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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Ah yes, me, the demigod who can act up on all my worries. Tell me again my plan to get trump to fuck off the 2024 election?

    Not to be too sarcastic at you, it’s a good sentiment that I do sort of agree with, but it places too much “you can do anything” blame on the observer who literally is already worried. Aka, this runs a major risk of demotivating people straight into doomerism when they’re faced with worries there’s really nothing that they individually can do about.

    Unless I’m wrong and there is some legitimate answer to that sarcastic opening question that I, individually, can do about it, in which case, I’m all ears lol


  • That’s fair. Part of my job is converting non-technical users into technical users by teaching them things like problem solving approaches that are supposed to help them teach themselves how to learn whatever they need to actually do their job. I don’t teach them what to do, I teach them how to learn what to do.

    I agree that you gotta meet people where they’re at, but I try to teach them how to poke around any code repo site, like GitHub or gitlab, so they can use it. Usually I point them to the docs and start by pointing out my favorite parts so that they have somewhere to kind of start by themselves, but it is a skill set that can be practice, or at least I am convinced it is.

    I’m not very good at this part of my job, but also, no one is, so it’s not a bad thing, I just want to do better. I guess I never thought of it from a truly non-technical and not wanting to be technical perspective before. This could be solved by a secondary interface designed specifically for this kind of user. It would not allow code download or interaction, but it would allow for issue logging. I might put this idea in my ever growing project list because it sounds like it would be a useful product…


  • I’m interested in where the limits to expectations lie here. I’m not trying to be a jerk when I say this next part but I do worry I may come off that way but I’m trying to figure out the boundaries of what a “reasonable” expectation is so I can make tasks like this easier for my own team (completely unrelated to this project but it’s essentially the same problem).

    Is it not reasonable to expect people to type into a search engine something like “GitHub help” and then poke around in the links that come up?

    … Well I’ll be damned, I tried my own method before commenting, and the first link that comes up is a red herring, how obnoxious. I was hoping it’d be a link to the docs, not GitHub support. I guess I just answered my own question: no that is not reasonable.

    As a technical user, I am still at a loss for how to help a non-technical user in an algorithmic way that will work for most non-technical users x.x guess I’ll be thinking about this problem some more lol

    (I guess I’m rambling but I’m gonna post this anyways in case anyone wants to chatter about it with me)



  • Honestly, the only thing that registered for me was that Caleb didn’t object to race being in the story until the second guy was brought up.

    I don’t think Freckles, the other character, was declaring a type preference though, I think they were just communicating the race of both guys as set dressing for the story (“you know how I like a little x” to me just sounds like a playful double down, but I really dont actually know, you do have a point here, but it seems ambiguous at best to me right now. I would have to ask the writers what they meant for me to be satisfied now haha good call out though!)

    The only reason I posted it was because it seemed that Freckles was saying essentially the same thing as the person I was responding to. Race isn’t a bad thing to include, it’s only bad when you’re being an asshole about it, essentially.


  • There’s an old proverb I like about this: a person is smart but people are dumb.

    People en masse tend to be dumber than they are apart. I think you’re comparing yourself to the faceless masses. It’s much more humbling to try comparing yourself to someone you respect (but don’t do it as a “I’m not as good as them” thing, only do it as a “goals to maybe achieve one day” thing to avoid accidentally trashing your self esteem)

    Side note: old proverb here means I think my dad said it once but I have no idea where it actually came from








  • Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).

    I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…

    I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?

    I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.


  • The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.

    You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.

    The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.

    Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?