No, there’s not.

This is not a Ted talk or a Wendy’s, this is an entirely related post on social media. This is an appropriate place to bring up these ideas

Ok…I did. That’s what I just did. You were there for it

What now? I pointed out the problem, I can tell you the answer at the end of the conversation. The answer is third places.

How do we get there?

That’s the problem… When is it time to talk about men’s issues? Specifically, in a group that doesn’t listen to Peterson and Andrew Tate

I agree with what you said, but I think the solution is to talk about everyone’s issues instead of men’s issues. Men’s issues aren’t about the men, they’re about how men relate to others.

Women’s issues should have their place, but men don’t need the same thing… Instead they need everyone to show up and talk about their own issues

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it

I don’t think so… Intelligence isn’t required for consent, it’s informed willingness in the absence of coercion or manipulation. The other factor is the likelihood of harm - I think that covers the full ethics of what beings you can ethically fuck

There’s a few ways to look at it

One of my parent’s dogs once had sex with a handyman’s foot to completion… By the time he realized what was happening it was over, and the dog wasn’t very bothered. The guy was also very nice about it, but I bet he stopped wearing sandals to jobs

What if he was into it? It’s not like the dog would care… He clearly knew what he was doing. If we’re just horny dogs humping their feet, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong by not kicking us off

It also reminds me of a YouTube skit where an 18 year old boy goes to an adoption agency to find a 16 year old girl to adopt, with clear implications. It’s a dark joke, but I think it lines up with this nicely

Let’s say there’s an alien species far more advanced than us. We’re too dumb to even understand the basics of their technology, so to them we’re basically pets - they can keep us around, but we’re at their mercy. Now, there’s an issue - a human could believe, even falsely, that we have to have sex with them or there will be consequences. We could even believe it’s expected of us - and that’s not coercive

Now let’s say that same species came to Earth, guaranteed the health and happiness if every human, and made tinder for humans who want to have sex with an alien. In that case, if you handle it correctly, you can minimize or eliminate coercion from the act

Maybe the aliens don’t even have sex… Maybe they just think humans are cute, and they enjoy making us feel good the way we enjoy petting animals

I don’t think intelligence plays into any of this - consent isn’t about intelligence at all. It’s about willingness in an uncorrupted state

Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem

Just gonna say, I find this kind of thing adorable

I will relentlessly make fun of them, but it’s endearing and I’ll go off on anyone else making fun of them

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead

You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about

You guys are circling around the answer

Aero looks, better menus (I refuse to believe nested drop downs are peak layout, but ribbon stuff looks pretty, at the cost of useful organization)

And finally, make it look good in dark mode. We aren’t a print-first culture anymore, and I prefer my retinas intact

Yeah, but like, everything is like that. The fact your not falling through the floor requires a similar explanation. The fact you can see requires a far more complex one

I remember a flashlight I had, where you could remove the reflector. I could see the little sunbeams coming off them, and I told my friend maybe I wanted to study light. He told me it’s just photons… Which later in life I realized says nothing, but at the time totally killed my enthusiasm

Magnets make sense to me though. Maybe since I’ve been playing with them since i can remember - maybe I can’t see or feel a magnetic field naturally, but I can feel it holding a magnet. Magnets make sense - they’re weird, but they make sense.

Light doesn’t… Our understanding of it is so clearly wrong, but sure let’s pretend it’s normal for something to be a wave that turns into a basic unit of energy when you look too closely. The universe loves inconsistency, right?

I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could you explain it in assembly?

Ah, I see what you were getting at now. Like “where are we going tonight?”, it’s a mirroring of the same concept, I think it’s fair to call that forced inclusion. Like you say, directly excluding someone is rude, so forcing that choice is pretty manipulative

I think you’re looking at it wrong, it doesn’t forcibly include the other participant, the usage you’re talking about does the opposite

We [our shared group] don’t do that. We [me and my group] don’t do that.

You can interpret it both ways - the first means “you broke the rule of the group”, the second means “you’re not one of us because you’re not following our rules”

It’s visceral because it gently tickles the “fear of exclusion” part of our brain

Embracing lack of meaning is nihilism talk!

Take in existence as it comes and laugh at the absurdity of it all

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync

Nah, because while it would be very easy to implement something like that, it would require specifically doing it. Programmers have 3 reasons for writing code

It’s cool. It’s necessary. I was told to do it in exchange for money

(And the secret fourth reason, it just kinda happened. I was building this related thing and I realized it’d be stupid easy to toss it in…I was in a fugue state and I have no idea what I wrote, but it’s some of my best code ever)

Devs don’t generally care about this kind of thing, and most of the time neither do the business folk. This kind of unnecessary crackdown only comes up when consultants like McKinney, who I’ve recently learned are the reason everything sucks

This is the world I want to live in

The world is absurd, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not

What about the first month? If you’ve got a buffer in the bank, it doesn’t matter much. But if you were living paycheck to paycheck, those 2-3 weeks might be enough to really set you back

When I walk outside, I see a dying world. There’s so much less life than a couple decades ago. Most people are stuck being little gears in a big machine, too stuck in their dull lives to be open to meaningful connection

Things have taken an uptick, but that’s only slowed the rate things are getting worse