As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate people who are willing to be a little rude in order to avoid wasting people's time or giving them false impressions.

For example, when recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn now, I almost always say something like "I don't want to waste your time or mine: what is the salary range?" It might be considered a bit "rude" to immediately jump to money, but I figure that that's less rude than wasting 30-90 minutes of time for a job that I have no chance of accepting.

I also try and be a little upfront if I don't like food someone has prepared. I try not to be too much of a dick, but if someone prepared something that I don't like and they ask my opinion, I will say that I wasn't a huge fan. Again, maybe a bit rude, but I also don't want to mislead people.

It kind of goes against my gut; I, like most people, don't really want to make people feel bad and I certainly am not immune to people-pleasing, but I've tried to fight that for the greater cause of being more-honest and upfront with how I speak.

I’m a big fan of bluntness / honest feedback, but it can still be done very rudely when inappropriate

like the svp observed that the ic was saying the details, not because the ic needed to share them, but because the ic was anxious that the svp didn’t view them as competent. So the svp cut to the chase and addressed that directly

For your food example, a host might ask if you like the food - not because they care about their cooking skills - but just want to make sure you had a good time. So, saying you don’t like the food and giving cooking suggestions would need to be accompanied by some reassurance that you still enjoyed their company or beautiful home or something. Otherwise it’s still rude

They didn't seem to be too upset over it, but they know me pretty well.

Phrases I've heard:

- This isn't my favorite

- Um, not really my cup of tea

Any resources you suggest?

Providing feedback on the meal is useful for their next guest, if they are interested in improving. If they aren’t, just say it’s fine and move on.

Shifting focus outside of yourself is covered in a lot of areas but Never Split The Difference stuck with me, written by a hostage negotiator.

I mean honestly the last time I gave negative feedback on food I didn't like, it's because I didn't really want to feel pressured to have more.

The first chapter or two of the book is good for the general principles. I found the later chapters about big org management to be less helpful.

I personally go one step further and mentally adjust radical candor to be winsome candor. I'm explicitly adding some empathy and humanity by doing that, so that I'm more likely to treat others how I'd want to be treated, even when the conversation is hard.

Plenty of people would have come away from this interaction without the level of introspection the author had, and thought, “Man, that SVP is a jerk.” This can add up into frustration and, given time, turnover.

My claim wasn’t that SVP was ineffective - the point was clearly made and understood.

My claim is that it would have taken slightly more words to get that point across without any reputational downside to the SVP.

Whether that cost is worth paying is a question of culture and style.

I knew they were stupid, I knew they had positions that I would consider racist, I knew that they were corrupt, but I guess I had assumed that they had worked for their corruption.

But no, you have RFK Jr.'s HHS lazily having ChatGPT generating anti-vax literature with broken links, you have Trump doing a blanket pardon of literally everyone involved with January 6 [1] apparently because he was too lazy to do any diligence. It's borderline farcical.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/trump-pardons-jan6-clemency

As a kid I had always heard that Hitler was some kind of evil genius. It wasn't until my 20s that I started actually reading about this stuff and NOPE, he was actually a fucking idiot.

My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.

I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.

I have just had a lot of very odd jobs which has taken me in a bunch of directions.

The interesting part of any program source is what it took to make that program. I view AI-generated code in the same category that I see a binary.

[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-...

"Our technology is so unbelievably powerful that the entire world might shatter if we don't have government imposed handcuffs!!!!". It just reads like the corporate equivalent of the drunk frat guy saying "HOLD ME BACK BRO!"

I used to work at a very large BigCo [1]. On the first day, one of the first things they had us do was set up email filters. A lot of email filters. Many, many, many email filters. This is because it was not uncommon to get multiple-thousands of emails every day. Of course it would be impossible for anyone to read that much, so you set up filters to have emails moved to folders that you never open because you never read them, and you needed to make sure that important emails weren't missed because if you took more than an hour to respond back to an email you risked a phone call from an angry middle manager yelling at you asking why you didn't respond to their email [2].

Email, and most written documentation in tech companies, isn't there for humans to read, it's for plausible deniability. You send out emails that you know no one will actually read because then you can say "I told you so!" when things go wrong. You write pages of documentation that you know no one will read because you can tell people that you wrote the documentation. You can generate infinite comments for your code that no one will read so you can show people that you did your work to write comments.

When I complained about the quantity of emails I got, I would universally be given the response of "just set up filters", presumably because they know that most of the emails I receive were a useless waste of time.

It never mattered if the writing was "good", and it never mattered if it was up to date, and it never mattered if it corresponded to anything useful, because "human comprehension" was never the point. It was there to some bureaucratic rule-of-thumb that a middle manager would religiously adhere to in order to justify their existence in the company.

I'm sure there are exceptions but it always felt like all this performative writing was disliked by everyone. No one liked spending time reading low-effort "cover-my-ass" emails and no one liked writing pages upon pages of documentation that no one will read. Having Claude write and read all this shit and cutting humans out is the natural conclusion, because, at least in my experience, no one will ever seriously suggest we stop with all the performative writing.

[1] It's not hard to find my history, and it's fine if you do, but I politely ask that you don't post it in relation to this thread.

[2] That's not a joke, and it's not hyperbole. I had gotten phone calls from higher-ups complaining I hadn't responded to their email within two hours. I usually bit my tongue because I was a bit more of a coward in those days, but now I probably would have tried to explain to them the very basic concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communication.

I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.

It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.

I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.

Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.

[1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=26.05&query=gdevel...

I know Rive recently started adding scripting support, but have not tried that out yet

(parts of me want to avoid liking it too much and becoming dependant on another company, but they do seem nicer than Adobe, but this ain't hard).

Just because something does provide an immediate perfect solution does not mean it isn't not worth investigating and/or pursuing.

Also consider that bugs tend to be more prevalent in new code (e.g., [0]) as a result, you are likely to see more of a benefit from writing new code in a memory-safe language than raw line count proportions would indicate.

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...

I am quite confident that what I'm doing is well within the law, and I'm not even doing any kind of pen-testing stuff, just some basic reverse engineering, but I can't even use Fable anymore because every time I enable it, it works for about twenty seconds and makes me drop down to Opus 4.8, and often even down to Sonnet.

If anyone here works at Anthropic, did you make the safeguards super sensitive recently?

You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.

Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.

It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.

The difference between a library and the internet is the difference between obsession and addiction.

It can be that most books were low-effort shit, but that the problem has become even worse with time.