• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m the kind of guy who will look stuff up. I think it’s really important to admit when you’re wrong and the other person was right. Don’t move goal posts or claim you misunderstood. Just own it.

    Like I was having a debate with my partner about if it was faster to go all the way up and over, or make a lot of turn-right then turn-left. I thought the ladder was faster because it approximates a straight line. She was like no that’s crazy. Eventually I found that’s called Manhattan distance and she was right, and I fully admitted defeat.



  • As others have said, working from home has many benefits

    • no commute
      • save time
      • save money
      • less risk of disease and accident
      • often easier child care options
    • greater control over environment
      • offices are often too hot or cold for some
      • stock own food, drinks, toilet paper, etc
    • better pet access. Cat on lap. Dog walk easier.
    • easier wardrobe
    • several distraction categories removed
      • people walking up to your desk
      • loud meetings

    The commute alone is pretty big. If your commute is like an hour, that’s changing your salary from like $x / 10 hours to $x / 8 hours. That’s a big bump. If your daily pay was $1000, that’s like going from $100/hour to $125/hour.


  • No disagreement here.

    I realized when reading one of the other comments that my similarly sized complaint is it creates a lot of potential for problems at the game level as well as narrative when people make their characters in isolation. I kind of assumed that comes packaged with “and you all meet in a tavern”.

    Like, everyone makes a fighter and shows up to session 1. The dm’s going to have a head scratcher thinking about balance, and some players might be annoyed they don’t really have a niche of their own. A weird party like that can work, but it’ll be a happier experience if folks talk about it ahead of time.


  • It can work, as clearly shown by your rather wholesome example and many people’s games. But it’s also leaving a very large surface area for problems. Unlike real life, you can just avoid that by making your characters together.

    Maybe I should have said in my previous thread that while the “you all meet for the first time” is kind of cliché, there are more serious problems at the game level. And like it can work if everyone makes a fighter, but you can also make everyone’s lives easier if you discuss up front.




  • So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

    Lol this works in a way the author probably didn’t intend. They are wearing extremely dangerous tools that were never really a great idea. They’ll code some circles, set their legs on fire, and crash into a wall.


  • I think the best game I’ve done started as “it’s a DND world and you’re a band on tour”.

    It started with a simple “the bridge is out on the way to your next show”, then there was a battle of the bands, a sketchy record label, and then the players organized a recall of the mayor that was in bed with the capitalists. That game went great places.



  • Snapshot tests are an anti-pattern. Easy to use, lead to problems.

    They do not encode intent. Everything in the snapshot is equally weighted. Your test will fail the same way if your copy changes or your HTML structure, but one of those is probably way more important. Assert on what’s important.

    They discourage thinking about what you’re doing. Suppose you have an API that returns information about a user and their pets. Your first integration test adds a user to the database, makes a request, and looks at the response. You could just brainlessly snapshot the response, but the user PK in the response might not always be the same. People are going to try to snapshot the response anyway.

    Humans are lazy, and they won’t read the diff carefully. This is especially true if the diff is large or complex. Doubly so if you have a great number of these. They’ll go “oh yeah I changed this component so it should have changed. Accept changes” and move on. No one wants to look at 40 large dozen line diffs.

    If you have your code set up to arrange and then act, you’re like 80% of the way there to writing a normal set of asserts.

    I would never recommend snapshot testing.


  • Not good.

    They could be ignorant and not understand how politics affects pretty much everything.

    They could be foolishly cynical and think that “none of it matters”, so they just don’t pay attention.

    They could be like pathologically avoidant and don’t want to talk about a potentially disharmonious topic.

    They could have shitty views they don’t want to talk about.

    Not good. Not good people.