Notices by Hazel Weakly (hazelweakly@hachyderm.io)

@thomasfuchs @mipsytipsy Helping users kick ass is always a fun one :)

@badnetmask I can definitely fill the pages! But the editing, making it coherent, figuring out what people want to read, figuring out how to articulate it cleanly, not getting mad and throwing it out halfway through cause it doesn't feel current enough anymore...

That's all much harder

@badnetmask Great question!

I typically like to relocate code to an internal library where that code becomes interesting and topical rather than boring. If that’s not the best choice, I might put it in a different module. Really what I’m trying to do is go from “I wrote this for internally relevant reasons” to “here’s how we solve this specific issue in this context given this motivation”

As an example, one could imagine writing a weird hacky inverse square root function that happens to work pretty well. Sure, you could just stick it in the code and comment “wtf?” (Like the historical implementation did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root). After all it’s “just” a quirky performance optimization of a common function. But how am I going to find that code and know what to do with it when/if hardware advances make it obsolete in the future? And how do I explain why we even did this?

If it’s just buried somewhere in a codebase, it’s hard to find. Doubly so if it’s “boring” code. It’d probably end up in a random utils file if we didn’t just inline it in the few places it’s used in… But if it’s in a library that implements hardware optimized mathematical functions? Now it’s interesting and relevant *and* I can much better understand when to evolve the code in the future.

@mekkaokereke You made that look easy as hell. Beautiful 🫡

@inthehands @grimalkina @jenniferplusplus I haven’t actually read it yet! I just did, and it’s lovely :)

I don't know who needs to hear this but:

1. Is your stove on?
2. Did you leave anything in the microwave?
3. Your coffee is cold now
4. Check your laundry
5. Don't forget to overthrow capitalism
6. Did you eat yet today?
7. Drink some water
8. Have you moved around at all today?
9. Throw out the moldy shit in your fridge

And most importantly, you're all wonderful ❤️

@bebatjof @oceane @excds @mekkaokereke @Unampho @thekernelinyellow school cops are "supposed" to be there to prevent school shootings. In practice they harass minorities, arrest and bully kids, uphold racism, and hide if a shooting actually starts to happen

One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency. The very same pattern that lets you non atomically deal with things also ensures that eventually you'll have a system that doesn't match your understanding.

Resources will go stale, things will go missing, stuff will exist without ever having been created, and data will be destroyed that never got manifested.

@w8emv "working" and "functional" are but a noble lie we build the foundations of civility on, lest we squabble about which way is up and which way is down :)

*deeper breath*

The amount of "I think logically without emotion" tone policing that goes on is absolutely outrageous. Especially when it's targeted at women and not all the people that fork every single OSS project at the slightest hint of disagreement

"Communication skills are useless" says person who just spent 12 days reading the documentation wrong because they feel less manly if they ask for help

"Irreplaceable" and loud toxic people suppress invaluable and quiet brilliance

*deepest breath ever*

Most of y'all will never understand or respect the deep intellect required to function on a daily level that is manifested by a black woman living under the poverty level feeding 5 people on a shoestring budget. You want to change the world? Feed people.

Most startups fail, not because startups are hard, but because two affluent dudes from an ivy league have no context with which to understand what a problem worth solving actually looks like and they never will

*deep breath continues*

Low code isn't trash, you're just bad at building tools your coworkers can use

"Technical user" doesn't mean "I use vim". The people from $NOT_ENGINEERING are fuckin awesome, stop refusing to acknowledge they exist

Your ETL pipeline could've been an excel spreadsheet if you weren't elitist about it

Your whole startup could've been a pivot table + some visual basic, honestly

Algorithms™ aren't all bad, you just hate being reminded that you're susceptible to feelings

Y'know how there's a pattern of behavior where someone says something is bad about the tech industry or community or OSS software or something, and then every single nerd within a 50 square mile radius says *WELL ACKTUALLY*??

I just realized that if, like, even 10% of them just... Sat down and spent some energy fixing the problem instead of insulting someone for experiencing it, we would've solved all those issues by now

*deep breath*
GUIs are broken on Linux

Good OSS photo editing tools don't exist

That goes for video editing as well, and audio, and literally anything that isn't blender

Mobile and touch screens? In this OSS? Pffh

"Coding on an iPad means you're a fake loser" is a sentiment that needs to stop

WordPress and PHP are real, useful, and your ego won't die if you admit you use them

CSS is a real programming language, so is html

It just breaks my heart that we have *so* much stuff out there still that's stuck in this old way of thinking that the only way to have humans create efficiently is to torture them into submission and rip out their very souls and dump them into the Capitalism Monster

It's beyond aggravating to have to explain that, no, one can't measure productivity, but they can measure belonging, and safety, and learning, and all of these wonderful wholesome ideas

Not only is that "fine", it's even better

I ended up publishing this on my blog because it was cathartic to write this out. There's no extra stuff in the blog post, which makes this the shortest blog post I've ever written... But it was cathartic to write, and that's the important part :)

https://hazelweakly.me/blog/soulless-productivity/

Knowledge Work as done is what happens when you take art and artistry and creativity and imagination and the soulful awe inspiring wonder of a child and you figure out how to forcibly shove it into something that is roughly shaped like an assembly line.

Knowledge Work as done is where the love of the world goes to die, it's where one of the most unique and beautiful aspects of the human mind gets turned into its most terrible weapon, it's the snake that eats its tail, it's the adult world equivalent of taking the quiet artist, giving them a wedgie, and shoving them into a high-school locker while you laugh at them and take all their pictures and shove them into chat jippity do dah, zippity day, my oh my, we're gonna IPO today.

It's a disgrace

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. We could be a lot better at this; we could be infinitely better at this, even.

But, that requires understanding what makes Knowledge Work tick, what makes it... Work, and how one might nourish it and encourage it to grow rather than brutally ripping it out by the roots and screaming at it until it learns to behave.

In short, understanding Knowledge Work means understanding the human condition itself, and taking a dark look at how we managed to turn humans from a social equitable animal that has unlimited curiosity and a desire to help each other succeed into a raving, bloodthirsty mass of hyperindividualistic demons solely bent on hedonistic self exploitation at the expense of the other.

Seriously, how the fuck did we do that? How? How did we so deeply and fundamentally break humanity like this?