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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • I think you’re wrong. But not because you’re illogical. On the contrary I think you’re thinking rationally if you assume businesses are running to make better products. If you do. You’re right.

    These companies are not running to make better products than their competitors. They are running to monopolize their industry to a degree that gives them enough power to sell absolute garbage.

    Look no further than the gaming industry. This is the exact type of garbage we are seeing from other industries now.

    They are not interested in making better products. They are interested in making profits. And if the entire market is held together by 2-3 major players all replacing workers with AI slop they will have no reason to change. They will all do it together.

    No amount of “indie” projects will ever threaten their market domination.

    This is then future that will happen. Don’t expect “markets” to save us from this. The myth of “free markets” is how we got here in the first place.


  • This. I hate it. It feels like a modern day factory worker job.

    When I first graduated I was all caring about design, mainability, etc.

    Nope. All that shit is pointless in a large company. Took me too long to notice that Cisco was essentially just throwing as many code monkeys at the problems until things work.

    “Fix” a bug in a hacky way that creates 10 more bugs that won’t be found for weeks and be another teams problem because they can’t directly point to your hacky code anyway? That engineer is getting promoted. They fix so many bugs. So many commits!

    Take the time to understand the bug and do a rewrite to ensure other platforms are not effected and setup the design so it’s easier to debug in the future? Well, you spent all week on one bug you lazy engineer!

    It took me too long to realize that I was the bad programmer. That this is actually what companies want and reward their employees for.

    Sorry. Didn’t mean to rant. But your short comment triggered it I guess.

    I fucking hate this field. I still love programming though.





  • If the file is just a class I usually put example usage with some default arguments in that block by itself. There is no reason for a “main” function. It’s a nice obvious block that doesn’t run when someone imports the class but if they’re looking at the class there is a really obvious place to see the class usage. No confusion about what “main()” is meant to do.

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        # MyClass example Usage
        my_object = MyClass()
        my_object.my_method()
    


  • Decentralized currencies will only actually make sense when the material incentives of our economic system would benefit from them. Capitalism is literally all about concentrating the control of capital and the means by which we produce things. Sadly, decentralized currencies will never be allowed to decouple themselves from these economic systems. There is too much material power to prevent that. And by material power I mean literally the enforcement of these concentrations of wealth through the use of violence.

    The tech is cool. But it doesn’t magically solve the problem by simply being invented. It’s why no one is actually paying with these cryptocurrencies on anything but an extremely small scale.

    A currency that cannot be manipulated by capitalist for their benefit has no place in our world. So, it will never reach any meaningful real use until those structures are dismantled. It will just continue to be a speculative asset that rich people dump their extra wealth into and poor people play as the lottery.



  • This sadly excludes the majority of bad UX decisions that are done entirely to maximize users time inside of the app as well as display advertising.

    So many functional apps are destroyed by these incentives. There is literally a “skill issue” but in the opposite direction. The design is either purposely malicious in a subtle way with “dark patterns” (something Amazon is insanely guilty of. Literally just go try and return and item.) or is purposely annoying trying to ensure the user purchases the “free trial” to actually make the app functional. Knowing a lot of users will be charged at least once for the free trial.

    I guess my point is that there is so so so so much wrong with UX design today. But for the majority of people that’s not because of a bad programmer with no design knowledge. It’s on purpose in most cases.




  • Well, it’s the lie silicon valley has sold. A lie that is falling apart (hence the right wing shift of the tech oligarchs). The lie was “Making the world a better place” we could use technology to “fix” the contradictions of capitalism. It did this primarily through liberal aesthetic based improvements. Which a lot of every day people confused with actual progressive material improvements.

    You’ll still see it today with people defending Bill Gates as he continues to maintain the aesthetics. Still seen as a “progressive billionaire” as inherently contradictory that term is.


  • That and the absolute failure of “Denazification” in favor of “fighting communism” following WW2. The western powers aligned with former Nazis instead of purging them from any political position.

    We’ve had a generation of Nazi sympathizer in power building to this moment. And while the actual brown shirts may be dead their children are very much trying to take up where their parents failed. Musk being an obvious example.


  • If you have followed Elon Musk beyond just his public “tech guy” persona it’s not as much of a 180 as you’d think. At least in terms of Musk. The public perception of him has done a swap but I’d still say it’s inaccurate. The fact that we have a “party swap” on a billionaire like this is mostly testament to how both parties work for capitalist billionaire interests in their own way.

    Musk has always been a narcissist. His political goals have always been aligned with his capital and seizing of power. If he could get to the same place he was today by being an oil Barron he would have done so. It should be a wake up call for people that associate their political beliefs with red or blue to realize how flexible these parties are in serving the interest of billionaires. And not necessarily a “shift” in Musk. Musk has always been this way.