you’re only gullible. It’s forgivable. But calling something AI when it’s clearly not, as if the term is so broad it can apply to any old if-else chain of logic, is proof that their marketing worked exactly as intended.

My mother told me that she hated me. After a really dumb argument we had, as adults. I still talk to her and play nice in front of our siblings but I haven’t forgiven her and I don’t think I ever will. I lost a lot of love for my mother in a single day and then nothing anyone has said to me since has ever matched or beaten that feeling. How do you trump your own mother hating you? She moved on like she never said it. No apologies. Never mentioned it. You can call me every name and slur and hang me for all my fuckups and oddities, but you can’t hurt me. I’m already at 0 HP emotionally

Seeing my friends.

Cool rocks.

New video games coming out soon (Tekken 8!)

Finding new pretty things to wear.

Baking treats.

Having a whole day to myself with no interruptions to do what I like.

Complaining about AI in all the wrong ways to complain about AI. AI is definitely a poor substitute for actually well thought out feature implementations. But it has nothing to do with why your iPhone sucks to navigate on.

“Morpheus this is really not funny”

Criticize myself unnecessarily and with some self deprecating flourish