I started my career with Visual Basic (3!) and I appreciated the loose typing because it meant I could get going and actually have something running quickly as a newbie. A few years later I switched to C# and saw how an entire class of errors disappeared because of the strong typing. Both have their place, depending on the skill level of the coder and the needs of the application.

I was just in a literal CVS an hour ago and they have a sign on the receipt printer that says “please don’t grab receipt until it is done printing.” It’s like, shouldn’t the fact that you had to write a sign like that be an indicator that you’re printing out too much shit?

I used to work for an organization in Atlanta that was similar to Habitat for Humanity but smaller. Our mission was to build and rehab housing for homeless people. Ironically, our typical project involved buying an “abandoned” house that was actually occupied by a large number of squatters. The first step was us carpenters going in with shovels and axes and whatnot and rousting everybody out. We would then do an absurdly overpriced renovation on a property that would have been cheaper to tear down and rebuild from scratch, and then the house would be sold to a single family that was relatively well-off enough to afford a mortgage. I was too young to realized it at the time, but I think the whole thing was just a charity scam being run by the CEO.

That’s what happened to Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Cool concept but laughably unsupported by basic Physics. Niven had to write a sequel not because anybody wanted to see more of his characters but because he was tired of readers telling him what a moron he was.

The Integral Trees was a way better concept and much better thought out.

I was checking out the online reviews of my dad’s gastroenterologist the other day. The reviews all contained em-dashes although it was obvious just from the content that they were AI-generated. Dude is full of shit, ironically enough.

HOA’s don’t allow watching Friends? I thought HOAs were bad.

It’s funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There’s no compiler that ensures that a method’s name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable’s name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says “you shouldn’t use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading”. And this is hardly academic: I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about “self-documenting” code.

There are no comments in the code

At my last job, I was assigned to a project being run by a straight-out-of-college developer who felt that not only were comments unnecessary, they were actually a “code smell”, a sign of professional incompetence on the part of whoever added them. It’s an insane philosophy that could only appeal to people who have never had to take over an old codebase.

I’m squishing your head!

Overrated. ON ERROR RESUME was much more fun.

Back when I still rode airplanes, I used to never shut my notebook off except when I was about to leave for a flight. Then I had the pleasure of watching Windows install 957 updates while the cab was honking outside.

I remember Macintosh computers from circa 1990. Even then Apple loved to just remove buttons because they hate buttons. Because it was so perfectly intuitive to drag a disc icon over to the fucking trash can icon in order to eject the floppy disc, they didn’t have a physical eject button for the floppy drive. Helpfully, they instead put the power button right where a floppy drive eject button should have been. So I was constantly turning the computer off whenever I wanted to eject a disc.

“Can’t find a better man.”

I’m a Cognitive Developmental Transportation Engineer … aka school bus driver.

My mom taught me growing up to deal with spiders like this. She proudly told me how her dad had taught her to do it. Now she’s nearly 90 and when she sees a spider she’s like KILL THAT FUCKIN THING!!!

My local Acme carried red bananas for a while. They are fucking delicious, taste more like a banana custard than a regular yellow banana. They’re also a bit smaller so less of a commitment to carbo-loading when you peel one. I wouldn’t mind at all if they became the new standard banana, even if it would kind of ruin Mario Kart.

We can’t accept drum and bass. We need jungle, I’m afraid.

“What is an Imagine Dragon, anyway?”
“Imagine Dragon deez nutz across your face.”

TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?