inexperienced big brain developer see nested loop and often say “O(n^2)? Not on my watch!”

complexity demon spirit smile

This hits too close to home.

“Merge pull request #8 from [branch name]”

Not the most exciting but hey, someone has to do it.

I’ve reached a point where I avoid these types of updates. An update post like that either means nothing important changed or they’re up to something.

A while ago I saw that style of patch notes, updated an app, and suddenly I can’t use it anymore because it got limited to a maximum of 2 devices. Another time I updated an app putting a harmless “we improved the user experience” message, they put dark mode behind a paywall. This isn’t counting the number of times an app got redesigned to make the user experience worse for no reason. Maybe they wanted to justify hiring 5 UI/UX interns in that quarter or something.

The patch notes look harmless, but my god, they are usually up to something.

• git pull

• git add *

• git commit -m “Some stuff”

• git push

And occasionally when you mess up

• git reflog

• git reset HEAD@{n} (where n is where you wanna roll back to)

And occasionally if you mess up so hard you give up

• git reset --hard origin/main

And there you go. You are now a master at using git. Try not to mess up.

FWIW not everyone using source control is a programmer. I’ve seen artists in game dev using GUI tools to pull new changes and push their assets.

downvotes come at a “cost”, whereby if you want to downvote someone you have to reply directly to them with some justification, say minimum number of characters, words, etc.

I think it’s the complete opposite. Platforms with downvotes tend to be less toxic because you don’t have to reply to insane people to tell them they’re wrong, whereas platforms like Twitter get really toxic because you only see the likes, so people tend to get into fights and “ratio” them which actually increases the attention they get and spreads their message to other people.

In general, platforms without upvotes/downvotes tend to be the most toxic imo. Platforms like old-school forums and 4chan are a complete mess because low-effort troll content is as loud as high effort thoughtful ones. It takes one person to de-rail a conversation and get people to fight about something else, but with downvotes included you just lower their visibility. It’s basically crowdsourced moderation, and it works relatively well.

As for ways to reduce toxicity, shrug. Moderation is the only thing that really stops it but if you moderate too much then you’ll be called out for censoring people too much, and telling them not to get mad is just not going to happen.

My idea for less toxicity is having better filtering options for things people want to see. Upon joining a platform it would give easy options to filter out communities that are political or controversial. That’s what I’m doing on Lemmy, I’m here for entertainment, not arguing.