Adam Vartanian

Software engineer at Relay. Counterculture-adjacent. Strong opinions, rarely tweeted. @[email protected] (he/him)

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz Sure, if you think Mark is crafting a narrative so they can put more UB in the game despite people disliking it, I can’t disprove that. But to what end? Why is that likely, compared to the totally reasonable thing that lots of people (but not everyone!) actually like it?

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz That doesn’t mean those people don’t hate it! It sucks for them! But Mark’s been pretty clear that those people are a small minority, and so they’re not going to change, even though they’ve heard the feedback.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@VladdViever @monolith94 @Sierkovitz That’s because people think not changing in response to feedback is the same as that feedback being ignored.

Wizards can only make one Magic. If 90% of players like something and 10% hate it, they’re going to keep doing it.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 Also the ETA is pretty much just retaliation for the ESTA.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 UK government software is surprisingly competent as a general rule! It does have a problem of too many edge cases in the actual regulations meaning a bunch of them end up with “sorry, we didn’t build a flow for that, go find the form”, but the main stuff is good.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 Relational calculus and SQL are both useful things to teach, but they’re useful to teach to different sets of people with different goals. And the fact that we don’t separate those two and just have faculty fight about which one to teach is silly.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 This is the science/engineering split, which for some reason is bundled together in one department in computing, much to its detriment. You wouldn’t expect to learn beam loading equations in a physics program, and you’d be horrified not to learn it in a civil engineering one.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@lsv Ah, cool, makes sense. (And thanks, glad you find it useful!)

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 (And the answer people give to that last one often depends on how much the person in question resembles the answerer in various ways.)

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 Also blurry lines are everywhere. Somewhere emails cross from useful product announcements to spam, but nobody agrees where. If someone structures their affairs to legally receive more Social Security income, are they a parasite or are they properly responding to incentives?

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@ajlvi I’ve played it in the last 20 years but have no idea what clock you’re talking about :)

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 @MrKapitalist @Bootlegregore We already get indictments showing snippets from someone’s Google search history, definitely only a matter of time before ChatGPT logs serve the same role.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 In the interest of pedantry, your “drafting error” commentary is sadly in error. That’s how lists with a conjunction are commonly written in legal documents. See, for instance, 11 USC 101(9)(A). (https://t.co/pm7w9NYT1F)

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 The UK rates pretty highly here. Faster Payments is approximately instant for most payments, and recent rules changes have made reimbursement for fraud almost universally available up to £85k (customer eats £100).

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 One way to solve the UK immigrant bank address verification catch-22 is to have your US bank mail a replacement statement to your UK address. UK banks trust bank statements, US banks generally will mail a statement anywhere, done.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 Tradeoffs everywhere. Another one is that an SSN unlocks many government systems because the SSA makes getting one very difficult. If getting a new SSN were easy, then other systems would become harder to interact with to compensate.

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@lsv So glad to hear you’re all home safe and sound! Good luck with the new adventures!

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@SamuelHBlack That is the number one thing preventing me from using it more often

[Adam Vartanian @flooey]

@patio11 This reminds me of moving to the UK and being caught in the address verification catch-22. Google had a thing in their relocation docs that basically said “Print this letter, go to this branch down the road from the office, they will give you a bank account.”