Returning to this WAY late, but that is fucking cooool.

First off, don’t sweat it, the “nightmare” was probably 20-30 annoying minutes for the senior.

But commit count isn’t what would’ve made it tough to merge, and strictly speaking smaller commits is typically better.

Concretely: limit the kinds and the reach of changes you’re asking someone to review & merge. I’ve never done localization but I’ll try to guess for an example -

1000 lines changed because you’re replacing an incorrect punctuation character misused everywhere - that’s really only one change to have to think about, it’s 1000 lines but one fairly trivial change.

Now, if each of those lines was improving some phrasing, done by a native speaker that found existing phrasing clunky for their language? Well, each of those are their own judgment call and have to be assessed individually. A thousand fairly subtle changes, and a PR isn’t meant to accept some and reject others.

More abstractly, try to put yourself in the reviewer’s shoes (hard when new) - how much stuff do they have to keep in mind in order to make judgment calls about this whole batch of code?

More if you want it:

Generally it’s more considerate to submit smaller batches of (self-contained!) work at a time. Sometimes the work or existing code is so interconnected that this can’t really be done, though. You mentioned spending a month, that’s also a long time in most environments to be off working on bulk changes for later review. A week is probably long enough in most cases, some orgs even prefer to push (if not review) code daily.

Don’t agonize over it though, wanting to improve your impact on others while working is the right direction to point, keep walking that way and you’ll do awesome, let it develop over time. As in, don’t let your desire for politeness slow down your work or growth too much (I do this lol, why I’m mentioning).

I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.

Gross!

This American Life and The Moth may not be quite the format you’re describing but if you’re not familiar, they are old (big backlog), and quality and tend to feature viewpoints from the ordinary and even marginalized, both in their own ways.

Actually when I think about it, unless I’m misremembering, This American Life did a piece on body dysmorphia long before that concept reached more mainstream awareness. I don’t know how I’d feel about it now (I’ve just learned a lot since and it’s been like 10 years or something), but at the time I remember finding it compassionate and insightful, really opened my eyes on something I was previously only dimly aware of and curious about, before.

As is often the case in the US, without someone chiming in with a bunch of specifics, it’s hard to understand the scope of what I mean as being as dark as it is. We institutionally went from “no pain is allowed in patients, load em up!” to “patients can fucking deal with it, it probably doesn’t even hurt that much”, overnight, we didn’t land at any semblance of a sane middle ground. Hopefully the pendulum swings will behave like a real pendulum and settle lower and lower, but woof, it’s bad out there.

It gets worse. There was nothing done for the people whose doctors told them these drugs were safe and non addicting and totally fine to take for their ankle sprain or whatever (slight exaggeration, maybe, but truly slight).

They experienced the same sudden guillotine chop of subscription willingness with no support, mid-addiction.

So yeah all those people the Sacklers got rich by lying to and addicting, they’re just dead now or homeless and on their way there. Damn near to a rule, cuz opiate addiction often can’t be beat at all, and almost never without real support.

It’s grim. But the dead and ruined, their voices don’t rise to anywhere that people with decision-making power can hear. And that’s how our country works, in a nutshell - if you mistreat people a bit, they complain. If you mistreat people all the way, though, they die and go otherwise silent. Forget leopards and their face buffet, we live in a full-on meat grinder.

I can’t quite put my finger on moments like yours, but had the same strange sensation of creeping revulsion toward NPR, where it once felt like a safe, familiar, even comforting, thing.

NPR, in a million ways small and large, carries water for the status quo, and it’s fuckin gross. Even just small ongoing things like their current phrasing “the war in Iran”. It’s an anodyne, neutral phrasing used in their broadcasts, seemingly as a rule. Same neutral language for cops when “an assailant was shot and died”, or when “a weapon discharged”, etc.

It’s never the war against Iran, it’s not “the unprovoked attack against Iran”, etc., it’s just this vague inscrutable thing merely happening, and merely in Iran. No one is responsible, and it just is there. And thankfully, it’s only IN Iran! Wouldn’t it be worse if that were spilling over into other places and things?

There are countless stronger examples, but this one is current and consistent and you can hear it in any random news broadcast, and it tells a huge lie in a tiny word every time.

Side note update for you, thanks to the Sacklers and the hell on earth they visited on us via profiteering lying about the opiates they invented, now there’s actually a gigantic back swing and it’s WAY more difficult to be prescribed strong pain relief, even when badly needed. Count on us to always come up with the worst possible response to a problem, I guess.

This doesn’t contradict what I’m saying, but maybe you didn’t intend to. The person I knew well and was describing would be described even worse by his own teachers - in fact his teachers insisted he go into classes catering to kids with severe learning disabilities. Which he was beaten for at home, and caused him huge unanswered shame.

But again, he could basically instantly understand the motivations of a room full of strangers, it was uncanny. Even other people I know who are good at it, not like this. And he would get bored and put people in weird situations to entertain himself, using this power. They never saw what he was doing.

Trump is fucking horrible at almost everything. He’s not quite dumb though, really clearly not. He’s unable and unwilling to direct his mind toward anything other than a specific narrow set of goals, and this person I knew was exactly that way.

But pursuit of one of his goals? He’d fucking get there. He would get there. And it was sometimes horrifying, and often base and mean, but it could just be a lot of egregious flattery too - whatever the situation called for. Scary stuff.

Ah, thank you, beautiful. So much of that passage amounts to “for real y’all, you could tell by looking, this dude was a jerk” lol

The statue’s features “tell” that the sculptor read those “passions” (the cold sneer, etc.) in the monarch’s face, his general mood and way of treating the world. And in doing, those passions survive and appear in this statue.

I don’t really understand “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”.

I’ve known someone else a bit like this, where he seemed “stupid” - found it very difficult to learn traditional academic subjects - but he was top notch at manipulation, and had an uncanny knack for guessing what people wanted in any given scenario.

You can’t be truly dumb and successfully manipulate the majority of people you meet. Put another way, people who are as limited as he seems - find it very difficult to understand people and get what they want/need from them.

In my experience, economists are not serious people and generally do not address serious concerns.

I acknowledge there are some exceptions.

I never felt attacked by you. I’ve got a family of folks I’m trying to bring along with me here, wish us luck!

[Edit: and cheers, torch the slaughterhouses, I sincerely wish you and your efforts well - material realities force change to a degree that can never be matched by the very “choose your own ethics” (AKA commitment-level) moralizing and minor harm reduction to which I’m annoyingly subscribed]

I get it. In the end it’s a half measure that allows lots of suffering and may keep folks comfortable with that in a way that a stricter commitment doesn’t risk.

For me it kind of “unlocked” a focus toward harm reduction rather than promises to try hard someday, and allowed us to begin on the path. I’m not sure where we will stop, but we weren’t on it before.

This mentality has me and my family eating dramatically less meat than we otherwise would and I hope to continue that slide, I think it’s a great strategy most folks who want to try can use to get started.

Huh? I thought it was the baby from the hokey 90s show Dinosaurs, all grown up??

It’s fine, we’re just over here producing the same absurdities that (much) later result in clumsy-sounding stories like “and then the question became, to whom goes the bigger portion of the baby being split? jk what does the posing and response to the question itself reveal? for fucks sake how bad does this have to be, to stir us or anyone to do differently?”

I guess I added the bit on at the end.