which would never happen because I have decency and morals

I would never be in the trump circle of corruption not only because I have decency and morals but also because trump’s type of person is just so fucking awful to be around on a personal level. Those people are just so boring and stupid in addition to being evil. If I knew I was going to have to spend the rest of my life only socializing with them – even if millions of dollars came along with it – I would just kill myself.

The shared open office thing is pretty much why I quit the profession. I don’t know what’s wrong with most people, but I need peace and fucking quiet in order to code effectively.

I used to work at the Comcast Center in Philly and I randomly ended up working on one of the higher floors where about three-quarters of all the offices were empty. I spent my days alone in a huge corner office that had a perfect view of a battleship. Somehow during this run Comcast was building a second office tower two blocks away because the Comcast Center was supposedly stuffed to the gills. The reality was that it was stuffed to the gills with Indian contractors down on the lower floors and the corporate leadership wanted them out.

At my first job as a programmer I had a full old-fashioned desk. Unfortunately it was in the server room which was kept at 58°F. The servers didn’t actually need to be at that temperature any more and I sure as fuck didn’t need to be at that temperature since I was writing desktop apps, but that was how that company had been doing things for literally decades. I had to wear a hat and motherfucking Oliver Twist fingerless gloves all day.

One of my cats vanished on New Year’s Eve one year, because my idiot friend who came to pick me up left the door open for ten minutes when he showed up. I was distraught and spent New Year’s Day driving around the neighborhood and calling for her. Turned out she was just hiding under the house and she came running back in that night and never went near the door ever again.

Emdashes are used by real humans who write, too.

I had actually never heard of emdashes until the whole AI thing and I just used hyphens instead. Now I’m embarrassed by my earlier ignorance and use emdashes – and people think I’m an AI. I do put spaces on each side of them which I think is incorrect, at least.

Bourgeoisie Meat Wagon

BMWs are great cars - as long as you buy ones that are at least 25 years old.

School bus transmissions have been like this for over 25 years. They’re all built with 6 gears but if you only want 5 gears (which is ironically is all most school districts actually want) they just disable 6th gear. It used to be that there was a little bit of missing hardware (which could be added later for a considerable price) but now it’s just disabled in software. In the skoolie community (people like me who buy used buses and convert them to motorhomes) you can get your software-disabled transmission upgraded to a six-speed for a few hundred bucks (dubious legality but who gives a fuck).

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the “hide the menus” concept as hard as I’ve always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

You didn’t even mention the ribbon lol.

100% Ballmer is yakked out on coke.

I started working as a professional programmer in the mid-90s when three-tiered design was all the rage: a data access layer, a business logic layer, and a presentation layer. It seems that nobody actually knew what “business logic” was even supposed to be, because I kept inheriting projects where all the middle tier did was hand data objects from the data layer to the UI. In theory this prevented the UI from being fundamentally bound to the data access, but all three layers were always written in Visual Basic which got kicked to the curb in a few years anyway.

Surely the only people buying tickets are teenagers who want to have sex in an empty theater?

Looks like an ornithopter cockpit lol. I liked the new Dune movies well enough, but there is (was) a lot of stuff in them that was kind of jarringly off. One thing was the ornithopter cockpit with the shitload of modern (our modern) switches that Duncan Idaho had to flip to get started, completely not fitting in at all with pretty much every other example of technology on display.

I recently saw the first movie again and it seems they had edited that part out, although maybe that was just for the TV version. They had also edited out the exchange where Duncan sees Paul on Arrakis for the first time and says “you look like you’ve put on some muscle.” “Really?” “No.” Just a terrible Marvel-style cheap laugh and the movie benefited from not having it there.

Some women like tiny faces. Don’t kink-shame.

I wonder if my old app circa 2000 would actually run on Linux/Wine. One of my projects for this winter is to install Linux on one of my Windows laptops. I’ll have to give the old app a try.

It was originally written as a C DLL utilized by a Visual Basic front end. The C DLL used the Win95 API, though, so it wouldn’t have worked on anything but Windows 95 and onwards. I subsequently ported the entire thing to C# but still using the same API to do the actual playing of the audio (I experimented with using DirectSound instead but that was really not appropriate for an application doing its own audio mixing). Now I’m working on an iOS version and I couldn’t give two fucks about Windows at this point.

As a programmer, it’s pretty wild how much of Windows under the hood has remained completely unchanged. I started writing software synthesizer applications back in the late '90s, using a part of the Win95 API called “winOutX”. The functions are kind of clunky to use but they allow you to programmatically create your own audio buffer arrays filled with whatever sounds you’re up to creating and dump them into the playback stream for seamless audio. This shit has remained in place, working pretty much perfectly, for the last 30 years. It was even there in WinCE/Windows Mobile, which allowed me to write software synthesis applications for early smartphones circa 2005. And it’s still all there today.

I like to rip on MS as much as the next guy (not least for them completely dropping the fucking ball as far as smartphones were concerned), but sometimes their incredibly long-term conservatism can work to your benefit.

“I’m serious as cancer when I say that TikTok is a cancer!”