A Realization: It's true, I am in fact "afraid of people just because they think differently than me" -- when the way they "think differently" considers reality to be less important than social status.

@jwildeboer @alan

I have a proposal: BotID

@evedazzle I feel like this kind of labelling comes from the same place as "[Bush|Trump] Derangement Syndrome" -- an attempt to discredit an entirely legitimate viewpoint by painting it as extreme and unhinged.

I don't know if anyone believes it outside of the propagandists; it seems painfully obvious to me. "Like a kitten trying to cover up on an uncarpeted floor" -- Robert A. Heinlein (approx.)

@amcooper I pretty much always have to go into manual-focus mode.

@venite I've been watching a lot of @notjustbikes (who is Netherlands-based) and other "new urbanism" content which, yeah, shows how much better things already are in many other parts of the world (especially Nederland ^.^) and could be here too, if we could just allocate transportation money more wisely and less corporately.

The downside of understanding this is that now I actually feel kinda angry when I hear people unknowingly parroting car-culture ideas (like wider roads, don't waste money and space on bike/ped improvements, parking should be free and copious, cities and dense development are ugly, roundabouts are confusing and expensive, cars are freedom... :-P).

That said, there's currently a serious proposal on the table to eliminate or at least cover a freeway which was built through the heart of downtown during my lifetime (destroying a once-vibrant urban neighborhood). The culture is slowly changing for the better, beneath all the fashy horribleness.

@jonny I dunno, that kind of patch sounds like me trying to fix obscure problems in my own code that I wrote last week a long time ago.

Perhaps I am actually an LLM in a simulated reality.

That would explain a lot, really.

@n1vux @universalhub

There's now a food truck court named after it -- we go there regularly. :blobcat:

@universalhub Relatedly: https://11foot8.com is a bridge near us ^.^

I'm suddenly taken with the idea of doing graphical AU fic in which one's US town is depicted as it should have been if car-culture hadn't been allowed to take over.

...like, maps and drawings of all the bikeways and tracks there would be instead of stroads and highways.

#hopePunk

@xssfox The fact that there's no check-digit or other security just shows they weren't really trying. #askingForIt

(This reminds me of how I eventually discovered that when installing MS Office 97 and it asks for the serial number from the CD case, anything would work as long as it had the same first 4 digits.)

H: "And that, as they say, is that."
Me: "Oh, is that what that is? I had always wondered."

(There should be, like, a :smartaleckblobcat: emoji er sumthin)

@mirahimage Most inefishant.

Welcome to the Place of Eternal Feline Tooting, @Chickerino! We look forward to the mewsic :tootcat:

@DavidM_yeg @inthehands When they say "more efficient", they're measuring efficiency entirely in terms of the profit-to-value ratio.

@ceejbot This makes both songs better (as these things often do) ^.^

@tuban_muzuru @inthehands

At the org we're slowly assembling, the plan is to build the work around the people. Find good people you can trust to be diligent, give them a choice of problems to solve and resources to work with, and then let them figure out how to proceed.

@cratermoon @grwster @inthehands

My first real job, at a major university, was handled that way.

That was 1985.

The brokenness runs deep.

@inthehands This explains much of the frustration that has led to me no longer bothering to apply for tech jobs.

Maybe the companies that use these broken processes will soon start to collapse under the deadweight of accumulated techbros? A girl can dream...

@AutisticInnovator Makes me wonder if the bots are written in VBA running under MS Access97 or something... :D

I used to be a coder, like you, until I took an error to the knee.

#offalPost