JohnBooty

The usual given reason is that porn/adult stuff tends to generate a relatively large number of chargebacks, due to factors like (1) predatory/dark patterns by porn providers (2) guys’ partners seeing porn charges on the credit card statement and freaking out, and guys claiming they were “hacked” or whatever and then following through and disputing the charges.

Even if the absolute number of chargebacks is small, in relative terms it’s still several times larger than it is for non-“adult” charges, and that kinda destroys profit margins — more support calls, more work, etc.

Or so they say.

I’m not in the industry, so I don’t know. I can certainly believe that many of the oligarchs in charge are weird shitheads with bizarro conservative views, but payment processor leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about morals in any other manner, so it’s also kind of weird to me that they’d pick porn and porn only (a seemingly passé target for most conservatives these days) as the one and only target of a uh, decades-long distributed lowkey conspiracy that spans multiple generations of payment processor leadership. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    > It’s invisible, insidious censorship

Absolutely agree 100%. Even if they’re not trying to be puritans, this is absolutely the outcome.

I have seen models designed this way! Vornado used to make one, I think it's discontinued.

These directed-air "personal models" make a lot of sense to me... at least in theory. I haven't seen them properly tested.

The big air purifiers work great.. if the room is closed up. But their effectiveness approaches zero if you have the windows open or otherwise have unfiltered air entering the room. Which is kind of important, if you don't enjoy breathing in sky high levels of CO2. (If one's allergies are bad enough, or a wildfire is raging outside, CO2 might of course be preferable to particulates)

I have 4 Coway and 2 Winix purifiers and I can confirm: they're great sleep noise generators! The plastic front pieces and the filters themselves block/baffle any high frequency noise from the fans, leaving you with a pleasant low/mid frequency whooooooosh. I like it better than the sound from small cheap solid state machines; their small speakers can't do low frequencies.

    For most circumstances where someone would use 
    a white noise machine, this kind of small purifier 
    is all-around better. 

Hmm. The word "most" is doing a lot of work here.

Depends if you enjoy fresh air when you sleep or not. If you've ever monitored CO2 levels you know how quickly they climb in a closed room.

But, if you are blowing fresh air into a room, or have the windows open, the filtration effectiveness of these units approaches zero pretty rapidly. And these air purifiers aren't exactly free to run: they use ~50-100W of power and if you run them 24/7 you can expect to spend $100+ per year on filters.

So there's no perfect answer...

I smile whenever I see EBCDIC, probably because I never had to deal with it.

But I'm sorta old and some of my school's texts were outdated so they had programming examples and explanatory text that treated EBCDIC on equal footing with ASCII.

So unlike anybody who dealt with EBCDIC conversions in the wild, seeing that acronym actually takes me back to happier days!

It's a shame, because there is money in it. It's just (like most sensible preventative maintenance) that the financial benefits are typically delayed. And when it comes to software, they're notoriously impossible to quantify.

Generally the only way to get it done in a corpo environment (and receive any kind of thanks or glory, as opposed to just torpedoing your own career) is to let things get so bad that production stability suffers and/or the team's ability to ship features is severely impacted.

...I realize I'm basically just echoing what you said, except more verbose. I'm venting!

Thats badass! I like doing that kind of work, but I got very jaded about it over the years, because management generally acted as if the engineers took a shit on the conference table in the middle of a Zoom call with their most important customer whenever anybody attempted to address technical debt, as opposed to delivering more more more features. Unless it was billable agency work, in which case they’d hate it even more.

With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.

Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.

I burned out on trying after decades.

Wow. That was hardly ever the case in my experience in ~30 years in the industry. I enjoy(ed) what you’re describing too but… how common was this for you?

In a big production codebase with lots of active customers and data, architecture changes still feel pretty difficult even with LLMs accelerating them by an order of magnitude — migrating and backfilling data and all of that. That’s more complex than pointing Claude at a repo and saying “rewrite this in Rust.”

I guess you’re right, though - what is the ROI of keeping the architecture clean? It certainly saves time and money later, but it’s unclear if it’s a net win.

(It’s of course also significant to note that the upfront work of figuring out the right architecture and keeping the code clean has also been correspondingly reduced as well. Both sides of the equation are affected…)

The industry never really figured out a way to reliably answer this question in the pre-LLM days either, so… I suspect it will continue to be hard to determine.

