ugh

as someone who is currently fighting this kind of problem in our $work SaaS product: a huge part of it is that managing a "user-visible" error message alongside your "internal" error message (which may contain internal information) is difficult, and the 'easy' thing is to just do this. and god help you if you want to localize the error message, or if the thing supports different levels of access control to a single object and you can have an error in the "secret" bit that propagates to the non-secret bit: "hey, why does this error message say that 'SECRET LAYOFF PLANS.txt' wasn't found...?"

Now I'm sitting here thinking about liminal environments and how, a lot of the time, they're just regular artificial environments without people in them, and I'm forced to reflect that maybe a liminal environment with a lot of people in it is worse. Yesterday I was in the world's loudest supermarket and I felt like it matched my idea of hell. It made me start thinking of the tunnels from Us. And while i was walking around thinking, 'Jesus this place is so busy and noisy, I hate it', I bet the vast majority of other occupants were thinking the same thing, and they saw me as being part of the Busyness Problem, but we were all compelled to be there anyway like ants in an ant trap because WE MUST HAVE OUR GROCERIES.

there’s a scene in The Dispossessed where Shevek gets overwhelmed and nauseous in a marketplace on the capitalist planet—all these objects, all these people, so many different materials all wrapped in other materials and transported from who knows where, all piled up with no relationship to anyone or anything else around them, save the notion of “ownership.” A completely artificial environment. But he’s the weird one out because he doesn’t get it

Now I'm sitting here thinking about liminal environments and how, a lot of the time, they're just regular artificial environments without people in them, and I'm forced to reflect that maybe a liminal environment with a lot of people in it is worse. Yesterday I was in the world's loudest supermarket and I felt like it matched my idea of hell. It made me start thinking of the tunnels from Us. And while i was walking around thinking, 'Jesus this place is so busy and noisy, I hate it', I bet the vast majority of other occupants were thinking the same thing, and they saw me as being part of the Busyness Problem, but we were all compelled to be there anyway like ants in an ant trap because WE MUST HAVE OUR GROCERIES.