Your eye gets trained eventually. Also most of our components look something like this once class names start to get long.

  const inputWrapperClass = classNames(
    'flex flex-col gap-y-1',
    'group-focus:border-blue-500',
    isDisabled ? 'opacity-50' : null
  );

  return (
    <label className={inputWrapperClass}>
    {...}
    </label>
  )

In practice our "full-stack" developers are writing less and less CSS because they're just using the components that encapsulate all of this, our frontend developers get code completion for our design system tokens, and we haven't had to ship any new CSS classes in the last few months.

Our new hires are able to just use the design system tokens rather than going in and saying `padding: 5px` and `padding: 4px` because the designer didn't think it was a big deal. They just write `p-1` and that covers it.

All the components get tree-shaken and only ship the styles they need so bundle size gets reduced as well.

If I had my dream team of 10x frontend developers and a perfect design team who always follows the rules they create then yes I would use regular css with css variables, but I don't.

I am more than happy to sacrifice "separation of technologies" for a happier team, more consistent styling, and faster delivery times.

I would quit. That's so infantilizing. We're adults we don't need these hand holdy forced "team building" ice breakers. Just let us work together and I promise we'll get to know each other as much as we need to to get the job done.

I have not found that to be true, at all. Quite the contrary, I've seen that when there is no forced team building, people only get to know each other to a minimal level. They do not build trust, they do not learn each others strengths and thereby put a heavier weigh on people's weaknesses. A small mistake by a coworker can become "That guy sucks, can't wait 'til he gets fired or leaves", and small cliques and camps end up developing across teams. It can become quite dysfunctional, quite fast.

Of course, in a way this means I agree with you - if you are not someone who wants to be on a team that spends time and energy on the warm and fuzzy team building tasks... quitting probably is the right move. There will be other teams that work better for you.

I've heard this is why 360 reviews can be flawed. With limited interaction coworkers may only see a small slice of a person's performance, possibly the worst/best.

Heaven forbid anyone asks you to do any explicit emotional labor in addition to technical labor! The horror!

"I get paid to write code, not to be a human!!!!"

It's pretty obvious the bias here if you flip things. We all know that both emotional labor and physical/technical labor are required to get the job done. If you said everyone would only be rated on hard metrics around their social abilities, and the programming would be left up to whatever each person feels like, it would lead to technical chaos. I doubt anyone would say, "That's so infantilizing. We're professional programmers we don't need these hand holdy forced "engineering architecture" meetings. Just let us code together and I promise we'll build the product the right way, and on time."

In the same way, if you don't explicitly plan and architect the culture at your company, it can lead to similar chaotic situations. People only associate organically based on similar background, similar interests, similar personality, etc. This leads to basically every single bias that everyone not a white/asian straight man has been screaming about for decades in tech.

Being paid to take a walk and talk to some people seems reasonable to me. So long as they don't expect me to stay late to "make up for lost time" while doing the exercise.

Are recurring manager 1x1s also infantilizing?

Yes. A million times yes.

I have talked about this before here, but I don't really understand this idea companies have about promoting/demanding social things at work, or having a dedicated 1:1 block with managers. Are developers so social awkward that you need to have someone higher up blocking time for you to talk with people/managers?

Whenever I have an issue with my work/company I just do a 'hey, when do you have 5 minutes, need to have a chat about something' message and then talk with the manager/person about it. These 5 minutes chats have been as small as 'want to spend some time with my kid so will take a couple long weekends' to 'i am not a good fit for this company, so I will be resigning by end of day'. Never had to have it scheduled like I am a fucking 5 year old that needs an adult to time box his life.

As I understand it the scheduled 1:1s can provide a release valve for employees who get so focused and heads down they neglect interpersonal relationships or concerns. They're meant to avoid the problem of emotions being bottled up too long then exploding. Can also help to batch concerns so there aren't constant interruptions for minor things that can be addressed later.

Obviously it's not a perfect approach as one cannot force candor or trust, and frequency must be tuned to the needs of everyone involved.

There is a middle ground between going above and beyond and being difficult to work with.