Like many, I became a SWE because I loved writing code. Ruby, in particular (whatever one thinks of its other strengths and weaknesses) can be very expressive and beautiful.

However, most code is corporate CRUD stuff. The world sort of runs on CRUD. But it's rarely particularly fun, or beautiful, or fulfilling. It tends to be pretty ugly because there's rarely time to make it beautiful. So I'm not losing much joy there.

Additionally, even with an agentic workflow, my team still thinks deeply about architecture issues. We believe that well structured code is better for bots and humans alike. So I am still exercising my engineering brain; I'm writing blueprints and supervising the bricklayers now instead of laying bricks.

Does that match your teams' experience at all? Sometimes I feel like folks on these threads are working in a parallel universe where the majority of coding tasks and somehow fulfilling and fun and not 99% tweaking reports, trying to implement arcane and contradictory business logic, or fighting with shitty and frustrating externalities. Maybe people found joy in those aspects. I guess there are all types of people in the world. I mean, I'm a sicko who loves writing SQL, something that most coders seem to hate.

    I've been direct with my team about it being a legitimate 
    feeling of grief and the grieving process that comes along 
    with it. It's been helpful for folks to hear that they aren't 
    alone in that feeling.

This is super great. God, I wish all leaders had half this much empathy! Good on you.

Yeah. “Just cut bullshitters out of your life” is about as unhelpful as “Don’t get sick!” when it comes to medical advice.

Like, duh yeah that’s the goal. Do that as much as possible, but a lot of your life is going to involve dealing with these people.

On a slightly deeper level, essentially nobody is 0% or 100% bullshitter. Nearly all of humanity falls into the middle. Even the most literal, level 2+ ASD folks I’ve known were, at a minimum, cagey at times.

I think that’s a great reason to get into the psychology of bullshitters, or at least get really familiar with their tactics. You are going to have a lot of situations in your life when you can’t just flip a switch and get rid of them.

Few counterpoints:

Most people, even toxic people, do have positive qualities.

At the most basic strategic level, it’s vital to recognize this so that we don’t fall for such people in the future. It’s sooooo easy to say “well so and so can’t be too toxic… I mean, they volunteer at the soup kitchen on weekends” or whatever. That’s part of how they (intentionally or unintentionally) lure you in. All very valuable for engineer-types, who may tend to be very literal in actions and their interpretations of others’ actions.

At a more nuanced strategic level, it’s good to recognize that since all people are a mix of positive and negative traits, How can we coexist with such people in cases when we can’t avoid it? It’s simplistic to say “just avoid toxic people” — it’s a good “north star” but is often impossible or impractical. e.g. it’s convenient to say “just cut toxic family members out of your life” and sometimes it’s the right call, but I’ve heard people toss that phrase around like it’s nothing and wow it’s heartbreakingly glib.

I think it’s also valuable for introspective purposes. It’s very easy to fall into the mindset of “well, I’m a good person because of X, Y, and Z” while blinding ourselves to negative ways in which we affect others.

Finally, yeah, sure — I admit it. I like a puzzle. Specifically the puzzle of figuring out if these people believe their own bullshit!

(For the record, I thought this movie was incredible, though HN’s collective “meh” on this thread was expected)

I'd be curious to hear from other older engineers who remember the RAD (rapid application development) explosion of the 90s with Visual Basic and Delphi.

There are obvious differences, but also similarities. Particularly:

    I've been doing some fractional work and I've been 
    getting more and more outreach from organisations that 
    don't have much development knowledge internally and 
    have come to understand the limitations of what they've 
    been building and want expert review.

There was a lot of this kind of work in the late 90s and early 2000s. The IT guy or Bob from accounting would cobble together some surprisingly effective Visual Basic apps that presented a huge win over whatever they were doing previously, but quickly grew unmaintainable.

Good call, thanks.

A lot of APIs we use return JSON - Github, Semaphore, Context7, Docker, etc. We're parsing JSON dozens of times per session. I think 5-6 tokens telling it to use `jq` in AGENTS.md was the right call for us.

I eagerly await your misunderstanding!