In my opinion, the rightward correction has gotten even worse since the defunding. For a long time now they’ve run a graphic showing their corporate sponsors before each broadcast (Meta and oil companies often show up there). They love to say it’s “viewers like you” that make them possible, but I think the corporate sponsors are a lot more important. It’s been a very long time since the government funding has even been that big a chunk of their income.

I don’t watch PBS News Hour but my parents do and I have to listen to it from time to time. They characterized this issue as one of Grok creating “explicit” AI images and artificially generating pictures of real women (not “girls”) in “bathing suits”. Not exactly an accurate characterization of CSAM.

Escort carriers?

their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles

The companies I worked for just kept doing shit the same way they always had but renamed everything with terms borrowed from agile.

My favorite approach to team processes was to work entirely alone and do everything by myself.

At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.

I briefly wrote Blackberry apps circa 2010 (yes, I knew RIM was dying a quick death). The development process was insane: any module from the framework that you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by RIM servers every time you tried to compile your app and deploy it to a device, even if you had only made a one-line change to the code. On good days, this would make the compilation take 5-10 minutes; on bad days it would be upwards of an hour or never happen at all. Some wags had even set up a special website that would tell you whether the RIM servers were down or not (long gone now, of course). I got in the habit of making a large number of code changes before attempting to run and test stuff, which is obviously not the ideal way to do things but it certainly teaches you to be careful. It also make me think long and hard before including a new module into my code. As one example, for my GUI I needed to use trigonometry functions which were naturally (lol) part of one of the cryptography modules which took an especially long time to get signed. I ended up writing my own sin() function in Java just to avoid the hit of including that module.

The great part of this was that I always had a ready-made excuse whenever I felt like taking a long lunch or going shopping or going home early. “Sorry boss, the signing server is down” and I made damn sure they never knew about isthesigningserverdown.com. It also helped that it was Blackberry circa 2010 and it didn’t make a shit bit of difference whether I got the app done or not.

An organisation that harvests the organs of homeless called “Rivendell”?

Surely “Mordor” would be a better choice?

I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn’t have to do it all that often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don’t think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM’s servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you’d made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I’d like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard

Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).

I bought my house two years ago and it had been retrofitted with baseboard radiators. They covered up the lower receptacles in every outlet so you could only get a plug into the top one and then the wire ran over a hot radiator. Just mind-boggling that anybody could do that and not see a problem with it. Granted, the outlets were embedded in the cinderblock walls so it wasn’t an easy matter to move them up, but laziness kills.

For good measure, these plugs were not grounded and they all had the polarity reversed.

Everyone used to bitch about how Windows 95 was such an ugly interface, but it was actually built to be usable by people with vision problems, including color-blindness. Relying on color for your interface is certainly intuitive but isn’t useful for everyone.

My house has motion-activated floodlights with the switches inside the garage. It almost qualifies as a workout trying to figure out if they’re on or not.

I have a mouse with a scroll wheel. I just can’t comprehend why half the time the website scrolls in the opposite direction from what it’s supposed to do if I flick the wheel too quickly.

I hate the credit card terminals at TJ Maxx/Marshalls specifically because of this. They have noise and visual feedback when you tap but it’s always a few seconds late. As a programmer, that shit makes me want to track down whoever wrote it and slap them.

Some electricians install the receptacles upside-down if they’re switched.

That reminds me of Macs circa 1990. The disk drive had no eject button (because of course it was perfectly intuitive to drag the disk icon onto the fucking trash can icon to eject) but the computer’s power button was helpfully located right above the disk drive, so I was constantly powering off my computer whenever I just wanted to eject a disk.

the switches and plates aren’t lined up right

If that bugs you, don’t look at those screws. So close to perfectly lined up, but not quite.

We don’t have that in software engineering. And outside of critical software we don’t need it. When the audio fucks up in Teams and you have to leave and re-enter the meeting, people don’t die.

I had a co-worker who was writing remote control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Not exactly “critical software” but he ended up firing a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head.

Þufferin’ þuccotash!