brennen
@teslas_moustache if you've got access to a community garden, participating there can be good. (starting one is also great, but almost certain to be a lot of work.)
we have a free concert series in the town where i live - i gradually see more and more people i recognize there.
depending on your tolerance for various things, local highschool sporting events, churches, and stuff like charity soup suppers can be good.
brennen
of course there's plenty to fear and plenty to be angry about. it's a scary and unjust world. and yet it seems pretty clear that our collective susceptibility to these things, our tendency to amplify and redistribute them, is itself doing much of the damage.
i used to really believe spider robinson's formulation of "shared pain is diminished, shared joy is increased", but i think there's something missing there.
brennen
and of course these things are reflections of the general state of the system, even as they're also partially causes of it.
i'm not sure how to turn aside or dampen any of this effect, but i badly want to stop participating in it.
brennen
i took
127.0.0.1 metafilter.com
127.0.0.1 www.metafilter.com
out of my /etc/hosts for a bit and went to skim the front page. it took me a good 30 seconds before i was deep in some thread that just kinda felt like one long wail of anguish, and half an hour later i still haven't shaken the overall feeling.
this is a site that has finished its transformation into a sink/amplifier for anxiety and rage - it's not, in its own way, unlike what became of twitter.
brennen
@gdorn skilled developers with ethical preferences are actively threatening to the business model of almost every employer in tech. it's entirely unsurprising that they aren't welcomed. caring enough to fight is what they don't want.
brennen
@IggyMeansHeroin that is: the thing you're talking about is the joke.
brennen
@IggyMeansHeroin i think it's just a funny meme.
brennen
@mrgah @Mainebot oh, _that_ spenser. the real one.
i was briefly hoping for some robert b. parker fans.
brennen
@aardrian insecurity theater
brennen
@nex3 i recognize this impulse as a thing that i once experienced regularly, before i had learned to run away as quickly as it began to manifest...
brennen
@Angle @natecull i am disinterested in continuing the conversation.
brennen
@natecull as one internet random with strong and often unconventional opinions to another: you have always seemed like a person of good will with interesting thoughts, but i would gently suggest heeding the general tenor of responses from people who find this line of argument worrisome.
peace.
brennen
@natecull awright, i'm out.
there's probably some more restrained version of your underlying thesis that has explanatory merit, but the "work of art you're supposed to love but really don't" thing is a story old as time by now and you're taking this to frankly kind of unhealthy guy-who-thinks-he's-being-silenced lengths.
brennen
@advicepig i think the correct trajectory, if there is such a thing, is that by the time you _actually find_ things like bugs in databases and language implementations, you should have been burned enough by the arrogance of thinking you found one that at first you refuse to believe it.
brennen
@djsundog where do cat vacuumers fit?
brennen
@advicepig brutal.
brennen
@advicepig with luck, this will turn out to be just a phase. some people never seem to escape it, granted.
brennen
@mala imagine the interior lives of the people who build & maintain https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid
brennen
@allan i observe that somebody has http://mews.news parked but isn't observably doing anything with it. a real missed opportunity, if you ask me.
brennen
@Alamantus yeah, i think it's a hard tradeoff depending where you're at on the knowledge curve. you get more for fewer $ and the flexibility of solutions can go way up, but the learning time and the maintenance hours of course ain't free.
best of luck!
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