Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.

Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.

So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.

References:

Spoiler

I suppose the real reason ties back to the capitalistic feeling of a lack of ownership in one’s work.

I have two friends who self-publish computer games and they have full time jobs in other fields because of code burnout.

@Jumpscare The db and ndb attributes are AttributeHandler objects, to my recollection, and it’s my understanding that using db in particular will automatically handle the database-serialization and synchronization for you. Which is why I feel like I’m forgetting something if move_to() invocation is what fixed the DI problem in question.

Ah, yes, using db handles the serialization, usually. Lists and Dicts are automatically serialized, as are Object references. Strings and Integers are not. You can also intentionally not serialize things by adding .deserialize() to the end of a db request. That last thing is what was being done on Dies Irae, which has been fixed.

@MisterBoring said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Jumpscare said in Re: Dies Irae:

I wanted to see how so many coders become cynical reactionaries

From my time in IT, I can assure you that coder burnout exists across the entire realm of coding, not just MUs.

Oh, I would never want to code as a profession. That sounds like it would suck all the fun out of it.

I suppose the real reason ties back to the capitalistic feeling of a lack of ownership in one’s work.

I wanted to see how so many coders become cynical reactionaries

From my time in IT, I can assure you that coder burnout exists across the entire realm of coding, not just MUs.

updating the database when you use the attribute handler

Using handlers is a topic that escapes a number of Evennia developers, including myself. My experience was that there wasn’t a clear enough tutorial on handlers back when I made Silent Heaven.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Having Jumpscare dress me down is making a lot of this clear as to why things didn’t work!

I wouldn’t take it as a dressing down. She’s just a very tired teacher reaching for her third bottle of whiskey with one hand, pinching the bridge of her nose with the other, and staring at an assignment from that one child…

I’ve been there.

I disagree with that characterization. I’m fairly new, myself. Silent Heaven is my first coding project ever. It was supposed to be a short project during the 2020 quarantine that I’d throw away once I inevitably broke it. I wanted to see how so many coders become cynical reactionaries who despise the players, so I could have a better respect for the stuff they have to go through.

In the 5 years since then, I haven’t displayed any contempt for mankind, so I’m thinking it might not be the coding that makes coders that way. So much for that sociological hypothesis.

@somasatori that is my point, though. It’s not upfront until AI starts really being asked about. In your own snip there, Catzilla is thinking you didn’t use AI based on the content of your previous posts. It’s not clear.

AI is a personal choice. You can use it or not. It’s just good to be clear about its use.

Fair enough, it definitely wasn’t my intention to mislead anyone with that. I thought that clarified it, but apparently not! My bad

AI is a personal choice. You can use it or not. It’s just good to be clear about its use.

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

Okay

Why did you lead off with this then?

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

If you want to use Claude the AI, good. If you learned a lot with your experiences using Claude the AI, good. Just be honest about it upfront. These tea sipping winkyface comments early in the thread land awkwardly when there was demonstrably a major problem with AI that had a major impact on everyone’s experience with the game.

Don’t wait for someone else to have to ask into it before you go “oh, yes, I did use AI.” Just be upfront, man.

I did say exactly that though, in my next comment below that:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:

@Tez I can’t speak of the AI part, especially since @somasatori is saying/implying they didn’t use AI code… but the rest is true.

I definitely did a lot, like a LOT in the beginning, because my exposure to Python was me screwing around with a Cyberpunk RED project so when Diablerie I was trying to scramble with the tools I had available. By the end of it, I was only using Claude to consult, but the mark had been made as it were.

Edit to clarify the tea-sipping-winky-face emoji post: This was generally a reaction to the accusation that has been funneled back to me after I left staff that the entire reason why the game failed is due to AI code, which I feel was a way to scapegoat poor or inappropriate behavior as well as a general unreadiness to be staff. Primarily here I was engaging with that as a joke, because, as some of the other stories in this thread will identify, there were some serious issues at Dies Irae that were not code-related.

this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

Okay

Why did you lead off with this then?

