Sounds almost as irritating as “OK boomer”. Which I have to say is especially irritating to be on the receiving end of since I’m not a boomer.

This guy’s code once fired a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Probably not the same guy.

Job interviewer: “What’s the best sorting algorithm for {whatever}?”
Me: “The SORT BY clause in SQL.”

We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML

It’s funny, one of the modern UI glitches that I hate the most is when a long bit of text is just truncated with ellipses instead of the whole thing being shown and you have to hold the mouse over to get it in a tooltip, or shudder actually click on the thing. HTML is great at word-wrapping and allowing the whole UI to “flow” with variable heights and widths as necessary - and yet that is never allowed to happen in apps.

I used to work for Cisco but I can’t say what it’s like internally. Not because of an NDA but because I literally have no idea. I worked for a much smaller competitor of theirs that they acquired, obviously just to remove a competitor from the marketplace. We were all allowed to work remotely but given nothing at all to do for six months and then everybody (except the executives, of course) was laid off.

I spent a good fraction of my career taking over and trying to fix code bases that my company refused to scrap and replace outright because they didn’t want to admit their worthlessness. Complete rewrites would have taken maybe a tenth of the time I spent.

My favorite thing to encounter (which was nearly universal) was the phenomenon of a young programmer fresh out of college encountering SQL for the first time, deciding he hated it, and writing a huge mess of code to handle auto-generating the necessary SQL. I remember taking over one C# application that had classes named “AND.cs” and “OR.cs” which just took a String as a parameter and returned that String with " AND " and " OR " appended to it, respectively. In about an hour, I replaced three months of this guy’s work that had bottlenecked the project with like five SQL statements.

It’s insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.

I moved from Visual Basic (3 no less!) to C because I needed to optimize the performance of a software synthesis (like, sound synthesis) application I was developing at the time (mid-1990s). It boggles my mind to this day how much fucking work you had to do just to create a simple window in C. It instantly made clear why UIs at the time were so bad and I went back to Visual Basic for the UI with a compiled C DLL to do the heavy lifting.

There’s no excuse for why UIs are still so bad today.

Developmestuction!

capturing the rules as tests is a great way to make sure that rules remains true

Capturing the rules as documentation is also a great way to make sure that rules remain true.

Lol just kidding! Documentation … can you imagine?

That fucking alphabet grid where you try to type search terms with the four arrow keys is what always sends me back to reading books. Like, just doing that with a keyboard-type layout would be way better or even T9 - or maybe they could recycle old used Blackberrys for the purpose.

how dumb does one have to be to tailgate a bus?

Pretty fucking dumb but it’s a low bar. The only upside to tailgating a larger vehicle like a bus is that our stopping distance is a lot greater so the tailgater is less likely to slam into us.

Fun little Stalin fact: when the Bolsheviks first took over the Kremlin, food was a scarce commodity. Stalin faked being sick so he could have a whole chicken to himself every day.

I live in PA and I’m not holding my breath for this shit to ever be enforced. I’m a school bus driver and last year I had a local cop pass me when I was stopped with my red flashers on letting kids off the bus. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other - never even saw me.

I’m a school bus driver and many of my coworkers use their phones (talking, texting and even doom scrolling) while driving a bus - sometimes even when they have kids aboard. And these buses have internal cameras that are always recording! I don’t understand how they’re not fired or at least suspended for it, but I suppose the driver shortage has something to do with it.

I’m a school bus driver and the course material (and test questions) for the CDL state this explicitly. If someone is tailgating you, you slow down. Tailgaters are gonna tailgate no matter what, and slowing down means the damage will be less if they do happen to hit you. If that makes them mad tough tittie (the course material does not use “tough tittie” but you can tell they wanted to).

The great irony of people who tailgate school buses is that WE CAN’T EVEN FUCKING SEE YOU BACK THERE. Even in your fantasy world of the person in front of you feeling pressured and speeding up (which never ever actually happens), it can’t possibly happen if they don’t even know you’re there.

THEY BANNED A FUCKIN BEE

Weighing way too goddam much is also a cause of back (and knee) problems.

Shit, Anthony Bourdain had six-pack abs at age 61. You’re never too old to stop whining about life and start moving some weights around and stop eating so much shitty food.

Dude has an unlimited supply of ketamine. He probably is actually enjoying life most of the time, unfortunately.

he’s been selling the AI kool aid for so long that he actually believes his own bullshit

I worked for an Internet startup in the ‘90s and at one point we were sucking up to R. J. Reynolds’ venture capital division for more funding. This tobacco company had so much fucking money they had actually branched out into venture capitalism to do something with it. The VCs came to visit us one day; we were in a non-smoking office and these assholes spent the entire day literally chain-smoking in the meeting room. We had not much ventilation and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t see to the end of the hallway. I kept walking past the meeting room and loudly coughing and my bosses eventually sent me home.

We ended up not getting any money from them. The only good part of this story is that these guys have all surely died horrible deaths from cancer or emphysema by now. But in order to sell the lie that cigarettes aren’t harmful, these R. J. Reynolds executives had first convinced themselves of it. The human capacity for self-delusion is truly remarkable.