I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.
There’s a bunch of factors.
So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.
Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.
It’s always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.
Even the idealized stuff of “buy a house on one income” was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, “and then the white people burned down our house” were all realities.
This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.
This was a favorite for a long time, by the high water marks: https://thehighwatermarks.bandcamp.com/track/suicide
It feels like suicide or something worse
I’ve got this curse on me
It seems I only dream about the things
that shouldn’t come to be
always I try to find a way it feels
it seems to real to me
I just can’t let it go
I’ll let you know
Just what it means to me
As days go past and it all moves too fast
And I won’t think about it
And when I do it all comes back to you
And I don’t want to change that
Markdown fornatting is really tedious to do on the phone so I’m not going to fix that more.
But the song sounds upbeat, but it’s lyrics are a sad loop they want to break and also don’t want to.
Yeah, I was going to say I saw almost this exact joke recently. That was the other one I saw.
It’s really hard to get people to suffer mild inconvenience when they don’t emotionally connect with the benefits.
Most of facebook’s evils are remote and impersonal. Seeing your cousin’s baby photos is real and at hand.
Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.
But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”
I’m just going to move on
That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.
So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.
A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.
B. It’s not original.
C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?
Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.
Meetup.com ? They’re still around.
One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.
Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.
Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?
Sure, could be. They didn’t have any automated checks, and I saw errors like “that’s too many parenthesis” and “you’re trying to use a library you didn’t add to the dependencies list” sail through.
I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now
Where I work, there’s really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There’s also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.
They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he’s learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just “you skim it. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes”.
Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.
Yeah, it can be hard, but many things worth doing are hard. If you start with the bare minimum, the other person’s first impression of you is that you half-assed it. Would you be extra interested in someone who’s too half assed to even read your profile?
Put in the hard work. If you don’t have the energy, don’t use the apps. Half-assing it is just going to make you unhappy.
Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.
This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.
Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.
Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.
Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)
I guess it varies by age and region.
While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).
Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.
I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups
This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.
The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though
The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)
But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?
Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.
And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.
Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.
At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)
These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.
Cool. Been on Pop!_os for a year or so. Not memorable issues. Plays games fine.
Microsoft should be broken up. Even if they walk back some of their AI slop, they’re too big. They don’t fail like they should for releasing a bad product.
Yep.
Management is often out of touch and full of shit