It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.

For that matter, even the Clinton era was not what I thought it was at the time – although it was certainly much better than the current era.

FWIW the trumpers that I know don’t believe that any of the things you mentioned are true. They think all that stuff is a smear campaign by liberals who hate such an effective conservative leader – that’s literally what “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is to them.

Somehow, the only exception to this is the “grab 'em by the pussy” comment which they do believe he said, but they believe he was joking and said it just to piss off us snowflakes.

I have a bunch of trumper coworkers who love to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. For fun I’ve been agreeing with them but telling them Trump Derangement Syndrome means that Trump is deranged. They get quite apoplectic.

The best my local wing place can do is to deep fry the wings, refrigerate the ones that don’t get sold and eaten, and deep fry them again the next day. Not literally the best way to have wings.

American homes…cheap AF.

One reason for this, believe it or not, is slavery. One very under-appreciated aspect of cotton plantations is that cotton (in the days before artificial fertilizers) very quickly exhausted the soil of the American South, leaving behind land that was mostly only suitable for growing pine trees. This left pine wood as a cheap and plentiful resource for building houses. Southern US pine is now so plentiful that it’s even the source of most of the chopsticks in China.

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.