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by chrismonsanto 3681 days ago
The effect of the joke is lessened when it is labeled as a joke, doubly so when every comment here copypastes the line saying it's a joke.

See also the latest reprinting of "A Modest Proposal," which kindly has "SATIRE -- DO NOT BELIEVE" in large caps on the front and back covers.
1 comments
HCIdivision17 3681 days ago
To be fair, the top comment here calls out Poe's Law. You can see this best by how "A Modest Proposal" was recieved: the anonymous author was villified and many powerful people were outraged. People were repulsed and offended and everything'd else by it.

One of my favorite Asimov quotes is "It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." It's a damn shame that it's helpful to put blaring giant signs that say SATIRE on it and ruin the joke a bit, but there's just a ton of people out there who just never really got up to speed on detecting it. Many - possibly most! - people really don't look that deeply into things and tend to take stuff at face value (or don't know that there is a deeper meaning to spot), no matter how outlandish.

All that as a mea culpa, as I read the OP's README and thought, "man, that seems like a bit of a mess... under what circumstances would you need to do that?" The answer is NO DO NOT DO THIS but I, lacking experience, kinda didn't get that right off the bat.

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chrismonsanto 3681 days ago
> To be fair, the top comment here calls out Poe's Law.

The top comment when I posted was a copypaste of the joke disclaimer. And the top reply to the top comment at the time of this posting is a copypaste of the joke disclaimer.

> Many - possibly most! - people really don't look that deeply into things and tend to take stuff at face value (or don't know that there is a deeper meaning to spot), no matter how outlandish.

If someone can't figure out why generating a CSS class for every (property, value) combination is funny, then I don't think an explanation will help. Maybe it will give those readers an A-ha! moment and a valuable life lesson, but it won't be funny for them.

> All that as a mea culpa, as I read the OP's README and thought, "man, that seems like a bit of a mess... under what circumstances would you need to do that?"

If you got rused then that's great. The joke did what it was supposed to do. What sucks is that people who instinctively click the comments first won't get that experience, because some killjoy had to post "IT'S A JOKE DON'T FALL FOR THIS."

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