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@mavnn @Bonfire although i've never got around to learning Ruby i've always liked it, and the community.

but this kind of thing just makes me love Zig even more. the ability to reliably look up stuff in completely unknown codebase (especially with `zig fmt`, you can basically just `grep "fn some_function\\b"`) is a well guarded feature in zig

Ha ha, org-habit-stats author has a sense of humor:

#org #emacs #workout

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]

> 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)

@mavnn @cstross

I think what you're describing here is, basically, the concept of tragedy.

Othello could solve the plot of his play in thirty seconds, simply by realising that Iago is an asshole. He does not do this, because trusting Iago is part of Othello's identity. Hamlet could solve the plot of his play in thirty seconds, simply by not being an overthinker stuck in analysis paralysis. He does not do this because that's who he is.

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.

That isn't to say that all tragedy is well done, of course. Like all dramatic forms, it can feel really unsatisfying when done by a hack. But when done well, it feels great because we can shout at the screen "NO DON'T TRUST IAGO HE'S LYING" while at the same time understanding why the protagonist does trust Iago.

There's no reason why this can't be applied to institutions too. We are, arguably, living through a tragedy in which Microsoft has been built into a cult by Nadella (first the cult of agile, then the cult of LLMs) and cannot save itself because that would require it to behave non-cultishly.

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.

@mavnn Yes, exactly. Whereas it's much harder to break out of the Abilene Paradox, to which groups or committees are susceptible, so it makes for *great* widescreen tragedy in fiction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

#WritersCoffeeClub 17 Apr (3/3)

THAT sort of misunderstanding happens in real life and works fine in fiction.

The sort of misunderstanding that doesn't work in fiction is one that relies on individual protagonists being idiots, or failing to have the thirty second discussion that would clear the air instantly. Which is all too common!

@mavnn

@mavnn "log in?"

sometimes i wish i can make a commit "intent", like, a pre-commit message saying what im trying to do. i have their super weird experience where once i'm done with my commit, i flush all memory of what i'm doing and have to look at diffs to remember. you'd think i was making large commits, but nope. just me?

@ajn142 @dch @cR0w I'm nowhere near smart enough in networking to be able to understand this at a spec level, but I'm hopeful at least that the authors of this spec did actually learn from the debacle of IPv6 and managed to keep it to that 100% reverse compatibility contract. There's going to be IPv4 only hardware around until the end of the internet.

Instant world building via cultural idioms.

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