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This isn't to say that Ruby is bad language, I know people who like it and are very productive using it. But it makes me grumpy everytime I look at it because I like a lot of the ideas in the language, but the conventions the Ruby community have chosen do not fit how my brain works at all.

(context for why I'm looking into all this is here if you're morbidly interested: github.com/bonfire-networks/...)

There is something about Ruby that makes me completely incapable of finding anything in a Ruby on Rails code base. Firstly, everything is arranged with according to conventions I don't know. Not my preference, but that I could learn or look up. But then there's also vast amount of stuff that just appears out of nowhere.

For instance, currently I suspect there's a mismatch between the url sent by @[email protected] in a Mention tag on an activitypub activity, and the result of calling short``account``url on a Mastodon account model for a remote account. But... there is no function called short``account``url in the Mastodon code base, it doesn't seem to be one of the standard Rails Router helper methods, it just... gets called in a bunch of places and ✨️magic✨️ occurs.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Which is where this type of conflict is so rich for stories! Nobody in the situation was "wrong", but several players were set up with conflicting information, backgrounds, and incentives and suddenly no person is wrong but every thing is wrong.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

> In a tragedy, the bad thing could be averted, but isn't, because the protagonist would have to act against their own nature to avert it. This gives tragedy its sense of inevitability and makes it so fun to read.

I think this is the difference though: if you don't have the conversation because of a character flaw, that's tragedy. If you don't have the conversation because you get interrupted by a series of increasingly contrived coincidences you have at best a weak farce.

> My sympathy for having been stuck on the inside of real-life failures, though. Seeing large corporations fail to do what must be done is the reason I've always avoided management jobs and just been a senior IC. You are made of sterner stuff than me if you risked that, and I'm sorry to hear it treated you that badly.

Thank you, but I'm not made of that sterner stuff either! Part of the problem/the saving grace was that I didn't go into management, I was supposed to be an IC with training and education responsibilities. But training one type of good practice/workflow doesn't work if the manager who wanted the training done is no longer in the position to actually push doing the things that are being trained (and the new manager is actively pushing other ways of doing things that are fine in themselves, but clash with what you've been asked to teach people)

@[email protected] Having been twice made responsible for institutional change in the workplace and then having the person who appointed me lose the authority to push the changes, I have a painfully direct experience of how tough it can be to break out of the Abilene Paradox with a group that has someone well spoken and charismatic in authority who doesn't understand what's happening in the rest of the group. Lots of well meaning people doing things that seem sane, rational, and empathic individually, leading to a Not Good™ and emotionally distructive overall situation.

Hmm. I think I'm leaking my trauma. But it definitely makes for a stronger plot than 'I need to delay the PoV character five minutes or the entire story ends because they can have a conversation.'

@[email protected] I think these 'stupidity dependent' misunderstandings are tempting partly because they are easy, but also because they are easy to justify as 'realistic' because we have all seen people being stupid in relationships. But they fundamentally aren't satisfying because we can see how easily the conflict could be resolved from the outside, sort of a deus ex machina in reverse.

@[email protected] thank you. Also, I am sad. Next round of debugging when I'm not doing the washing up.

"Your encouragement for the day is trout ala creme, enjoy your physics!"

I have a favour to ask; if you're viewing this post via Mastodon, could you tell me whether you see a link preview box to "Log in" below this post, or whether it just appears as a normal post with some hashtags?

Thank you! #testtag

@[email protected] hmm. Thank you for letting me know, looks like Bonfire and Mastodon handling hashtag links differently. I'll have to see what I can do about that.

@[email protected] I think this is actually how jujutsu is designed to be used github.com/jj-vcs/jj (and it can be used in existing git repositories). This isn't a recommendation, I haven't tried it myself yet, but I found the suggested workflow interesting partly for the reason you state ("have I actually done what I meant to do? What did I mean to do?"), and partly for the next morning issue ("I know I was in the middle of something yesterday...")

@[email protected] not making IP6 at least partially backwards compatible, or at the very least presenting a visually 'compatible' representation, has got to be one of the largest self owns in computing standards history. @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

"... change my mind"

Instant world building via cultural idioms.

"Today is a good day to..." #worldbuilding #creativewriting

chaos.social/users/weirdunit...

I've worked with enough Polish developers that I can probably research a reasonable estimate of this for several different projects 😀

@[email protected] Italy also has a bonus extra option of take away pizza 'by the cut' (al taglio) which you order by weight - often in hectogram units. So you order 'tre etti' (three hundred grams) and the guy cuts a slice of the right size off a huge rectangular pizza, generally by eye, and generally very accurately. Great for much confusion in shops not used to dealing with tourists. Also genuinely convenient for ordering the amount of food you actually want/need.

ec.social-network.europa.eu/...

This is genuinely really good news; Erasmus has been such a positive life changing events for many people I know and the UK dropping out of it was one of many tragedies from Brexit.