jackero

I know web developers who just put together WordPress sites and that’s how it’s been for decades.

Words matter but you need a thousand of them. Someone could say they’re “into rock climbing” but that could mean they climb once a month or they’re obsessed and do it everyday. That’s why we go through interviews or have dates because everything has a certain hard-to-put-into-words nuance.

And that’s why I don’t really care how you use “web developer” as long as you get the general idea.

I legitimately tried my best to like XLST on the web back in the day.

The idea behind XLST is nice — creating a stylesheet to transform raw data into presentation. The practice of using it was terrible. It was ugly, it was verbose, it was painful, it had gotchas, it made it easier for scrapers, it bound your data to your presentation more, and so on.

Most of the time I needed to generate XML to later apply a XLST style sheet, the resulting XML document was mostly a one off with no associated spec and not a serious transport document. It begged the question of why I was doing this extra work.

I think this is a basic “being an adult” skill to be honest.

We all know those friends that you can’t criticize because they’ll take it poorly.

A few things:

- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.

- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.

- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.

Here is a long ass post with some more but they come with a huge disclaimer — they are VERY personal opinions:

If you care a lot about plot and hate holes, go for critic >70%. 60-69% is passable but only if you like the subject/genre of the movie.

Very personal opinion — I find any movie with critic <50% completely unwatchable. I literally want to walk out of the theater. This includes nearly every modern horror movie because characters in horror movies always do dumb things. I know that’s the appeal but I hate it.

The extremely rare horror movie with >85% critic probably won’t be scary but these are personally the only horrors I enjoy (e.g. The Cabin in the Woods).

Movies with audience scores below 60% are hard watches.

>90% critic movies are really well done as in they did their homework. Left no stone unturned. It doesn’t mean that it’s an objectively good or memorable movie (use IMDB scores for that).

If you like experimental movies and/or are you’re into filmmaking, go for >90% critic and 65-85% audience for gems. If you’re not, you will HATE these movies.

But watch out — sometimes if you come an across a movie with high critic and low audience, it’s a movie really for people in the movie industry. You have to read the synopsis to figure out which case it is. See Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Superhero movies and fandom movies (e.g. LOTR) need extra consideration. If they didn’t follow source material, audience scores seem to be even lower than if it was original content. On the other hand, it also goes the other way.

If you’re a deep cut kind of person, check to make sure that the movie has a high enough rating count. Scores for less well-known movies are less accurate.

Old movies, especially those older than the 70s-80s, are harder to judge on RT. There seems to be a self-selection bias of people who are only rating those movies because they remembered liking them. But at the same time, they were also more revolutionary for their time (to be fair to the movie).

All of these tips are for movies. I watch few TV shows and don’t have insight into that side of RT.

Same. I’m big into filmmaking and arthouse films. But other times I may just want something simple.

Using RT’s two-axis score distribution helps narrow down movies.

I find RT scores very accurate but not the raw score.

What I mean is that a 70% score is meaningless to me. I need to know the movie genre, the audience score, the age of the movie and then I basically do a “lookup table” in my head. And I have that lookup table because I’ve looked up every movie I’ve watched on RT for 15 years so I know how the scores correlate to my own personal opinions.

As an example: the author said that critic scores should align with audience scores but no that’s not true at all. Critics tend to care more about plot continuity, plot depth and details while the audience tends to care about enjoyability. Both are important to me so I always look at both scores. That’s why a lot of very funny comedies have a 60-69% critic score but a 90%-100% audience score — because it’s hilarious but the plot makes no fucking sense and has a million holes. And if you see a comedy with 95% critic but 70% audience, it will be thought-provoking and well done but don’t expect more than occasional chuckles.

I’m not goal oriented and follow my instincts. There’s no way you could get me to write a 5 year plan for myself.

But I will never pick the fork on the road where I will probably be worse off in 5 years. I won’t take a job where I make good money but sit in a corner doing little, for example. I will regret it.

That’s basically my compromise.

I use TickTick.

I saw the author tried it but didn’t actually write about it under “What Actually Happened With Each App”

I use TickTick over Todoist and other apps because it’s basically a .txt file dump for me, but with notifications and reoccurring tasks /shrug

And model year too.

Sometimes you can link the bad years of a generally reliable vendor to a new part e.g. the first year they might have introduced a 10-speed transmission.

These first years are scary.

Some vendors don’t seem to change major parts as often, which helps their reliability.

There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components.

If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers.

The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing. UX easily takes a backseat.

Maximizing productivity comes from maximizing efficiency. Efficiency is about sitting down and analyzing your tasks holistically and doing min-maxing to ensure every process achieves its greatest result.

Now ask yourself this: how often do people do this at all? Pretty much never. Most of us only do it when you have to, because you aren’t making enough money, because your application is slow, because you can barely meet budget, or because you are trying to land on the moon and failing costs too much.

50% of my college education was general education though.

And frankly I find it just as valuable.