I am desperately choosing to see it as an extinction burst. The alternative, that everybody is totally chill with this level of terrible, is hard to contemplate.

I always tell my kids, if they start throwing a fit about something, then I _cannot_ give it to them (even if I want to!) since it incentivizes tantrums and bad behavior. Seems like whining in public about a bad grade ought to merit roughly the same treatment and for the same reasons

"There but for the grace of God go I" is, for many people, not a cautionary tale but a horror story.

I think, along a similar vein, that the thing humans fear most is exile (not death), even in the case of someone else removing themselves from our company. So much behavior makes sense to me through this lens; how can I make myself immune to being exiled no matter what I do or how I treat others?

There are many, very plausible catastrophies that are order_s_ of magnitude more expensive than anything even an upper-middle-class person could dream of buying. You can't save enough money from a wage to afford 24x7 in-home care for a family member who received a TBI in a car accident, for example

Slack's security team was like this too, just a top-notch group of people who understood that security doesn't mean anything if people constantly evade it. It's been a few years since I left so I don't know how it's going now, but I appreciate having had the chance to learn from them all the time

Sometimes; sometimes they just hung up immediately because they were too embarrassed to keep talking once they realized their mistake. I always told people that working with tech requires a certain kind of brain damage, and that they shouldn't feel bad about not having it themselves 😆

Everybody just wants to be heard, you know? I know sometimes frustrated people with broken printers are having some big feelings (as I say to my kids) and it's really transformative to keep that in mind along with the actual technical work

I had a big library of techniques like "can you unplug it and look for damage, then plug it back in" to give people gentle ways to save face when they realized they'd left something unplugged. Our society does such a bad job of teaching us how to give each other grace and talk each other down

When I did tech support, I learned that when someone calls they have two problems. 1) They need help with something that's busted, and 2) they're mad enough about it to call you. Great techs try to solve both problems, and if you can't solve 1, at least address 2. I think teaching this might help.

I think it's that you must love and hate the system, in equal measure, at the same time. Love because you must understand it deeply in order to change it. Hate because repulsion of its current state provides the motive force to keep going. Without that balance and passion you cannot hope to succeed

I think it's less about meatspace and more about interactions which may have conflict or friction. Those can happen online, but it's so much easier to walk away from those online or never invite conflict to begin with. The atrophy of our conflict-management skills is the problem, not online itself

The Pi-hole (pi-hole.net) does a fine job of blocking most of the Roku advertising, FWIW

The phrase "the perfection of capitalism is oblivion" haunts me. No friction, no conflict, no meaningful interaction; just endless, perfectly smooth, utterly predictable patterns of production and consumption