I remember some years ago when a version of MSDN came out that had clearly been developed entirely on enormously wide monitors. Despite word-wrapping being a problem that the programming world solved many decades ago, this version of MSDN had completely fucked it up and you could only read it on a normal laptop screen by scrolling left and right with the horizontal scroll bar for every line. I spent months copying every article I needed to read into Notepad.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.

the omnipresent Qt

So weird. I spent more than two years of my career working on a Qt app (not by choice) but I’ve never met another human being who has ever even heard of Qt. Nothing else has ever made me so certain that I’m clinically insane.

My favorite thing about Qt was the use of C++ for the back end and Javascript for the UI layer. It lets companies take advantage of the, uh, four people in the world who are good with both languages.

Technically, their profession is “Saudi ball-cleaner”.

I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB’s On Error Resume Next “solution” to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn’t actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.

In graduate school I used to go out drinking six nights a week, the kind of thing that would start at 5 pm and end at 2 or 3 in the morning at somebody’s house doing bong hits. Thirty years later, I would choose waterboarding before I put myself through that again.

I have a 76 year old coworker who does 18 mile runs. He doesn’t do marathons because he gets too bored. I console myself with the fact that at least he looks like a pork chop that’s been forgotten in the fridge, but it’s not much of a consolation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuAAza_Yvps

Right next to the very thrilling samples of wood from each state!

Pronounced “da-RILL”, of course.

You know it’s absurd to believe in Bigfoot, right? It’s obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.

Found Grover Krantz’ lemmy account!

Fun fact: Krantz was the originator of the so-called “running man” endurance hunting theory, but he was better-known as a firm believer in the existence of Bigfoot. Also, his skeleton (and that of his favorite dog) are on display in the Smithsonian for some reason.

I agree with this. I’m nearing 60 and I feel like I should be over 100. I’ve done a lot of different things and had different careers in my life, lived in many different places with different sets of friends etc., not just doing the same thing day after day and living in the same place.

Also, no kids, although this point is kind of the opposite of the other point. I think when you focus on kids you watch their lives flash by; they’re in their twenties in no time and you’ve lost that many years yourself.

I’m gonna go patent Marxism lol. Maybe I’ll patent irony at the same time.

I mean, it’s bad coming from actual human beings involved in the funeral home business because you know that they absolutely do not really give a fuck in the slightest (not something I really hold against them because they have to be like that for their own sanity). But coming from AI is just next level awful.

I’m so thankful that I got to retire from the programming profession before this AI shit took over (although I did get to spend a couple of decades burdened by junior developers, which is basically the same thing). If I were still in the shit, I would use LLMs for their proper purpose: proving to management that I’m using AI.

My dad died last November and when I called the funeral home we’d picked out to come pick up his body, the answering service was fucking AI. It had a weird non-specific accent with strange background noises going on, and when it repeated my father’s name back for confirmation, it said “Robert common name R-O-B-E-R-T, Smith common name S-M-I-T-H.” I was like “WTF? Common name?” I’m still made at myself for not telling them to go fuck themselves and using a different funeral home. For bonus points, the funeral home owner (with the same last name as one of the characters in The Sopranos) kept cracking jokes when we met with him, and then he ghosted me for two weeks and finally delivered the urn with the ashes in it at 8 pm the night before the interment ceremony, leaving them on my porch and splitting before I could talk to him.

But the fucking AI thing was the worst. I keep replaying the “condolences” it offered in my head.

How can you afford to own your own island but not afford a suit that fits?

“If I told you once, Chris, I told you a thousand times: slaves go in the other direction.”

“Definitely don’t try to blow up our data centers or our Amazon shipping facilities! That would be very bad for us!”