Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

There’s also the class of comments that explain strange business decisions.

# Product guy said to return January 1st if the user doesn't have a birthday on record

Kind of arbitrary but someone with decision making power decreed it.

Cars ruin everything. The primacy of cars is upstream from a surprising amount of problems with modern life.

I’ve known several people who moved from QA and testing to developer roles, but usually as an internal transfer.

Most recruiters and management don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to technical details, so it’s not surprising a lot of them think “Oh the guy who knows how software works and how to handle edge cases? No, we don’t want him”

Fuck test automation, it’s a fucking trap get out of it as soon as you can

lol.

Meanwhile, the org I work at has no test automation, so things that should be trivial require hours of tedious, error-prone, manual testing. Also they break stuff and don’t find out until after it’s merged.

I have no regrets from setting my editor to save-on-blur

Off the top of my head …

• free public health care for all.
• forgive all medical debt
• free public education for all, including college.
• forgive all student loan debt
• universal basic income
• more public housing. Homes are owned by the people who live in them, or the state. No profit seeking private orgs.
• close the “buy borrow die” loopholes, where people get untaxed loans to access their wealth without paying taxes
• more tax on the wealthy
• look into making property tax progressive like income. That is, the first $nnn of your house is untaxed, the next chunk at some percent, the following chunk at a greater percent, and so on.
• all Republicans removed from office. They are barred from government positions for life, as well as any private role with decision making power.
• break up mega corps. Disney, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Their current leadership has their wealth seized, and they are barred from leadership positions for life.
• invest heavily in public transit and safety improvements to existing roadways. Cars are literally killing us as well as sapping our resources.
• mandatory profit sharing for employees.
• mandatory pay transparency
• maximum pay gap between roles. No more janitor making $7/HR while the CEO makes $300/hr
• accounting hijinks to pretend like your org made no profit, or “they’re not employees they’re contractors” are punishable by seizure of all wealth and a prohibition from similar roles for life
• come up with something so venture capitalist bros aren’t deciding the future, if the above doesn’t somehow fix it.

Well surely you can agree that letting men into women’s change rooms

If the idea is that that’s a no-no because men are sexually attracted to women, then I must remind you that gay people exist.

If the idea is that men cannot be trusted, then there are many other spaces where men have power that should be examined first.

Skyrim. It was at best “fine” for me. I really dislike level scaling. The combat felt unsatisfying. I don’t remember the story. It’s not weird like Morrowind. The magic and enchanting was over-simplified.

But for many people it’s their grand joy. So I guess that’s good for them.

Did not expect caves of qud to be on anyone’s list, as I thought it was pretty niche.

I also really wanted to like the game, but it felt oddly empty. I wanted less lost in the wilderness, less static quests, more dynamic stuff to do and explore.

I have much respect for “it’s not fun for me” and less patience for “it’s bad”. Totally understand why you might not find the games fun.

I remember playing it at a friend’s house and thinking “quake is better”, but the four player local play on one game and TV was an overwhelming factor.

Obviously tastes differ. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt it deserved the praise.

• The setting is original.
• Turn based with Parry/Dodge isn’t original (super Mario RPG) but it’s pretty satisfying here
• The stat/build system is fairly original and gives a lot of depth
• I thought the story was a solid examination of grief

I was on some website the other day and I opened the browser console for unrelated reasons. They had a giant message there that was like “STOP. If someone asked you to paste something here, you are probably going to be hacked. Do not do anything here unless you know what you’re doing.”

Which, admittedly, is probably good advice.

Or just… Email.

My parents just email me pictures of stuff. It’s fine.

Well I’m not on Windows anymore so I can’t test it out. Does it still have the option to only show text raw and uninterpeted? I absolutely would not want it to, like, show bold instead of **bold**

I wouldn’t want it to do anything other than show the literal text, and anything in that direction is a loss via added friction.

Notepad was supposed to be the simplest lightest weight text editor. It didn’t need to change.

People assume it’s all terminal all the time. I haven’t needed to open the terminal for months. It starts up. With the GUI I open the browser. Maybe steam, too. Do stuff. Shut down.

One of the other guys is on Windows and we had to change a config in git to handle it. Not sure what he did on his end. I have vscode on a Mac. Some people at this place have been working since like the 90s and probably are using notepad.

Windows isn’t fit for software development unless you’re doing Windows specific stuff. Maybe you can get by with WSL or cygwyn or similar, but that’s just a bandaid to make the machine less windows. You’ll probably still have problems with like case folding and line endings.