My own personal ponytail says this could just be this in a code block of a README

https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail/blob/main/.github...

I've been an Xbox diehard since the early 2000s but bringing your exclusives to PlayStation just makes me genuinely consider switching to PlayStation.

You are telling me I can now get all the games I want to play on PlayStation, or some of the games I want to play on Xbox? You're really making the case for me to switch.

And the whole "This is an Xbox" marketing strategy, claiming a Firestick streaming Xbox is as good as an Xbox? Firstly it's dumb and no one is buying it. Secondly, if people did believe it, at best you're just canabalizing your market share. You're not going to build any sort of brand loyalty to a dime a dozen streaming platform.

There has been unrelenting reflection on where I am and how I got here. A lot of lament for a small handful of decisions and a life marked by avoiding uncomfortable decisions. I don't know where the last 20 years have gone. Last I remember, I was playing Wii in my friend's basement. I remember the seemingly endless opportunities nights laid out before us. DVDs and pizza and furious laughter. I remember waking up in strange places. I don't know when that all ended. It ended.

I had a friend describe middle age as suddenly being able to see the outline of the cage. It's apt.

I'd have liked to have gone to a real college, had the college experience. I'd have liked to have mended friendships.

40 has such a strange loneliness to it, I take solace in my children. My friends had children years before me and it made friendships tiring. The age gap in our children now that I have my own has not helped.

I spent much of the last decade collecting retro video games. I have a room full of them. It came to me recently, I don't think I actually enjoy games. I enjoyed playing them with friends, but by myself they're hollow. I don't play games with friends anymore. When my kids get a little older we'll have fun.

I've had Damien Rice's "Older Chests" playing in my head on repeat despite my best efforts to drown it out.

I am in therapy, but I think I have just too strong of a mask for anyone else to truly pierce.

I'll get out of this funk eventually, I should take this as a wake up call.

Learn SQL, learn the normal forms at least up to 3NF, profit.

I took an Oracle SQL class in High School in the very early 2000s and frankly it set me up for my career, despite never having touched actual Oracle SQL I've become the go to guy at every job I've had for optimizing queries and reviewing designs.

I read a book on how MySQL actually worked under the hood in the late aughts and it really went a long way towards the effort.

It's really not as hard as the complexity of modern ORM tooling likes to make it seem. That scares people away. It's an elegant language for a more elegant age.

I went to a talk like 10 years ago about how SQL will be displaced by Hadoop/MapReduce in the next 5 years. I posted on Twitter about it at the time like we'll see if that happens. Spoilers, it didn't. I can't even think of the last time I've heard someone invoke the name of Hadoop

Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.

It's amazing to me that they have managed to stick around like they have. They're very much an "old internet" site, and I hope they can stick around for many many more years.

I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I've ever been after a job interview.

The second interview a couple days later was a one-on-one with the CTO. After about five minutes of pretty friendly get-to-know-you chitchat he asks if I have any questions about the position. I ask about what my day to day would look like and he replies "I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't like to lead people on, I'll be honest I don't see a position for you here."

It was such a sudden slap in the face that my brain just completely shut off. I kind of just stammered out an "Oh... Um... Thank you for your time"

I didn't get to talk about my experience ... at all. Not a single mention of my twenty years of across multiple tech stacks my resume doesn't even begin to scratch. I've never been judged so quickly or so blindly.

Later that day, out of sheer frustration I email him back trying to explain that I'd felt like I didn't get a chance to talk about myself and all the ways I'd felt like I was a great fit based on the previous interview and how my experience applied.

I never heard anything back.

It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time.

It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully earned that authority it honestly just kind of smells of insecurity.

If there's something in the middle of a wall of text that invalidates something much further down, trying to communicate the problem becomes a pain in the butt. It's just not a good method for discovery.

It's never been a problem, and I feel is perfectly reasonable in the grand scheme of things.

Honest question does high velocity / first mover ever really pay off these days?

I don't feel like having the first AI slop to the market has actually paid off for anyone? Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Am I out of touch?

The way I see it, first movers do a lot of work proving the idea works, and everyone else swoops in with better product or at least at a cheaper rate.

Beyond that, let's take the company I work for, for example. We have an ingrained and actually relatively happy customer base on a subscription model. I feel like the only thing increased velocity can do is rapidly ruin their experience.