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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Give me concrete examples. You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about so I want to discuss something specific; the agency you’re talking about is actually there and is centered around the core of the script.

    In your hypothetical where you’ve now decided everyone is just following orders, I can still say the worker did a bad job. You gonna tell me the worker is gonna get fired for not following dumb instructions? Okay. Still did a bad job, orders or not.

    I do not understand why you’re so dead set on telling people critical analysis is bad. Is it morally wrong to like something more than something else? Kinda seems like that way if I can’t ever judge anything because there are constraints outside the control of the thing. I’m not going to attack a straw man here. You should expand on what we can and can’t analyze.


  • There’s a difference between a bad script and bad rewrites. Ending of GoT? Bad script, rewrites don’t matter. 2016 Suicide Squad? Arguably a good script with shitty rewrites. Galaxy of Terror? No comment on the scripts but the rewrites fucked it. Justice League? Horrible script and horrible rewrites. I don’t blame the writers of Galaxy of Terror for Corman’s worm rape scene; I do excoriate Whedon for the pile of shit Snyder used to make a worse pile of shit.

    You’re conflating moral standards with film standards. There are standards that people agree on that loosely dictate what we consider good and bad. They can change based on the viewer. The core of a script is what has the opportunity to be butchered and if it’s bad that’s not on the studio, that’s on the writer. Studios don’t hire someone and say “write us a piece of shit” they take something that exists and modify it (unless you’re Neil Breen in which case that’s your goal).

    In your example, I can get frustrated with a grocery worker pushing all of the things to back of the shelf where I can’t reach. That is a fair criticism of their contribution to the inane reshuffling. I’m not saying they’re a bad person because they’re doing the thing they need to do to survive poorly; I’m saying they’re doing a thing poorly. It has no bearing on them as a person. It’s not morally wrong of them to make it impossible for me to get the item I need; it is a shit job though.


  • You’re talking about two different things. In general, you should never be disrespectful of anyone because there’s no need to be mean. However, I can definitely criticize a writer for working on something terrible because they wrote it. I can also criticize a studio for releasing it. “Just following orders” doesn’t remove culpability especially when the writing is really fucking bad.

    Please note I’m not talking about this movie because it hasn’t been released yet. I’ve watched a plethora of movies over the last month that had really bad writing.



  • Speaking from 10+ YoE developing metrics, dashboards, uptime, all that shit and another 5+ on top of that at an exec level managing all that, this is bullshit. There is a disconnect between the automated systems that tell us something is down and the people that want to tell the outside world something is down. If you are a small company, there’s a decent chance you’ve launched your product without proper alerting and monitoring so you have to manually manage outages. If you are GitHub or AWS size, you know exactly when shit hits the fan because you have contracts that depend on that and you’re going to need some justification for downtime. Assuming a healthy environment, you’re doing a blameless postmortem but you’ve done millions of those at that scale and part of resolving them is ensuring you know before it happens again. Internally you know when there is an outage; exposing that externally is always about making yourself look good not customer experience.

    What you’re describing is the incident management process. That also doesn’t require management input because you’re not going to wait for some fucking suit to respond to a Slack message. Your alarms have severities that give you agency. Again, small businesses sure you might not, but at large scale, especially with anyone holding anything like a SOC2, you have procedures in place and you’re stopping the bleeding. You will have some level of leadership that steps in and translates what the individual contributors are doing to business speak; that doesn’t prevent you from telling your customers shit is fucked up.

    The only time a company actually needs to properly evaluate what’s going on before announcing is a security incident. There’s a huge difference between “my honeypot blew up” and “the database in this region is fucked so customers can’t write anything to it; they probably can’t use our product.” My honeypot blowing up might be an indication I’m fucked or that the attackers blew up the honeypot instead of anything else. Can’t send traffic to a region? Literally no reason the customer would be able to so why am I not telling them?

    I read your response as either someone who knows nothing about the field or someone on the business side who doesn’t actually understand how single panes of glass work. If that’s not the case, I apologize. This is a huge pet peeve for basically anyone in the SRE/DevOps space who consumes these shitty status pages.


  • This is a common problem. Same thing happens with AWS outages too. Business people get to manually flip the switches here. It’s completely divorced from proper monitoring. An internal alert triggers, engineers start looking at it, and only when someone approves publishing the outage does it actually appear on the status page. Outages for places like GitHub and AWS are tied to SLAs that are tied to payouts or discounts for huge customers so there’s an immense incentive to not declare an outage even though everything is on fire. I have yelled at AWS, GitHub, Azure, and a few smaller vendors for this exact bullshit. One time we had a Textract outage for over six hours before AWS finally decided to declare one. We were fucking screaming at our TAM by the end because no one in our collective networks could use it but they refused to declare an outage.




  • What you’re describing is closer to the nuance I’m interested in than WotC’s settings. If you read some of the later Lolth stuff, it’s the exact opposite of that. Evil is bad and the justification for anything always involves this trite movement from evil to good. They’re not presented as counterbalances or equal combatants. Even evil characters seem to always be working under the assumption that good characters are ultimately better.

    The 40k universe has a lot of similarities. However, I’d argue its authors are somewhat better at presenting why Chaos is an equally valid choice or why the Orks can do whatever they want. There isn’t a clear choice (some authors are fucking terrible at this and drive WotC-style to the goodness of the Imperium).

    The only reason WotC has to remove alignment from races is because WotC has made it very clear there is the thing people should want and there is the thing people should not want. That’s not an even layout of nine alignments. That’s a huge bias and all of their content reflects that.


  • I think a huge problem with this is trying to frame everything through D&D as well as our perspective. Fuck modern D&D and its desire to control the entire dialogue. Wizards of the Coast aside, there’s also a fantasy component here. I personally dislike requiring all races to act exactly like humans with human motives. From a specific perspective, we view the wanton murder and sacrifice of wood elves by the drow as a terribly evil thing. From the drow perspective, why can’t the opposite be true? I’m not talking about Salvatore’s one-sided writing that makes it clear the whole thing is a massive con. D&D is very biased toward human motive and perspective. Why can’t both be true? Drow are evil to us and we are evil to them? That’s a much more interesting story and completely changes the narrative around someone like Drizzt.

    This is a really nuanced take on speculative fiction in general. I also strongly feel that, the way WotC writes things, removing racial alignment is very important. There is no nuance in their universe. Even when we see other races, we always evaluate their action through a human lens rather than being presented a cogent paradigm contrary to ours.




  • The problem is the underlying API. parseInt(“550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000”, 10) (this is a UUID) returns 550. If you’re expecting that input to not parse as a number, then JavaScript fails you. To some degree there is a need for things to provide common standards. If your team all understands how parseInt works and agrees that those strings should be numbers and continues to design for that, you’re golden.