I tend to have no problem saying no to things that I think are bullshit, I have no problem skipping out on extra "team building" efforts or declining to attend the happy hour. I let my work speak for itself and I figure companies keep me around for that, and coworkers know they can come to me with any issues they might be having.

But I have never purposefully taken a coworker out to lunch or asked about their life outside of work (except for when we're on a call before anyone else and they start the conversation), and yet I've had just as much success as people who I've watched do that.

That's not to say that I don't get to know my coworkers I just let it happen organically as we're building things and solving problems together rather than going out of my way to make it happen.

Even if they did you think the average person is going to put their neck on the line over ads?

How many UX designers just give into client demands, how many devs work extra hours to make up for bad management practices? How many managers are under pressure over sales created deadlines? How many sales people are under pressure over the company's target numbers?

There will always be a few people who are willing to put their neck on the line but it'll require a culture shift before any momentum builds up and most feel comfortable protesting these practices at their workplace.

There's work happening now to make this a reality by partnering with on-ramps and off-ramps to go from fiat to crypto.

One can imagine a world in which this is completely transparent to the end user.

High ETH gas fees are also being solved by Layer 2 solutions which get fees down to cents by either batching transactions or doing the work off the main chain and posting only the proofs to the main ETH chain. Checkout zero knowledge rollups, aka zk-rollups.

Because whether or not Bitcoin is silly, someone else paid their hard earned money for the coins, usually we say that makes someone the owner.

What do you usually call someone who takes a thing from its owner without permission?

Except that they aren't taking anything from anyone. It's information. They might be copying it. And you might argue things like privacy count, and I'd be willing to hear your reasoning, but this shouldn't be like magic.

Yeah, someone was silly to pay hard earned money in exchange from useless tokens. It was a gamble. If the useless tokens get stolen, I'm sorry to say, but whoever paid for BTC already lost their wealth in the first place when they converted whatever they had before for it.

> Except that they aren't taking anything from anyone. It's information. They might be copying it.

It's true that information is infinitely abundant. However, unlike copyrighted works, private keys are not supposed to be shared. There should never be more than one copy of that number in the entire universe. If people can brute force keys by guessing, we've probably got bigger problems.

Obtaining that number without authorization is already a crime. Accessing computers illegally to exfiltrate data is already a crime. Breaking into a physical safe in order to obtain a paper key is already a crime.

> Obtaining that number without authorization is already a crime. Accessing computers illegally to exfiltrate data is already a crime. Breaking into a physical safe in order to obtain a paper key is already a crime.

Sure thing. Hence, the importance of analyzing each case individually. If unauthorized computer access is used, sure thing a crime was committed. If someone created a wallet using a stupid wallet generator which used this website to "create" private keys, and someone else also had this silly idea, and someone deposited Bitcoin on a wallet created by this mean and and someone else took it, then no crime was committed.

Yeah, I agree with that.

You don't even need the website. Cryptographic keys are just numbers. All data is just numbers. You can write simple code to generate all numbers from zero to infinity and it will eventually generate all cryptograhpic keys, all computer files, all copyrighted works, all hate speech, all child abuse material, everything that can possibly be represented as data.

The thing is the search space is so unfathomably large that such a program will never produce useful results. This is central to cryptography. If a private key is copied, it must have been done so illegally or accidentally. Any other option means the cryptography is defective.

This is the complete opposite of copyrighted works whose entire purpose is copying. The data is already known and they're hopelessly trying to regulate access to it.

> If a private key is copied, it must have been done so illegally or accidentally. Any other option means the cryptography is defective.

I agree if you're talking about an evidence such as a high-quality video or even photo with everything leading us to believe it's legit. However, we can not be as confident if we're talking about a BTC token. While extremely unlikely, there might be faulty algorithm implementations, problems with the algorithm, etc., that might lead to this situation.

Very unlikely? Sure, but we've to give the benefit of the doubt.

The balance of your bank account is similarly “information”. But since everyone places value on that information, it’s valuable.

