Software developers are uniquely arrogant in their belief that they have a right to choose when the workers of entire industries or sometimes everyone in the world needs to re-train on the tools they use to do their jobs.

I’m a woodworker. Imagine if I walked into the shop one day to find my table saw replaced with one of those mutant sliding table European things because the manufacturer pushed an update. “We’ve replaced your tool with one that conforms to recently adopted industry norms, buzzwords and trendy design patterns we in the table saw industry have been peer pressuring each other into adopting. You may proceed to suckle upon our genitals in gratitude and worship.”

Meanwhile I’m losing money because the tool I rely on to run my business no longer functions how I was trained to use it. I have to tell my customers that their orders aren’t getting filled because I was visited by the saw fairy and instead of building their furniture for them I have to read manuals, learn how to safely use this thing, find where all the controls went, and then remake all the jigs and tooling I relied on for production and hopefully I can get back to doing actual work before they change it again according to their needs and not mine, on their schedule and not mine.

That’s what it’s like using software in the age of nightly updates or worse cloud-based solutions. You never know when your tools will change out from under you mid-project.

I’ve seen Gnome spiffed up to a level of polish I’d expect from an Apple commercial. I hate using it, but some folks get it looking nice.

I wouldn’t have guessed a beaver would sit on his tail like that. Like how did he move to get it under himself like that?

I haven’t been able to go back to Factorio after playing Satisfactory.

the fact the install media can’t provide a working desktop by itself is pathetic.

BeOS/Haiku?

Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

The crossfit down my local stroad* does that. On the one hand, I find it kind of funny that they’re paying a gym membership to run up and down the sidewalk next to a five lane highway, on the other I think it’s an advertisement tactic; used to be you’d see the whole “congregation” but now it seems they only make the women who forgot to wear sports bras to class go run on the sidewalk.

I haven’t flown in ten years, so…yeah.

It’s fun fucking with boomers by calling 24 years ago “the turn of the century.”

For smaller boats, you throw an anchor with your hand like this.

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

Aren’t there already? Surgeon General’s Warning: Do not drive a pregnant woman under the influence blah blah blah

No, APT is the past 20 years.

I spent enough time in aviation to know how much drilling it actually takes to teach people emergency procedures. If it’s different than what they usually do, it takes hours of practice. Even something as simple as finding and pulling a different door latch. If you’re stressed, even as stressed as “the doors won’t open the way I’m used to them otherwise everything is okay” your brain will just fail to pivot to the alternate procedures.

Cars got so simple to use in the 90’s. Sure they were simpler machines in the 60’s but fuel injection eliminated chokes and other carburetor issues, automatic transmissions became ubiquitous, children can handle vehicles of this complexity. And now we’re making them more complicated for no actual reason, with electric door latches with manual backups and such, and it’s causing problems.

At least one door should open via a mechanical key and mechanical handle from the outside, and I firmly believe the internal door handles should all function mechanically as well. There shouldn’t be “usually you use a button but in an emergency this thing that looks like a bit of trim is the actual mechanical handle” that shouldn’t be allowable by code.

Yeah Tom Scott did one of his linguistics videos about that, he had a word for it but some questions aren’t really questions they’re basically just rituals, though rephrased a different way makes them genuine questions, and when you have major dialects of the “same” language like British and American English, we use different ones. “Are you alright?” is basically a noise of greeting in Britain and an expression of genuine concern in America, while “How are you?” is the reverse.

You want to make them stop and process, answer it with “I can still walk, how about you?”

Rich Evans once said of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “Bugs Bunny gave Eddie Valiant the spare tire (instead of a spare parachute) because Mickey Mouse would never do anything funny.”

Gender Gending Rodriguez.