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.

If you want to use Claude the AI, good. If you learned a lot with your experiences using Claude the AI, good. Just be honest about it upfront. These tea sipping winkyface comments early in the thread land awkwardly when there was demonstrably a major problem with AI that had a major impact on everyone’s experience with the game.

Don’t wait for someone else to have to ask into it before you go “oh, yes, I did use AI.” Just be upfront, man.

However, isn’t Evennia’s memory model for ORM supposed to also handle updating the database when you use the attribute handler? I feel like I’m missing something as far as the “disconnect” in location is concerned. I haven’t touched Evennia stuff in a while, so likely I’m forgetting something too.

Having Jumpscare dress me down is making a lot of this clear as to why things didn’t work!

I wouldn’t take it as a dressing down. She’s just a very tired teacher reaching for her third bottle of whiskey with one hand, pinching the bridge of her nose with the other, and staring at an assignment from that one child…

I’ve been there.

@somasatori I’d probably do the same if I could. I’d much rather teleport than walk.

Also in my defense (something that always goes well in a R&R post), my familiarity with “bring a character to X location from Y location” was in Tiny where you use tel(%#). So when I was told we needed an OOC/IC/Hangouts command system, I said to myself “oh, surely there are teleport commands in Evennia” without actually looking at the manual for how characters are moved around the grid. Like, “oh yeah, of course you would make the system force a teleport command on this particular player to this particular location, that’s how MUSH works.”

Having Jumpscare dress me down is making a lot of this clear as to why things didn’t work! I appreciate her knowledge

The weirdest thing about this is that Evennia has a built-in method on objects called move_to(). It handles moving an object to another room. If you wanted to do more with movement, you could just extend that method.

I was using teleport() lmao

or rather I was using the build command ‘teleport’ as a function within the character movement files, to be more precise.

@Jumpscare said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

multiple deserialized calls to update self.db.location

I run a horror game, and that line is scarier than anything I’ve ever written.

I kind of need an ELI5 because I think I understand the scream-emoji worthy part, but I am not sure if I completely understand the nuance. Either way, WHY DESERIALIZED? (The all caps part is me going )

When you look at your character sheet, you now have that information in your head. The DM says you lost 3 HP. You update the information in you head and you record it on your character sheet. The information in your head is serialized with the information on your character sheet.

The DM says your character has successfully moved from the LA Streets to the Corner Bakery. You update that information in your head but you don’t update it on your character sheet. You tell the DM that you want to say hello to the baker. The DM looks at your sheet and says that there’s no baker on the LA Streets. The information in your head is deserialized with the information on your character sheet.

The weirdest thing about this is that Evennia has a built-in method on objects called move_to(). It handles moving an object to another room. If you wanted to do more with movement, you could just extend that method.

I kind of need an ELI5 because I think I understand the scream-emoji worthy part, but I am not sure if I completely understand the nuance. Either way, WHY DESERIALIZED? (The all caps part is me going )

Look, y’know, it’s just like… I sincerely didn’t know what I was doing at the time and was wondering how you would write to the same attribute multiple times since it just overwrites each time. And it’s not like I wanted to append, so

when people complain about the bugs related to AI code, this is sort of where it comes from, being honest. I hadn’t taken the time to figure it out and Claude said it would be fine

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

multiple deserialized calls to update self.db.location

I run a horror game, and that line is scarier than anything I’ve ever written.

I kind of need an ELI5 because I think I understand the scream-emoji worthy part, but I am not sure if I completely understand the nuance. Either way, WHY DESERIALIZED? (The all caps part is me going )

multiple deserialized calls to update self.db.location

I run a horror game, and that line is scarier than anything I’ve ever written.

… something to keep in mind for PyReach or Curseborne.

If someone sets up a WoD edition wars thread, I will offer my most garrulous, crusty opinions there.

Yeah all that Garou stuff is why I picked a Pumonca, and why I never bothered with PB. Solo cat needs no pack drama!

Shark life even better. Just eat fish and Formori.