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  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not crazy, just sad.

    Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

    End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

    People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

    Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

    The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

    ———

    Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

    A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

    Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

    Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.


  • Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

    does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

    • can the product be resold privately?
    • can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
    • would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
    • would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

    if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’


  • Explain what you want. It’s that easy.

    I did many years of “I want something simple that I can maintain easily, and will still look ok when I drag my ass out of bed at 10am, an hour late for work. Anything but a buzz cut”

    Eventually I found something that I can touch up at home myself, and can explain to even the shittiest of barbers.

    It’s hair. Nobody really gives a shit. You’ll get some shit ones, some good ones, a buzz cut you explicitly didn’t want. Nobody got hurt, and it grows back.



  • Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.

    But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.

    Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.

    No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.

    Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.


  • Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.

    Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.

    It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.







  • I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

    I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

    It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

    Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

    Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

    Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.