It’s funny, I’ve watched Honnold rip on that guy. He (Honnold) considered climbing buildings to be way easier than cliff climbing because it’s basically the same move over and over again. But now Honnold is doing the same shit.

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.

Free speech!

[with purchase of regular-priced speech]

I got banned for racism … for making fun of a non-existent race. And the whole point of my comment was to mock racism itself.

I’m scared as fuck of heights but once in a while I torment myself watching videos of Alex Honnold, a freak of a human being who likes to do shit like free soloing El Cap. Watching him do crazy shit is actually kind of soothing, except for one time when he finished a climb on a slope like what these goats are on. It was basically like steps about 1" deep and a foot high; nothing to grab onto, he just had to stay leaned slightly in to the wall to keep from falling off. And I guess hope no wind sprung up. Just terrifying.

any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator

One of the problems is that these “failures in autonomy” could include a failure to engage a tele-operator when one is needed.

I originally sold my app on Beyond.com (which was originally software.net). They took 10% which didn’t seem too bad. One day they contacted me about giving my app a “freebate” – basically the app was still $29.95 but buyers could fill out a form and send it in and eventually (like months later) get their $29.95 back. Per their data only about half of buyers ever bothered to do this so it was effectively a 50% off deal. Beyond.com was supposed to give me about $10 per copy sold instead of the normal $27 to cover the freebate and they would make $5 per copy instead of their normal $3.

I said OK and they featured my app on their front page and sales went up like 100X and I was of course pretty happy. The funny part was that their accounting system was all fucked up and I kept getting $27 per copy sold even though the freebate was still in place. I actually tried contacting them multiple times about this to get the situation corrected and I could never get through to anybody who had any clue about what was going on. Eventually they went bankrupt and shut down and years later I got one of those class-action settlement checks in the mail without any explanation of what it was for. Maybe sales of my app were even better than they were telling me, I dunno. I’ve never once met a person in the real world who has ever even heard of the app so that doesn’t seem very likely.

He does like to launch into racist rants, but sometimes you just gotta hold your nose and swallow.

It’s wild, I released a shareware music creation app for Windows back in 2000 and it was easy to get people to pay $29.95 for it. I now have a vastly superior iOS version and nobody’s willing to pay a dollar for it. It’s a very depressing situation for an independent developer.

I had my sewer line backing up into my basement a couple of months ago. My regular plumber was busy so I had to call in a company that I knew was an overpriced scam (“Dream Team” lol) but I had no choice since I had guests in the house for my father’s funeral. They came and of course they couldn’t clear the line and said they had to dig up and replace the whole thing. The guy had a special tablet that he showed me the three options and the prices on and it initially showed them all in dollars per month with “zero-interest financing”. I was like dude just show me the total cost. The three options were $17K, $22K and $36K total but the monthly payments actually decreased with increasing total price (naturally the payment option didn’t show how many total payments you would have to make).

Fortunately I called my regular plumber and he was so outraged at these motherfuckers that he came out that afternoon and cleared my line for me. Total cost $850.

I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with the movie Groundhog Day in which the main character relives Groundhog Day over and over again? I don’t think anybody used “groundhog day” as a synonym for “personal time loop” before the movie.

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.

My pet theory is that Musk was installed at Tesla by the Saudis (who apparently have a bit of money) to destroy the very idea of electric cars by putting out as bad and overpriced a product as possible. Despite his best efforts, people still want the goddamn things.

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.