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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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    • I have a limited amount of bandwith on my mobile plan
    • if i know a game download is large i go home where i have broadband; i dont download large files over mobile internet
    • a text-only website can be rather small with only a few KB. It’s only when you get ““Designers”” that things start to bloat, because the system fonts are not good enough and 2MB in extra fonts no sane visitor will ever notice must be downloaded.
    • the marketing department REALLY needs those 10 extra trackers and analytics scripts that take 5s to load, even if they last looked at the visitor stats back in 2021 and the login has long been forgotten.
    • the CEO wanted that animated AI powered talking gorilla widget he had seen on a local tradeshow where the customers can ask product or website questions (spoiler: they dont!), which ads a few more Megabytes to each pageload even before you even use it.


  • The Lead Dev/team Lead was quite arrogant and in his own mind the worlds best developer who had all the answers. If some technology or software was not written by him or already existed in the 90s it was “useless” and not fit for the company (without him having looked at it or the docs). If asked why we would not use X which was out for years, well maintained, had no critical bugs would solve problem Z we where having, he would reply “because i said so” and insist in writing out own variant - which ended up having 10% of the features, 10 times the bugs, terrible UI and would take months to develop.

    When support repeatetly told him that users had issues with feature X because the only error message on a 10 fields forms page was “Error”, he would respond that this is a user problem, the end user is clearly stupid (despide used in a field where you need to study for years) and that support must hold training sessions so the users can “learn” how to use his product.

    As such, the company would reject git and instead email each other files and changes.

    Each meeting felt like living inside a Dilbert cartoon.


  • You only hurt yourself down the line. My last job had not improved their own product, processes, tools or frameworks, so everything was still stuck in the 90s. Their product was build on an discontinued an proprietary database and server system you never heard about, jQuery UI from 10 years ago and other BS.

    However if you don’t upskill yourself in this situation you will be unemployable in the future, because all other employers demand modern technologies, git, docker, unit testing etc., which I was yelled at in meetings for suggesting it.




  • downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

    I would choose a different solution. Instead of always up or down voting by 1 point, everyone gets a fixed points budget per day, that is then distributed between each post you vote on. So if you only up vote one post, this vote counts more than the vote from someone who votes on 100 posts per day.

    This would solve the mass down voting of legit content on YouTube or Facebook, where quite often conspiracy dipshits in their telegram channels post videos or Channels that should be down voted, while their own right wing propaganda gets upvoted. So the most active accounts who spent all day on the social would be muted, while average User would have a more important voice.






    • It takes 20 years to build
    • nobody knows how much nuclear fuel will cost in 20 years
    • you have to take out a big loan and make interest payments on it for maybe 30 years before you start making a profit
    • if you don’t have enough water for cooling because of climate change, the plant must shut down
    • if your neighbor decides to start a war against you, your nuclear plants become a liability, see Ukraine.

    I think smaller, decentralized renewable energy is cheaper in the short and long run and has a much lower risk in case of accidents, natural Desasters or attacks.


  • There are also a lot of e-commerce agencies who just don’t have their sh1t together. Was expected to work on 3 different clients a day who all had different platforms, different requirements etc. Yes, you can dump some new code into the project that looks like it’s working, but then you don’t have time for any unit tests, exception handling if the user won’t cooperate etc. and it’s basically just some dodgy, untested code that will come back a few days later with some issues related to something nobody told you about.

    The other “senior” programmer in the company never set up any local environment but instead ftp’d all changes directly to the live server. I asked him if needs help to set up a local server and debugger, but instead he would just dump vars on the live server and stream the contents of error.log to his second screen to catch any issues…