Don’t worry, they will figure out that without humans releasing gasses they have no purpose, so they will cull most of the human population but keep just enough to justify their existence to manage it.

Unfortunately this statement also applies to the 1%. And the “just enough” will get smaller and smaller as AI and automation replace humans.

Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!

c-suite

CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.

giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases

Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.

Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.

How is a database a trick?

The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).

Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.

As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.

Is BeOS still floating around?

They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.

/s just in case.

They get taken over by sales & marketing types

Like Steve Jobs lol.

Many places I worked the recent college grads were paid as much as (or more than) the senior developers, so this strategy didn’t work. They still did it, though.

Years ago I got a copy of MSDN which had apparently been put together by developers who all had giant monitors. On a normal laptop screen none of the text wrapped properly so every article had a horizontal scrollbar which you had to work left and right to read every fucking line. I eventually had to start copying the contents into a Notepad instance just to be able to read the damn things normally.

This is why I think developers should always have to work on 10-year-old laptops with 800x600 screens.

I don’t understand why they don’t just put “My” on it: MyMail, MyOutlook etc.

I solved this dilemma by quitting and becoming a school bus driver. Now I only have to worry about middle-schoolers threatening to shoot me.

Makes sense. Human beings don’t actually need proteins or fats.

There’s something I don’t understand that maybe other unicycle riders can explain to me. I can ride a unicycle and I can even juggle while riding one, but I cannot go more than 200 feet or so before my thighs completely burn out and I fall over. How do people use these things as actual forms of transportation?

“Special Envoy Carrot Top” has a nice ring to it.

Specifically, Columbus was the first transatlantic slaver - although he went in the nontraditional West-to-East direction. And was imprisoned by Queen Isabel for that shit.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about WebOS but I never got the chance to try it out.

I’m a mobile developer and back around 2011 I was hoping like hell that Windows Phone would make it big. When you look at Xcode (for iOS), Eclipse (for Android and Blackberry) and MS Visual Studio (for Windows Mobile and Windows Phone) for mobile development, there was absolutely no comparison - it was Visual Studio all the fucking way. But Microsoft just decided to completely shit the bed and give up on mobile altogether. I still don’t get it.

Its like having to live two lives

Ha ha exactly. I’m a school bus driver IRL and I constantly have dreams where I drive my bus into a wall or a line of waiting children and stuff like that. It takes me a few minutes after I wake up some mornings to process that I haven’t actually lost my job (or gone to prison).

I dunno, I was a wake-and-baker for thirty years and never had dreams at all. I quit completely about three years ago and now I have vivid dreams all the time. I actually don’t like this aspect of sobriety very much - the dreams aren’t nightmares or anything but they’re a lot more intense than I would like them to be.