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?
I could easily do it but my bladder has other plans.
I went the grocery store today and was very good about not buying any snack junk. On the way out I encountered those demons from the depths of hell known as “girl scouts”.
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”.
people just read to escape their terrible reality, and it literally does not matter what it is
I remember the good old days of reading the ingredients list of shampoo bottles while taking a shit.
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 love programming and I did it as a job from 1995 to 2019. Absolutely the only time I enjoyed it was when I was left completely by myself to work entirely alone – no managers, no designers, no junior developers, I did everything related to application production, deployment and maintenance completely by myself. These were also the only times I produced anything that was worth a shit and was actually used by people.
The dominant paradigm in software holds that it’s fundamentally a team sport that requires an absolutely rigid division of labor. I know that this is not so and that in very many cases software is more like golf: just you and a heavy bag of clubs and a fuck ton of rough and sand traps.
I started working as a professional programmer in 1995. From the outset, I was pitching to clients how a GUI (thanks, Visual Basic 3!) would be so much easier for their employees to use than a command prompt. I find it very interesting how command prompts are still around 30 years later. I’m way more amazed by the continued existence of vinyl LPs, however.
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.
My small company (~120 employees) got swallowed by a giant whale (rhymes with “Crisco”) of a company like this. Except that everybody in the original small company got laid off six months later, and we had no assets whatsoever except for the “talent”. Crisco even got stuck with the lease for our recently-renovated office and had to buy it out. Our C-suite got large stock awards when we were acquired but they all got dismissed, too. I have no fucking idea why it happened.
B’Thar has been hitting the b’ottle pretty hard. Demons should have abs.
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).
Blue Velvet was good, lots of fun weird shit but also a plot that moved along. It made me rent Eraserhead which in turn almost made me give up movies entirely.
Crows are complex, though. The ones that live around my house can often be found ganging up and chasing away the red-tailed hawks that like to snack on the squirrels. The squirrels repay the favor by chasing off the crows who come to eat the peanuts I leave out for them (and eating the peanuts themselves). One time the crows flew around above me making a godawful racket until I went to the back yard and freed a baby raccoon that had accidentally gone into the box trap I leave out for groundhogs; they immediately flew off as soon as I let the little guy out.