And these days, they way society is using traditional currency is become less tangible all the time. It’s is 100% possible to live life with never touching physical currency. Get paid via direct deposit, credit cards for your daily expenses, ACH your housing bill and credit card expenses. All just information flowing around.

Crypto is certainly overhyped and overvalued days, but it’s seems that at the core, crypto and modern banking are accomplishing the same thing: managing numbers(information) that people value.

The key difference is that one of these things has the backing and approval of recognized governments who also control law enforcement, while the other is just some guys on the internet. I'm not so sure "finding a pre-existing bitcoin wallet I can claim, and doing so" is really any different than "generating hashes until the blockchain hands me a prize".

That's not an argument. In any case, more and more governments are now recognizing crypto as something real, and are coming onboard. E.g. most recently Dubai.

Could you tell me how it’s changing in Dubai?

Look up dubai crypto hub

Thank you!

Are you based there?

The same thing is true about a bank account. Your balance is just information. Cash is just useless tokens.

So if I do a bank transfer from your account to mine, I'm just "copying information".

No. You're accessing computer resources that you don't own and you aren't authorized to.

Same with private cryptocurrency keys. Otherwise, accessing non-public APIs with weak security by playing around with the URL would be legal.

No. Invalid comparison. If you legitimately discover a cryptocurrency wallet private key by sheet lucky, and such cryptocurrency has no backing = is based in pure thin air, such as the case of Bitcoin, and there are public nodes which doesn't require you to abide by contracts that would forbid you to do so (which is supposedly all nodes), you're good to use that as you wish and it won't be a crime.

It's unethical to steal something tangible. Bitcoin has no tangibility whatsoever. You can't steal it.

What? From an engadget article:

---

Property is legally defined as 'Not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth.'

That includes protectable ideas, digital files, financial instruments (like stocks and bonds, loans and credits), computer graphics, certain arrangements of words and quite a bit more.

---

What does tangibility mean to you? That allows you steal the examples in the second paragraph without legal reprecussions nor ethical dilemmas?

Of course you can steal it, and it's unethical and should be punishable. Not sure what planet we live on here.

Bits on a server representing your account balance also have no tangibility

Jeez! So, are you telling me that cloud isn't someone's else computer? Damn it.

hmm? Do you think the blockchain isn't also on a bunch of people's computers?

The problem with crypto is the ownership (edit: maybe I should say authorization to transact) is defined only by the private key.

You may get lucky with KYC, but who in their right mind would gen a collision only to get caught on the cash out?

You're not in control once someone has your pk unless you can mobilize a 51% attack to fix your problem.

You need self control to the proportion that your emotions get in the way.

More anxiety (or whatever your emotional block is) around work, more self control required to get yourself to do it.

If you deal with the anxiety (on top of continuing to use your existing self control) you'll find that you need less and less self control to get things done.

That being said, self control can absolutely be trained and it is a part of learning to deal with your emotions. It's not an either or.

Personally I find it to be a mixture of anxiety & poorly defined tasks with unclear objectives/acceptance criteria and poorly coached "constructive feedback".

This comes out mostly with my boss who is famous for wanting "plans" but will trash the first N versions delivered for any number of unpredictable reasons, while questioning your competence for having provided something so bad. Often he often casually admits to having completely changed directions in between plan iterations. Never comes to a conclusion. Eventually devs just write up some tickets to work on the obvious & urgent work and get to it.

Part of it is detangling the emotional aspect from the operational aspect.

If you're procrastinating because of your fear of failure or because you think you'll look bad in front of your boss then no amount of planning is going to help you stop procrastinating unless that planning is helping you convince yourself that you won't fail.

In the same way, if you're lost and don't know what to do motivating yourself emotionally isn't going to help unstick you unless it results in your figuring out how to tackle the problem.

Watch your mind, figure out what it's running away from and tackle it at _that_ level, 9/10 times it's not the work as we can plainly see by the fact that once we start we can usually finish and get good results.

The other thing is that as crotchety as this sounds, put down the phone and other things that yank your attention around during the day. Re-learning how to focus on something past the first sign of uncomfortableness is a crucial skill for all of this.