At one of my old jobs, we had a suite of browser tests that would run on PR. It’d stand up the application, open headless chrome, and click through stuff. This was the final end-to-end test suite to make sure that yes, you can still log in and everything plays nicely together.

Developers were constantly pinging slack about “why is this test broken??”. Most of the time, the error message would be like “Never found an element matching css selector #whatever” or “Element with css selector #loading-spinner never went away”. There’d be screenshots and logs, and usually when you’d look you’d see like the loading spinner was stuck, and the client had gotten a 400 back from the server because someone broke something.

We put a giant red box on the CI/CD page explaining what to do. Where to read the traces, reminding them there’s a screenshot, etc. Still got questions.

I put a giant ascii cat in the test output, right before the error trace, with instructions in a word bubble. People would ping me, “why is this test broken?”. I’d say “What did the cat say?” They’d say “What cat?” And I’d know they hadn’t even looked at the error message.

There’s a kind of learned helplessness with some developers and tests. It’s weird.

You should read “Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs, because it talks about this. Basically, having more people on the sidewalk makes for healthier, safer, neighborhoods. Having everyone drive instead of walking is really bad for pretty much every metric we care about- safety, the environment, economic activity.

Also, you only pay when you enter the system, and it’s a flat fee no matter how far you ride. So if you fuck up and get on the wrong train, just get out and get on the correct train. You don’t have to pay again until you actually leave the system. (I think there are some stations where you can’t change directions without exiting to the street and re-entering, but that’s pretty uncommon.)

That’s a very stretched definition of “full of”.

Pre-pandemic I rode the subway to work every day. I’d see a handful of clearly unwell people on the train a week. I’d also see thousands of seemingly put-together people in that time. Is a milk jug full of milk and one jellybean full of jellybeans?

I cannot speak authoritatively for women, but my understanding is most of the danger comes from men. Not mentally unwell people, not the homeless, just regular men. Being unwell or desperate doesn’t help, but it’s not the only source of danger.

Furthermore, not everyone prefers personal vehicle transport. Maybe people prefer mass transit for a variety of reasons.

I think there were crackdowns on the “Showtime kids” (aka the kids that dance on the train). A lot of people have no soul and get cranky about them. I mean, they’re mildly disruptive and probably occasionally fuck up, but it’s also only a couple minutes, and sometimes it’s pretty impressive.

I saw a car hit a teenager on a bike the other day. Dragged the kid a bit and then just sped off.

Somehow the kid seemed fine. Got up and rode off after a moment.

This was in Brooklyn, by Barclays center (a very crowded spot). Fuck cars and double fuck irresponsible turds that would drive off after nearly killing someone.

I’d rather you be uncomfortable in a subway sometimes than the entire world suffer from all the horrible things personal car ownership does.

People who don’t live here think it’s like The Warriors. They picture roving gangs of murderous criminals, live wires sparking everywhere, and insane people screaming Eldritch horrors. This is not accurate.

I’ve rarely had a subway that smells like piss. The last time I had a stench on the train was years ago. It’s not always “so clean I would eat off the seats” but the NYC subway is much better than people who don’t ride it imagine it.

Most of the people on the train are just people trying to get someplace.

On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We’ve apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.

Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text. That’s probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.

I feel like because of how much insider bullshit there is, there’s a good chance the billionaire would get rich again even if they were left with only $1mm

They’d go to their investor buddies and ask for funding for their new startup, and they’d be right back to being ownership class.

They wouldn’t suffer. I want them to suffer. I think that’s the only way they’d learn empathy.

poe’s law is real and i can’t tell if this is a joke

Alternative : we kill you for being anti-social. Get fucked.

There is truth here.

I think rich people will have assets, like stock, and they’ll get a loan out with the stock as collateral. They pay like 2% on the loan, but they get like a million dollars cash. If that was treated like income, they’d pay a lot more taxes.

Not sure the best way to address this, but it should be addressed.

I feel like if we had spent the money lost to tax cuts on enforcing existing laws, like really throw the book at tax cheats, like put them in orange jumpsuits and make them rot in a cell, we’d have had better outcomes.

The ultra rich should be afraid.

We should execute doge. They are doing violence to all of us

Someone should stop these DOGE people.

Many people don’t really think about their language. They kind of snap their phrases together like a child with those big duplo blocks.

Most of the time that’s fine, if a bit limiting. But occasionally you get glimpses into how communication could be clearer, or more accurate, if they thought about their words more.

I partly blame our public education system. Not enough funding, some funding misused, other problems I don’t even know about. But it feels like a lot of people are barely educated, and don’t have any intellectual curiosity.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

It might come to that. People should organize and arm now. Even though that’s kind of hard and scary and I don’t know where to begin.