Is this a war tho

You can live off minimum wage in Canada in some regions, if you’re children-free. It gets harder with kids, though the state will cover some of it of you’re low-income (Like a couple hundred per months, and virtually no income taxes).

I’ve found that communities that are both mainstream and related to technical subjects to always get filled by people who know just barely enough about the subject to spread self-assured disinformation.

You won’t really have this problem with super-niche stuff, or stuff that isn’t mainstream enough like a pilot community. Gaming in social media is definitely cursed.

I love Valve, but I really don’t understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don’t truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.

Don’t get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it’s been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don’t need the money as this point. They don’t need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.

What if you make an app or a game and sell it for 2 Billions dollars?

Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.

There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.

No, it was a big international corporation. But afaik the forced positivity was universal.

Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.

Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.

Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.

Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.

So, I figure all modern corporate offices are exactly the same then. There is some good stuff in there, but it is so over the top and forced that it sort of ruin the benefits imo.

Positivity is great, even if it is forced a little, but hiding all negativity, issues and criticism make forced positivity completely useless. Not to mention that at the office I worked there was virtually always one or many of your “bosses” in earshot, in every situation. There wasn’t a daily, a meeting or a workstation in that job where some guy responsible for my promotions and employment wasn’t listening. This is how you make sure nothing of value is ever said in your dailies and retro meeting. It’s all great!

Now let’s play the game of figuring the smallest politically correct nitpick to mention during the retro so that we can check that self-improvement/self-organizing checkbox in front of the boss. What, you think over 10 hours of useless scrum meeting is wasteful, on top of the actual important meetings? Well, better not mention it. I mean you could, but shitting on scrum will get you canned. Do you think the way points/hours/complexity is evaluated completely miss the mark? Or are you tempted to mention Goodhart’s law when reviewing whatever metric in Jira? Well, better not do that, because you might as well say that your boss’s job needs not to exist. Better not mention anything that might compromise someone else in front of the boss, or anything that could be used against you in a review.

Because that’s the thing, since no one ever admit to mistake and make themselves vulnerable, if you’re the only one to do it it’s gonna raise “red flags” and you’re gonna hear about it in your next review. Better give a good not-so-anonymous review to your immediate managers too, raising any sort of issues could prevent one, or both of you from getting promoted with increased pay.

I did not really mind when I worked at a ~10 people company, it kind of made sense. Working on a floor with over a hundred people in an open office was miserable. There was always someone on Zoom or people having live meeting in earshot.

Blow my mind that all those office managers and floor planners and supposedly expert at organizing a work environment think that it make sense to cram in hundred of people working on wildly different stuff together at earshot distance. How hard would it be to create big divisions so that you only get to hear the 10 or so people which you’re directly involved with. Anyway, there was clearly an “everyone must be an extrovert” culture thing going on. The higher ups sure seemed to enjoy hearing and seeing everyone everywhere all the time.

Ah, good ol’ “They let you do it” defense.

Open offices are a mistake.

Having to reserve conference rooms to have a semblance of quietude is a terrible system. I don’t miss that shit.

We had a loud talkative guy at my place. Fucking deep voice that he was projecting like he was on a stage or something. It was not possible to have a conversation near him when he was on Zoom. We barely spoke in the open area anyway, but some people just wouldn’t shup up. I can still hear their stupid voice when I think about it.

Yeah I have this particular alt-right website I visit every now and then due to my morbid curiosity. It is basically a mix of Q-stuff, Trump fans, pro-genocide folks and people who shouldn’t be there but who are completely lost. They certainly think highly of themselves.

One thing I noticed, is that beside the conspiracy stuff for which the evidence is paper-thin and mostly made up of air, they don’t say anything really. I mean it is all one-liner, posturing, saying how the left or the globalists are so bad, but they don’t actually discuss in-depth of anything but those made up facts. Take our little conversion right here, we’re trying really hard to understand them, you yourself shown empathy for them. Well, they don’t speak like that over there. They don’t try to understand “the left”, they don’t discuss facts or events outside the talking points except to agree on the conspiracy stuff. But man do they think that we’re literal morons.

That’s one thing I noticed with some people in real life. People with simple world views have very black and white answers. They feel very smart because they’re pretty damn sure they solved whatever it is they believe. When they hear other people talk with nuance, cite allegories and abstract concepts they are completely at a lost. Often, their first instinct is to believe that we are completely stupid for talking nonsense. After all, it is all very simple right? It must be because we struggle to understand that we’re having such strange discussions. Aaaannyway. It will get worst until it get better. The cure for ignorance is education, but a few generations have been lost already.

Makes sense.

I suppose it comes back to the allegory of the cave, though I really like the idea of them having an inverted Okham’s Razor, because it helps to visualize on which side of the thought prison we are. Because, you know, Trump supporters would argue that we are the one missing the big picture.

It is flipping the complexity of the world upside down basically.

The world is a complex system made of many simple observable facts and events.

To them, the world is a simple system made of many overly convoluted and self-contradicting facts and events.

They still have to make sense of the world, so that complexity has to go somewhere. Every little thing has to be twisted and distorted to make sense of their simple world view. It is both intriguing and scary. It is the opposite of okham’s razor really, because they use it to justify the simplicity of the world, but really they picked the most convoluted answer.

It is in some parts of the world. Lots of people hate those classes.

That is crazy to hear. I always cherished the few days of recovery after I get the flu due to it stopping my head spinning with thoughts constantly.

Depends on your hair, also, some shampoos are good at cleaning your hairs without that intense feeling of sucking the oil from your hairs. I like silicon-free shampoo because I have very, very fine hairs, and it gets either too dry or too greasy.

Depends on the degree. Internet made colleges much more obsolete than what society care to admit. This is an oversimplification of course. Education is a complex subject.

How does it work? Labouring for free and still feeding your family I mean, from the point of view of the developer.