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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I was repeatedly disappointed by the class traitors I worked with. They were like “oh we have to work this weekend to get this feature out”.

    Do you? Do you really? Management set this deadline. They fucked up and now it’s “behind schedule”. And it’s a website. It’s not like there’s a factory sitting idle until we’re done, or a family without a home until the project is finished. The impact of “now you can view your project summary and team list side by side” is nil.

    When I pushed back against this, my boss I was bringing down the team’s morale. He said that it doesn’t hurt me if they work longer. Bullshit. They’re providing the same labor I am, but they’re devaluing it. They’re also setting a nasty precedent.

    And you know what? Almost all of us got laid off anyway, including my boss.

    This is also part of why the visa stuff is bullshit. Two of the guys were afraid to make any waves because if they lost their job, they might have to leave the country. Maybe they wouldn’t be so traitorous if their personal security wasn’t on the line.

    Now the CEO is posting memes about how high unemployment is and captioning them “lol”. He’s a middle eastern man that loves Musk. If ICE takes him to a camp I’m going to feel a little bad because of basic humanity, but also laugh really hard at the leopards eating his face.


  • Code reviews are important. Unfortunately, no-test-text guy convinced his whole team that he was right, and I wasn’t able to block it. I’d scheduled a meeting to try to get the wider org to adopt a more sensible standard, but then there was a mass layoff 🤷

    The other guy with the bad messages is at a tiny startup where they’ve laid off almost everyone, and the other 2 guys don’t want to make waves. The CEO is big on “just ship it” (and also “why are there bugs in production? this is unacceptable!!”)



  • I’ve worked with a few people who are just incomprehensible. One refuses to write commit messages of any detail. Just “work in progress”. Cast him into the pit.

    There was another guy that refused to name his tests. His code was like

    describe(''. () => {
      it('', () => {
         expect(someFunc()).toEqual(0);
      }
     it('', () => {
        expect(someFunc(1)).toEqual(0);
      }
     it('', () => {
       expect(someFunc("").toEqual(1);
     }
    }
    

    He was like, “Test names are like comments and they turn into lies! So I’m not going to do it.”

    I was like, a. what the fuck. b. do you also not name your files? projects? children?

    He was working at a very big company last I heard.

    edit: If you’re unfamiliar, the convention is to put a human readable description where those empty strings are. This is used in the test output. If one fails, it’ll typically tell include the name in the output.





  • Is this an age thing? I’m about 40 and I never had instagram, barely used facebook, and didn’t use any others really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem where someone backed out because I didn’t have instagram. But I also don’t have a big group of casual friends, and maybe that would be harder.

    Discord sucks, but I’ve noticed a lot of social groups use it. A couple meetups I go to all use it for communication. Maybe that’s more bearable than instagram?




  • Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

    You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

    You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

    If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

    The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

    Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

    Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

    also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.







  • Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.

    You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.

    On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.

    Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.