afarrell

Yep. And Engineers often have pet projects. Marketing often has a slightly odd artistic vision for something.

People are gonna be people.

This is an important thing to keep in mind when engaging with institutions which make most of their money from outliers. Their incentives are not aligned with the stability of your mental health.

(Though they don’t follow their incentives perfectly because institutions are still made of humans who care about people)

The setup is left as an exercise for the reader.

A person can gain knowledge and experience. That just takes time, effort, and people to work with.

It requires overcoming the fear of being fired before gaining the required knowledge and experience.

The reason people (talking primarily about myself here…) over-complicate things is fear and their coping mechanisms to fear. Engineers like me enjoy making and solving puzzles. So when there is a task requiring social courage (such as publicly revealing a massive knowledge gap in order to ask a clear simple question), it is tempting to puzzlecraft the way around the simple hard task.

The leadership solution to overcomplication is not to say “you’re overcomplicating things” but to be a steadfast curious collaborator with them to encourage the person to see more clearly the challenge that they’ve obscured with needless puzzle-making. Easier said than done.

> The looming question- what if pointless cruelty and prolonged suffering is an important part of the culture? What then?

Then it would be irresponsible for the US congress to be spending public money to buy tools which create the expectation that we would sustain our effort sending our beloved sons to immerse themselves both in that culture and the cruel trauma of war.

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But does anyone here actually think that pointless cruelty is an important part of the relevant east asian cultures? I know myself that my understanding is so superficial that I'd be arrogant and lazy to make any judgements without spending far more time and attention to learn. I also have not seen any evidence of that in the individual people I've met, only the same varied mix of human cruelty and compassion in other peoples.

The Romans were not as smart as us because they did not have the tools to understand the neurological effect of lead poisoning.

> Why not just say "why I'm still bullish on crypto even though everyone says the opposite"?

If you would like to understand why they use weird vocabulary, here is a request which I expect will induce frustration and then clarity:

“Please explain how someone can be similar to a bovine in their relationship to crypto”

On the contrary: I’ve made a leather sleeve to hold 3 portable external monitors.

The reason for the glut of these apps is that people have a drive to create.

Ability to print onto paper and then OCR. That way my habit tracking can be more independent of the cell phone I’m trying to habitually spend less time with.

You are not forced to pay income taxes anymore than you are forced to use toll roads to go to the grocery store or pay sales taxes when you get there.

A taxpayer can choose not to engage in activities which incur taxes, so long as he is willing to forgo his corresponding reliance on the structures of social trust and physical infrastructure.

A slave will be beaten if he does not work.

The hyperbolic analogy you are looking for is not slavery but a mafia protection racket.

Yes, but governments are much less murdery and much more predictable than the sloppy gangs which are funded by lotteries.

> why not a carbon tax scheme for everyone

Because the world is not fair and a general carbon tax will not get passed.

I want a government which is humble about its ability to declare an activity valueless to society. It would have been vastly arrogant to declare that cryptocurrency is useless in 2012. In 2022 it is… debatable.

If there was a auditable publicly-viewable record of all lotteries, then it would be practical to simply ban them. As it is, banning them does more harm than good by funding organizations which also commit murder.

Hmmm… okay you are making the distinction between judgement and discretion and saying I’m wrong to categorize this as discretion.

Upon reflection, I think you are right.

> writing is hard

Oh definitely. I’ve certainly had the experience of Lin-Manuel Miranda expressing something more clearly than I can.

This design is really pleasing to my eye.

Resources spent which, after their consumption, do not result in an experience which a human would look back upon with fondness or gratitude.

Effective coping mechanisms that are reasonably grounded in objective reality.

Whose decision is it that the other songwriters are better at expressing this one dude’s experiences? Thats not an objective question. It is a choice.

The statement is in fact useless. Changing your mental actions is what is useful. When you notice you brain doing it, then imagine you are a kind kindergarten teacher guiding a child to take crayons out of his mouth. Kindly tell your brain to think of something else. Then patiently tell your brain again.

Put down the internet drama machine and go do small good things in the real world.

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> considered subhuman by the rest of society!

Unless you are literally an AI, then as a member of society I can tell you that this is factually inaccurate. I think you are a human.

I also know that there is a tiny fraction of society that consider me subhuman. HP Lovecraft would be horrified by my very existence. The fraction of society that calls people subhuman is really bad at maintaining healthy relationships and so they don’t tend to hold onto power so I don’t care about them.

> just terrible at everything and have accomplished nothing

Do you have solid evidence that this is factually accurate, or does it only feel true?

If it feels true, then get up and go for a walk or roll outside, occasionally doing pushups or waving your arms about. That will help you see reality more clearly.

Also, teach yourself how to make scrambled eggs well. That way when you remember the parts of your life that do suck, you’ll at least be able to remind yourself of your ability to make scrambled eggs for someone.

Or “do not compare yourself with others, for there will always be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

The Tokyo Sewerage Museum was worth going out of the way to visit.

Sometimes it is a fear response to the anticipated consequences of giving a clear answer.

In your example, I imagine that the engineer is trying to be seen as still worthy of employment despite not shipping a feature. That motivates them to show themselves as:

- Able to overcome some challenges.

- Able to learn from mistakes.

This is a self-reenforcing cycle. An engineer who struggles to make decisions will struggle to deliver at pace. An engineer who struggles to delver at pace will have more experiences of getting fired. An engineer with more experiences of getting fired will be more fearful and thus struggle more to gather their thoughts and communicate clearly.

The only solution I know of is more secure professional relationships such as with a coach such as you’ve been acting as.

Can you see that there is effort which must be paid for it to be both?

This seems to be a consequence of a contradiction at the heart of calling what we do “Software Engineering”.

A bridge which stands up for centuries without significant change is a good bridge. This is widely agreed. Nobody expects that a bridge will change much over time. A hydroelectric dam which needs constant maintainence to avoid the killing a million Iraqis is a bad dam. This is also pretty widely agreed.

Is software which cannot be easily changed but just does the same thing for years…

A. good software because it is reliable.

B. bad software because it is not changeable.

?

Is Django good software?

Is Unix good software?

Is our field mature enough to have a clear idea of what good software is?

Is “bigger online presence and fame in the conspiracy sphere” beneficial to a person?

> I think both are equally irrelevant

That is my point. They are analagous and equally relevant: no more. No less.

I doubt people make indie films specifically targeted at getting a job either.

They are about as irrelevant as someone writing a unix tool in Rust, pushing it to github, and linking to it in an email to a hiring manager.