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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • When I was a kid, I’d usually get As or B’s. This other kid told me whenever he got an A, he’d get $20 each. I said to my mom, “why don’t I get anything for my As?”

    She said, “Because [other kid] is kind of stupid, so it’s a big deal when he gets one”

    This was not a satisfying answer.

    I also remember in late middle school, we were in the computer lab (I’m old) given a sort of free form assignment to do something for whatever book we’d read. I made a basic little game in BASIC (I’m still old). Some kid wrote the book title in WordArt. The teacher gushed over it, and I got a “that’s nice” for my fully operational game. Infuriating. Had a huge impact on my respect for authority and academic career, probably more than warranted.

    My therapist tried to make me see the teacher’s point of view. Kyle was always fucking up and off task, so rewarding him when he’s not a fuckup for once must have felt like a big payoff. But I was always good, and she didn’t really understand what I was going on about, so she didn’t engage with it.


  • A large part of code review has been preventing people from doing stupid shit. AI is making stupid shit worse. It’s not defects, it’s “adding a whole micro service to get the user name from the ID, when the name is already in the metadata” or whatever that recent meme was.

    Or that time a guy wrote a whole DSL instead of using the existing framework. Technically impressive, but adds a huge burden.













  • I don’t know how to grade myself on clarity of communication, but I’ll share some things I think have helped.

    Avoid long sentences. Many people don’t read well, and even those that do will get lost in a long block of text.

    Read back what you wrote out loud.

    Do not neglect the emotional front. Conversations and convincing are about emotions more than facts. Acknowledge their position. Make them feel heard.

    Read more. Read a variety of things. Op-eds in newspapers. Books of various genres. Old stuff. New stuff. Feed your brain more than word junk food.

    Ask questions. Sincere questions. Don’t try to trick them. People are usually happy to talk about themselves and their beliefs. Use this to find common ground and shared experience.