I cahn’t believe you’ve done this.

It’s nice to see academia adapting (somewhat) to the work environment, even if it took a few decades.

For me, developing applications was a joy … but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.

Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it’s never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.

I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses’ heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.

i was about to say exactly that

*I

My body is a machine that transforms absurd requests from technically illiterate managers into overpriced bloatware.

I had a coworker choose RoR for a major project despite the fact that he didn’t know it, nobody on his team knew it, nobody at our company knew it, and nobody in the entire state knew it. It ended as one would expect, after three years and millions of dollars spent, with the only revenue it generated being $50K from the original client that had to be refunded to avoid a lawsuit.

I like saying “CHRIST-ee-en”. It really pisses them off although it obviously shouldn’t.

Every time someone tells me about the ten commandments, I ask them to name all ten. They can never name all ten. On the flip side, if somebody starts talking about UBI they can usually say what all three letters stand for.

I’m a school bus driver. Last year I had a cop blow past me at 40 mph in the opposite direction when I was stopped with my red lights flashing and stop sign out, about to let off a large number of kids who cross the road at that stop. If I hadn’t kept the door closed, they probably would have been hit. I glanced down at the cop as he passed and he was driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right handing holding his phone - he never saw my bus at all.

We now have the external cameras that auto-ticket cars that pass us when our red flashers are on, but I wish to fuck we’d had them last year to catch this guy.

do a proofread before adding the D

Always think twice before bringing the D.

Lol “credentials”. This was done directly on the server, which was kept always logged in with the admin account so anybody in the server room could access it. It was OK though, this was just a small company … just Reliance Electric, now part of Rockwell Automation.

And you thought “security through obscurity” was bad - this was “security through apathy”.

I remember my first day of my first professional programming job back in 1996. I had just learned SQL that morning (which I’d never even heard of before) and that afternoon I forgot to add a WHERE clause to a DELETE command. Good times …

Fortunately this was in production and not in any important environment like development or test.

Where is Visual Basic in this diagram? Does nobody enhance blurry license plate pics any more?

What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.

I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had “way more power than Obama” and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a “foundation” which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.

In Gates’ case, a lot of his “charity” involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying “fuck your patents” and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.

I ran into a similar situation many years ago, when I was trying to write a software synthesizer using Visual Basic (version 4 at the time). The big problem is that if you’re doing sample-by-sample processing of audio data in a loop (like doing pixel-by-pixel processing of images) and your chosen language’s compiler can’t compile to a native EXE or inline calls, then you end up suffering the performance hit of function calls that have to be made for each sample (or pixel). In many applications you’re not making a lot of function calls and the overall performance hit is negligible, but when you’re doing something where you’re making hundreds of thousands or even millions of calls per second, you’re screwed by the overhead of the function calls themselves - without there being any other sort of inefficiency going on.

In my case, I eventually offloaded the heavy sample processing to a compiled DLL I wrote in C, and I was able to keep using Visual Basic for what it did really well, which was quickly building a reliable Windows GUI.

I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.

Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).

I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.