Back when I was in college I took a computer engineering class around 2010 I think with a professor who had done CPU design at one of the big chip manufacturers. He had a story about how no human knows how they work anymore because they’ll do the designs, then feed them through some optimization algorithm thing before the fabrication. Then when they would evaluate the chip they’d find that it was behaving in completely unexpected ways due to the optimization finding crazy efficient but unintuitive (to a human) ways of performing different operations.

I wish I could remember the details of what he talked about better, but that was a long time ago.

Your comment made me curious, so I tracked it down. The “comic” was used with an article on differential privacy written by a publication called “ad exchanger” and the ad symbol on the outfit is their logo.

If you’re not already familiar, the owner of the DNA lounge is Jamie Zawinski.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.

Doesn’t have my favorite classic, I’ll have to add it later.

There are a couple that come to mind.

Definitely the worst, a C# .net mvc application with multiple controllers that were 10s of thousands of lines long. I ran sonarqube on this at one point and it reported over 70% code duplication.

This code base actively ignored features in the framework that would have made things easier and instead opted to do things in ways that were both worse, and harder to do. For example, all SQL queries were done using antiquated methods that, as an added benefit, also made them all injectable.

Reading the code itself was like looking at old school PHP, but c#. I know that statement probably doesn’t make sense, but neither did the code.

Lastly, there was no auth on any of the endpoints. None. There was a login, but you could supply whatever data you wanted on any call and the system would just accept it.

At the time I was running an internal penetration test team and this app was from a recent acquisition. After two weeks I had to tell my team to stop testing so we could just write up what we had already and schedule another test a couple months down the line.

I once saw an application that would encrypt (not hash, encrypt) passwords but then when a user was logging in, they’d encrypt the password candidate and then compare the cipher texts to see if they were the same. This was using 3des, so no IV.

I just recently joined a company that offers two options for operating systems, Mac or Linux. Windows is explicitly not allowed. Seeing that in my onboarding paperwork was like walking into a warm sunny meadow.

There’s a great interview somewhere with the writers of one of these shows talking about how they knew this was shit and they had unofficial competitions with other shows to constantly one up each other on the stupidity.

ArnoldC is still my favorite of these :D https://lhartikk.github.io/ArnoldC/

I asked a buddy that works at Amazon about the outage and he pointed me to this article.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/

I know quite a few people who currently work there and pretty much all of them are trying to leave.

Hol up, DS is now old enough to be considered retro‽

Why does my back hurt so much? Unrelated I’m sure.

A person I know (and don’t particularly like) created a start up on this idea a couple of years ago already. It’s creepy AF.

Actually yeah, that sounds rad af

The design and building of authorization policy systems. And crypto (as in cryptography as the word originally meant) but that one tends to be slightly more common.

A buddy of mine and I used to play this game where one of us tried to think of an absurd metal concept and the other tried to find a band that actually fit that description. The game ended the day that the challenge was Maori folk metal and we discovered the band Alien Weaponry. At that point we pretty much decided that there must exist a rule similar to the internet’s rule 42 along the lines of “if there’s a genre of music, there exists a metal subgenre influenced by it.”

I was openly an atheist in highschool (early 2000s). Death threats weren’t sent, they were spoken to my face

It’s a huge problem in any industry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal

Sometimes it isn’t even media literacy. I’ve known several nuero divergent people over the years who can have a hard time understanding sarcasm in person unless the person being sarcastic is really over doing it. They have no chance differentiating sarcastic and serious if it’s written.

I think I had to step away for a few minutes after that

It’s pretty different from the other games listed so far, but I’ll toss it a recommendation for Oxenfree. At least for me, that game did oppressive creepy atmosphere better than just about any other I’ve played. When it first came out we were dealing with a massive heatwave and I would be shivering while playing it in a 100f+ apartment.

An older one I always really like as well was the very first F.E.A.R. game.