It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.

For that matter, even the Clinton era was not what I thought it was at the time – although it was certainly much better than the current era.

My mother was born in the mid-1930s and from time to time she likes to talk about “the good ol’ days” of her childhood when people respected each other blah blah blah. I remind her of the horrific racism and she’s like “but I didn’t even know any black people!” lol.

Lol I found the only less competent people than the managers were the consultants they hired.

With one hilarious exception: at my first real programming gig I was left alone and I had created the sort of vastly overcomplicated, unmaintainable mess that newbie programmers always manage to create. My company brought in a highly-paid consultant who correctly identified the problem: me. Since I was a rock star, my managers laughed and sent the consultant packing and I was allowed to keep fucking things up for another year or so.

I had a boss once come to me with an article he had just read about how APIs were the next big thing in programming. He told me I should incorporate some APIs in our software and I told him I would research it. This was in 2010.

I interned at IBM in the late '80s at the TJ Watson research facility. I have no idea if that’s still around or if it’s still what it used to be, but at the time it was a pretty amazing place, filled with brilliant people doing stuff that may or may not have been directly related to the corporate bottom line. Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theory guy) had an office there. There was an unused scanning electron microscope parked in the hallway outside of our lab because there was nowhere else to put it. I learned to use CADCAM on enormous monitors; it was a blast to design something, send it electronically to the machine shop for fabrication and have it delivered on a cart the next day (sometimes the same day). I worked on a project repurposing these miniature electric punches that had been designed for ceramic green sheets (the way they built their mainframe cores back then) and then got to experiment creating a new hole-punching technique using pressurized fluids. They let you do whatever you felt like doing even if you were just an intern. There were no corporate idiots anywhere in sight there.

As far as I can tell, that part of IBM (the actual innovation) is gone.

FWIW the trumpers that I know don’t believe that any of the things you mentioned are true. They think all that stuff is a smear campaign by liberals who hate such an effective conservative leader – that’s literally what “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is to them.

Somehow, the only exception to this is the “grab 'em by the pussy” comment which they do believe he said, but they believe he was joking and said it just to piss off us snowflakes.

I have a bunch of trumper coworkers who love to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. For fun I’ve been agreeing with them but telling them Trump Derangement Syndrome means that Trump is deranged. They get quite apoplectic.

The best my local wing place can do is to deep fry the wings, refrigerate the ones that don’t get sold and eaten, and deep fry them again the next day. Not literally the best way to have wings.

American homes…cheap AF.

One reason for this, believe it or not, is slavery. One very under-appreciated aspect of cotton plantations is that cotton (in the days before artificial fertilizers) very quickly exhausted the soil of the American South, leaving behind land that was mostly only suitable for growing pine trees. This left pine wood as a cheap and plentiful resource for building houses. Southern US pine is now so plentiful that it’s even the source of most of the chopsticks in China.

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case “Notepad” was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely – hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn’t fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people’s computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named “Notepad” would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to “NotepadX” fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

another major tool in a designer’s workflow is testing with target users before release

Lol you should have seen this UX dude’s face when I suggested doing exactly this. It’s hard to imagine an actual live human being saying “users don’t know what they want” but that is exactly what he said. It should be no surprise that this company routinely produced one-star apps, and also no surprise that the company was a routine winner of the Worst Company of the Year contest.

“Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like a leopress above the Serengeti.” I spent most of my adult life thinking a leopress was a female leopard because of that fucking song.

I mean, you only need an n of 1 to prove that you shouldn’t drive a school bus behind a 747.

follows design and accessibility standards

Ah, this reminded me of another reason this dude hated me. One of my responsibilities with this gig was ensuring that the client’s mobile apps passed accessibility testing. Making an app accessible is tedious work and every time we released an update the accessibility would be broken again. I tried to get this dude to bake the accessibility requirements into the design documents themselves on the off chance that the other developers would actually read the documents (lol as if) and make accessibility work from the get-go. He wasn’t having it and couldn’t be convinced that it mattered if blind people could use the apps or not. I had to sic the client (who faced enormous fines for failed accessibility tests) on him to get him to do it.

I’ve only worked once with a UX person and all they did was order other people to produce design documents before any software was written. Like, he didn’t design anything himself and didn’t even critique others’ designs. He made over $300K and eventually left for a job on the west coast making twice as much. He stopped talking to me entirely after the client had me write a prototype TV guide-type app for Blackberry. I created it entirely myself and the client loved it and wanted it released to the public exactly as it was. UX guy insisted (client didn’t care at all) that all software needed a design document before any coding could take place, so he was forced to order somebody else to produce a design document for my app which already existed. He wouldn’t even look at me when we passed in the hall after this.

I assume that this is not actually what a UX person is supposed to be doing, but I have no idea what their real job is.

the grand alliance scheme demanded total conflict

The core reason that France and Russia entered into the alliance that so worried German military planners was that the Kaiser was a belligerent asshole. If he had simply not been such an asshole – or better yet if Bismarck had not put supreme military power in the hands of the German emperor in the first place – then the grand alliance scheme that was supposably responsible for the war would not have been there.

Even with that alliance in place, Germany’s perceived need to quickly stomp the shit out of France before turning on a slow-to-mobilize Russia in order to have any chance of winning – which was their main reason for wanting the war to start when it did and was why they backed Austria’s farcical ultimatum to Serbia – was proven to be ridiculously wrong by the events of the actual war. In actual fact, Germany was able keep France (with British troops thrown in for good measure no less) completely at bay while kicking the shit out of Russia for most of the war. Germany lost because of America’s entry into the war, and they weren’t even involved in the supposed “powder keg” that started it all.

I also saw Falling Water as a teen. I was in awe … of the fact that an artist could actually have the name “Lipchitz”.