Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

A really important thing to understand about bigotry, how a community responds to it, and why they're not spotting the bad vibes that are obvious to you:

The vast, vast majority of people do not actually *understand* bigotry, as a mechanic. They've been taught about "discrimination" as a list of things you cannot say or do, and a list of groups/people to whom you cannot say or do them. The 'protected class' thing, basically.

Nobody has ever really taught them how bigotry *works*, what its consequences are, or how it is experienced by the targets on the other end. They themselves, even with the best intentions, don't actually understand it - they are just following a vague ruleset given to them, because somebody told them to.

(This is likely where the "I can't say anything anymore!" thing comes from, especially in centrist circles. It's frustration that the full ruleset is not known to them, and it feels to them like it is expanding outside of their view.)

That means that they literally *cannot* recognize any form of bigotry that isn't on their 'list'. They don't know about the patterns of behaviour or the social dynamics at all.

They simply don't recognize it when patterns of bigotry are applied towards groups not on their list - say, furries, or users of a particular programming language. They only have the list, it's not on there, therefore it can't be bigotry or discrimination! Even if the consequences are the same in practice.

This can only be fixed by actually teaching people how bigotry *works*, and talking about real-world consequences, including the indirect ones, and how things got to that point, and showing that it is generically applicable - it's the *behaviour and attitude* that matters, not the specific words.

Real-world examples help a lot here, especially for the cases where the cause and effect are a few steps removed from each other, because most people *also* aren't used to thinking about second-order effects.

This is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0_aiTFZ46o

As I've been taking Ritalin (generics) for a while now, I've noticed my preference changing a bit - I now like to slightly "underdose" it, and then spike it up a bit with an occasional cup of tea.

This gives me a bit more of an 'ebb and flow' in my mental state, where I don't *constantly* feel one way or the other, but it can fluctuate a bit between 'relaxed focus' and 'slightly chaotic excitement'.

Really seems to help in continuing to feel like myself with eg. excitement for my own projects, while also giving some much-needed rest from a constantly-chaotic brain... while still mostly preventing brain fog!

And that makes it all the more irritating when you're one of the few people who *has* actually looked into it, because you end up spending all your time and energy arguing with what essentially boils down to religious beliefs strongly held

Like, the vast vast majority of developers is basically just going off vibes and whatever assumptions/beliefs are considered the social default for their particular programming community, almost nobody has actually looked at what's going on or why

Even if only half the people loudly complaining about software performance and efficiency actually did the work of "understanding where the performance issues come from", things would be so much better right now

(Another way to look at this, is that "just write efficient code" is an attempt to solve a collective problem with an individualist solution, and I hopefully don't need to explain why that is doomed to fail)

Potentially controversial opinion: I think that "making software more efficient" is the wrong thing to focus on right now.

There's a significant kernel of truth to the idea that "it's easy to make good code performant, but it's hard to make performant code good" - and so before going all-in on optimizing code as the primary objective, we should make sure that we're optimizing the right thing.

And right now, we're not. We're very much not.

There are significant problems to be solved in how we address software development, and the power dynamics embedded into it - the most obvious example would be the still-widespread fear of dependencies, which actively interferes with making software work better for people, and results in an endless treadmill of broken shit.

And guess what, there *are* significant efficiency benefits to be gained here - everybody using the same well-optimized implementation is going to be much better than everybody using their own homegrown half-optimized "clever" implementation.

But by putting all the focus on software efficiency and performance as the #1 priority, we risk removing all the oxygen in the room for figuring out better ways to deal with dependencies and many of the other industry-wide problems I haven't even mentioned here yet, and ending up in a *worse* place (even efficiency-wise!) than where we *could* be if we started with other problems first.

TL;DR: software efficiency and performance is important, but if you treat it as a goal to chase directly, you will end up with broken and faux-simple software that isn't even as efficient as it could be. Fix the big problems with software first, *then* think about how to optimize the remainder.

It's still bizarre how my brain synchronizes with whatever music I'm listening to, even when I'm doing something completely different

Looks like they basically rewrote the whole event handling system to make Suspense work

TIL

- Please stop publishing your library as minified bundles, I beg of you