I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.

I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.

My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.

The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.

Not strictly technical, although organizational science might be seen as a technical field on it’s own.

Regularly rotating people between teams is desirable.

Many companies just assign you in a team and that’s where you’re stuck forever unti you quit. In slightly better places they will try to find a “perfect match” for you.

What I’m saying is that moving people around is even better:
You spread institutional knowledge around.
You keep everyone engaged. Typically on a new job you learn for the first few months, then you have a peak of productivity when you have all the new ideas. After some 2 years you either reach a plateau or complacency.

Cleaning, organizing, and documentation are high priorities.

Every job I’ve worked at has had mountains of “The last guy didn’t…” that you walk into and it’s always a huge pain in the ass. They didn’t throw out useless things, they didn’t bother consolidating storage rooms, and they never wrote down any of their processes, procedures, or rationals. I’ve spent many hours at each job just detangling messes because the other person was to busy or thought it unimportant and didn’t bother to spend the time.

Make it a priority, allocate the time, and think long-term.

Not everything needs to be deployed to a cluster of georedundant K8s nodes, not everything needs to be a container, Docker is not always necessary. Just run the damn binary. Just build a .deb package.

(Disclaimer: yes, all those things can have merit and reasons. Doesn’t mean you have to shove them into everything.)

AI is a fad and when it collapses, it’s going to do more damage than any percieved good it’s had to date.

React sucks. I’m sorry, I know it’s popular, but for the love of glob, can we not use a technology that results in just as much goddamn spaghetti code as its closest ancestor, jQuery? (That last bit is inflammatory. I don’t care. React components have no opinionated structure imposed on them, just like jQuery.)

the hill i am willing to die on is: FUCK AI. I’ll be dead before I let it write a single line of code.

A plain text physical password notebook is actually more secure than most people think. It’s also boomer-compatible. My folks understand that things like their social security cards need to be kept secure and out of public view. The same can be applied to a physical password notebook. I also think a notebook can be superior to the other ways of generating and storing passwords, at least in some cases.

1. use the same password for everything: obviously insecure.
2. Use complex unique passwords for everything: You’ll never remember them. If complex passwords are imposed as a technical control, even worse if you have to change them often, you’ll just end up with passwords on post-its.
3. use a password manager: You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If the manager gets breached there goes everything.

Transparency + blur + drop shadow is peak UI design and should remain so for the foreseeable future. It provides depth, which adds visual context. Elements onscreen should not appear flat; our human predator brains are hardwired and physiologically evolved to parse depth information.

I fucking hate AI in HR/hiring. I try so hard not to spread my personal data to LLMs/AI ghuls and the moment I apply for a job I need to survive I have to accept that the HR department’s AI sorting hat now knows a shit ton about me. I just hope these are closed systems. if anyone from a HR department knows more, please let me know

Workplace safety is quickly turning from a factual and risk-based field into a vibes-based field, and that’s a bad thing for 95% of real-world risks.

To elaborate a bit: the current trend in safety is “Safety Culture”, meaning “Getting Betty to tell Alex that they should actually wear that helmet and not just carry it around”. And at that level, that’s a great thing. On-the-ground compliance is one of the hardest things to actually implement.

But that training is taking the place of actual, risk-based training. It’s all well and good that you feel comfortable talking about safety, but if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not actually making things more safe. This is also a form of training that’s completely useless at any level above the worksite. You can’t make management-level choices based on feeling comfortable, you need to actually know some stuff.

I’ve run into numerous issues where people feel safe when they’re not, and feel at risk when they’re safe. Safety Culture is absolutely important, and feeling safe to talk about your problems is a good thing. But that should come AFTER being actually able to spot problems.

They should stop teaching the OSI model and stick to the DOD TCP/IP model

In the world of computer networking you are constantly hammered about the OSI model and how computer communication fits into that model. But outside of specific legacy uses, nothing runs the OSI suite, everything runs TCP/IP.

Okay, I’m pretty late to the party, but here we go. My field is illustration and art, and especially color theory is something that a lot too often is teached plainly wrong. I think it was in the 1950s when Johannes Itten introduced his book on colortheory. In this book, he states that there are three “Grundfarben” (base colors) that will mix into every color. He explained this model with a color ring that you will still find almost anywhere. This model and the fact that there are three Grundfarben is wrong.

There are different angles from where you can approach color mixing in art, and it always depends on what you want to do. When we speak about colors, we actually mean the experience that we humans have, when light rays fall into our eyes. So, it’s actually a perceptual phenomenon, which means it is actually something that has small statistical differences from individual to individual. For example, a greenish blue might be a little bit more green for one person or a little more blue for the other.

Every color, however, has its opposite color. Everybody can test this. Look into a red (not too bright) light for some time and then onto a white wall. The color you will see is the opposite. They will cancel each other out and become white / neutral.

Ittens colormodel, however, is not based in perception. In this model yellow is opposed to violet, which might mix to a neutral color with pigments but not with lightrays. But even that doesn’t work a lot of times. I mean, even his book is printed in six colors, even though his three basecolors are supposedly enough to print every color…

In history lot of colormodels have been less correct course. What is so infuriating is that in Ittens case, he just plainly ignored the correct colortheory that already existed (by Albert Henry Munsell) and created his own with whatever rules that he believes are correct.

Even today, this model and rules are teached at art schools and you can see his color circle plastered all over the internet.

Tldr: Johannes Ittens colormodel is wrong, even though it’s almost everywhere.

(Added tldr)

Dynamic typing sucks.

Type corrosion is fine, structural typing is fine, but the compiler should be able to tell if types are compatible at compile time.

Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.

Personally: Don’t use CSS if tables do what you need. Don’t use Javascript for static Web pages. Don’t overcomplicate things when building Web sites.