That’s bigots for you. They’ll cut off and throw community members into the sacrificial fire for the sake of their panicked feelings, because treating people decently is just not one of their baseline values.

I can’t help but project an old version of myself on you. I can’t imagine defending 4chan unless I was actively using it a lot… It did used to be basically my only internet community, so I understand being particularly fond of the cesspool.

However, I don’t actually understand your reactions here. Why are you defending it when it seems like 4chan itself wouldn’t even go this far except maaaybe as a limp wristed attempt at an excuse when something truly horrific happens because of them? I genuinely don’t think I understand

Like, to currently vilify it is easy, just take a screenshot of pol. I remember looking pre2016 and seeing HYPERPARTISANSHIP all caps everywhere. It’s an anonymous forum with people discussing plans to make life shittier for various groups, essentially at all times… And before pol it was b (my era was back when pol was a boring place, I don’t know the current state of any board, but I know some of the history and what motivates some normies of my niche who fuck with it)

I just don’t understand the downplaying of it, normal people participate in shit ways on 4chan specifically because of the anonymity. The anonymity is why it’s such a cesspool in the first place. It’s toxic keyboard warrior syndrome to the extreme.

This ignores that 4chan is widely known as the cesspool of the internet and attracts those types. It’s like going on Hexbear and being surprised at the communists. People gather where their banners are. Shit attracts shit. This reduction is apt.

Sure it kind of does some good ish things sometimes, but more often than not, it’s just an internet mob internet mobbing. That’s essentially all it is: chaos waves constantly crashing back in on itself. Any good that comes from it is incidental at best.

Also, defending 4chan on the wider Internet is a little odd, 4chan itself revels in its shit reputation…

Ah right, scream into the void and get ignored because I’m not a multimillion dollar donor. Forgot to waste my time, no I have not.

Do you have any more useful suggestions or is void talking all im allowed to do now or get shouted down with “you haven’t done enough” bullshit?

I guess perhaps I’m just disenfranchised in which case, nothing systematic is gonna help.

Guess I’m the doomer after all.

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)

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

1. you don’t have to understand it, you just shouldn’t be a legislative genocidal asshole about it (not that that’s what you’re doing, but that’s what republicans seem to do to anything they think isn’t their slim sliver of a definition of “normal”)

2. if you’re talking about furries, to my layman’s understanding of the subculture, that’s not how the vast majority of furries relate to themselves. From what I’ve seen, it’s not that they are the animal itself, they are the aspects of the animal, and those things are just little icons that they’re like boosting because they resonate with it. That said, there are at least a few people who DO feel that way, but I’m pretty sure they have a special category name (ferals? I think that’s what they’re called but I could be wrong, this is some deep lore I picked up years ago). If they do have that special name and I’m not just making that part up, then that implies that most furries do not feel that way about themselves.

But, acknowledging the existence of people like that at all does validate your question in my mind. I don’t really understand that extreme either. My only point is that most furries are what you would likely consider “normal”, they just have a particular hobby. It’s no more nefarious or odd than being into gender bending cosplay. You’re just taking something (yourself rather than an anime/video game character) and twisting it into something artistically different (a fursona instead of a cosplay outfit).

…no I did not intend to write that much defending furries but here we are lmao

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The way I (layman) read it, they seemed to be saying that it would be phased out by newer companies finding different alternatives, not that everyone is phasing it out as we speak.

Does this seem more realistic? Or just completely non-factual?

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?

Tbh at this point I’m convinced articles like this are just life support trying to claw back as many Musk dick riders back into normies.

It’s good work, and I think it should be done, but yeah, this is exactly what a sane person would expect to see given all the context.

It’s not news to most, but to the audience that I think this sort of thing is going after, it genuinely might be news to them.

Not that this article alone would get anyone to drop their fanboy bs, but it seems like it’s intended to be a tool to facilitate that. As for why it’s here specifically in world news, probably in case anyone wants to use it as a facilitation tool for anyone in their lives. Can’t use what you don’t know exists and all that lol

Yeah, that makes total sense.

Most software engineers also have to actively maintain and add features to their finished project, and those aspects change a lot about how the problem can be approached.

I failed to take into account why might I have not been effected by tech debt despite occasionally creating it before commenting. Will have to make sure that filter gets a bit stronger lol

As one who was raised Evangelical Christian for the majority of my childhood by a devout and Republican parent, I’m pretty sure it’s just a death cult.

They live their whole lives only preparing to die.

They forsake and forego a lot of random stuff in favor of rewards after death.

And if they think it’ll get them any bonus, they don’t care if they take everyone else with them, hence the Republican Evangelical politicians generally trying to supply the ingredients for the battle of Armageddon to happen.

Tldr; I think it’s greed typical of those who would fully knowledgeably choose to be a Republican combined with the beliefs of an Evangelical trying to cash in on rewards asap, in the way a Republican typically does.

Ah yeah, that would be a worry, except I forgot to mention that most of the code I work on usually gets thrown away after like 6 months. Makes tech debt not have nearly as big of an impact on me.

We do have a longer lasting code base that the little widgets I make run off of. That has a much more strict requirements to ensure tech debt is not introduced specifically so we don’t end up in that sort of a position.

That said, and yet we couldn’t even keep it out of our own code base. So yeah, I think my original comment is just wrong because I forgot all the ways tech debt actually has effected me in the past and how my industry’s project cycle is so short term that i rarely have the opportunity to run into tech debt that I caused in a problematic way…

Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.

These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.

Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it’s a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn’t have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client’s new order.

I guess I’m just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn’t hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn’t identify that before now lol

Instead of saying tech debt isn’t that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.

Rarely have I ever actually had consequences for my sins, which tends to be why I don’t go back and fix them…

If tech debt weight is felt in any way, it tends to get fixed. If it’s not felt, it’s just incredibly easy to forget and disregard.

(This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what’s right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn’t returned for payment from me yet… Only time will tell)

Yeah, it works really well for me, but I also have taken it since I was young whenever I needed/wanted it, so it might just work well for me. I’d recommend starting with like a 5mg, give it an hour to work, then if you still don’t feel tired, I’d take another one.

Worst case you’ll still have to deal with the shitty situation with a slight melatonin hangover (I warn you in advance that it can happen, but it usually only happens if you take too much and it can’t metabolize before you wake up. You’re just very sleepy until it’s done)

Best case, you end up going to bed earlier than normal and you feel fine in the morning.

Good luck!