eschatologist.net
Bad Take, Folks
Looks like I’ll be putting away my Daring Fireball and Accidental Tech Podcast
shirts for a while. It’s a pity, they were comfy shirts and I thought I was
supporting good people with them.
See, Marco Arment and John
Gruber have, for some
reason, decided that now’s the time to let their privilege flag fly, and it’s
not a good look:
> And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew
> everyone’s hot takes on everything.
>
> The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for
> going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang
> out with our friends.
“Pizza is an open-faced sandwich” is a _hot take_. “Chicago-style pizza is a
casserole” is a _hot take_. “Brown people are poisoning the blood and soil of
Europe and must be removed” is _Nazi shit_ and _that’s_ the sort of thing that
DHH, the creator Rails and that slop Linux distribution, has been saying.
> If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side”
> considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at
> their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside?
>
> Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political
> contexts?
>
> Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself?
Yes, if those “political views” are _Nazi shit_ that’s _exactly_ what should
happen.
These are not views about which reasonable people can disagree, like tax policy.
We’re talking about views that deny the fundamental humanity of some people and
whose existence is a call for violence.
If Marco or John were not white, straight, cisgender men, they might have
realized they had to put a lot more work into deciding whether Bob and Van were
safe neighbors. If they were black, brown, Asian, Jewish, indigenous, gay,
trans, or women, they would have known that everyone you interact with at
anything more than the most superficial level needs to be vetted for subtle
signs that they don’t actually see you as a fellow human being–or that even if
they see _you_ that way, they may see your friends or family differently.
They should ask their respective wives whether they ever had to be concerned,
when they lived on their own, whether any of their neighbors might be a
misogynist or worse, or whether they were able to just give straightforward
trust to them, and why. It might shed some light on an unfortunate aspect of the
human experience that they missed out on.
As for me, I’m _glad_ people are finally openly stating that they’re Neo-Nazis
and fellow travelers, and that other people are stating that they’re comfortable
breaking bread with and supporting Neo-Nazis. It’s important to know because the
first step to rooting them out–and make no mistake, they _must_ be rooted
out–is seeing them clearly.
There’s a German saying:
> If there’s a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to
> him, you got a table with eleven Nazis._
Don’t be one of those ten, no matter how nice you may find that one particular
Nazi personally.
![[SKILL.md segment for ponytail]
# Ponytail
You are a lazy senior developer. Lazy means efficient, not careless. You have
seen every over-engineered codebase and been paged at 3am for one. The best
code is the code never written.
## Persistence
ACTIVE EVERY RESPONSE. No drift back to over-building. Still active if
unsure. Off only: "stop ponytail" / "normal mode". Default: **full**.
Switch: `/ponytail lite|full|ultra`.
## The ladder
Stop at the first rung that holds:
1. **Does this need to exist at all?** Speculative need = skip it, say so in one line. (YAGNI)
2. **Stdlib does it?** Use it.
3. **Native platform feature covers it?** `<input type="date">` over a picker lib, CSS over JS, DB constraint over app code.
4. **Already-installed dependency solves it?** Use it. Never add a new one for what a few lines can do.
5. **Can it be one line?** One line.
6. **Only then:** the minimum code that works.
The ladder is a reflex, not a research project. Two rungs work → take the
higher one and move on. The first lazy solution that works is the right one.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:22yyehc52vyozjdxuvhlfwh6/bafkreih7kytsvbxx7ywuvllwzvoqrxejx2pdunprtt27grxjfucxvpk5h4)
