Roll Lore: Gaming for initiative!

Pathfinder is superior to D&D ethically, morally and mechanically. Fight me.

Same

Only sorta related, but now I have an excuse to tell my anecdote…

One job ago I had a manager who decided that he would convert some of our helper scripts from bash to Python for reasons. I was new there and so didn’t realize what he was doing, or that he had started the process just as I was going through orientation. However, I ended up being the reviewer for the PR.

This was the worst Python I had ever seen but in such odd ways and it mostly worked. It almost felt like it was written by someone who knew bash really well but had never learned any other languages, or thought that bash was just so damn good that he wanted to turn every other language into it. For example, instead of using argparse he was manually looping through argv and parsing them one at a time. And instead of using a standard for each in foo loop, there were index variables and while loops. And certainly there were no comprehensions or any understanding of the basic built in data structures other than using lists as arrays.

So I did a review, assuming that this person was just really new to python and tried to gently coach him towards basic Pythonisms. His response was: “Oh yeah, I just ran them through ChatGPT and assumed it was all ok.”

I quit about two months later.

I grew up in one of those places. It was a town that anyone from a real city would think of as tiny, but was seen as the “Big City” in the area: population of around 35k, by far the largest in a several hour drive. I left when I graduated to go to college and have never returned from more than a holiday break to visit friends and family. Some of my friends and family left and some stayed. Everyone who stayed… well, it hasn’t worked out well for them. They all ended up with dead end jobs in a dying town, hoping for the boom times again that will never come. They’ve become bitter, paranoid, and fearful of the outside world. The last time I was there, in 2021, was so damn sad. The town is so run down, there is a bad meth problem, and everything just felt despondent. Yeah, the town has chosen to do it to themselves in a lot of ways and I wouldn’t be part of this community if I didn’t enjoy at least some schadenfreude, but I also have to wonder how will those 35000 people, and their kids, ever have a chance at a better life?