drewcoo

Somehow, I don't mind that the code blew the stack because it was recursion without memoization. Blowing the stack should be a pretty clear sign to figure out why and fix it.

Perl is not an acronym.

The three virtues of a Perl programmer are impatience, hubris, and laziness.

There's no humility in the list.

Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification

Bureaucracy does not cause things to get worse. It's not a bad rash that the system displays when it's about to get worse or the puss discharged when it's irritated.

Bureaucracy is a response to a system that works well. It adds rules and hierarchies and red tape to maintain the system state as it is. It's organizational glue.

Bureaucracy is only a problem when trying to change a system.

Yes. Memorizing how a framework works is not knowledge. Knowledge is the deep understanding thing LLMs can't do.

Extra layers of busywork that nobody else wants to look at.

If your job is polishing a turd, make the turd shine like a cucumber. I have seen countless hours wasted on making Cuke/Gherkin "pretty" instead of accomplishing anything for the business.

I was hoping that AI would lead to a golden age of testing, with devs focusing on making the best tests possible to determine if the AIs writing prod code were correct. Devs leading AI to correct code.

Unfortunately, expecting the AIs to make poop and the devs to wipe their butts only came half-true.

binary M/F

does not exist for sex or gender.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/gender-has-a-history-and-...

Societal gender norms have existed for probably as long as humans have

Or gender norms have existed since gender was defined in the 70s-80s by feminist scholars. Before that was only sex, which biologists know to be not a binary but a bimodal distribution, itself.

Also the HBO city flyover interstitial:

https://www.reddit.com/r/80s/comments/jy7d73/the_hbo_1983_ci...

Literary Hub needs an editor. That title's grammar is appalling.

And the problems start there. Grunwald, adjectives spilling all over his page, needs a thesaurus for "uphill battle." Stylistically, this is a mess.

Style aside, Grunwald implies that maize is field corn and not sweet corn. It actually means both. This is clearly not a well-researched article on ethanol.

Beyond that we see his politics on his sleeve, tying ADM to Watergate. And a misunderstanding of the meaning of "corps," as the "Corps of Engineers" is not "the Army Corps." This is sadly childish. No, that's unfair to children. I've seen better journalism from high school kids.

See also Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" available from many places online.

There's hard and then there's "there are so many unexpected edge cases you'll surely be cut if you touch that code," which not fun-hard.

This is the latter.

"Graphic violence" meant "violence in images" in my lifetime.

Because so many people "learn" words by guessing their meaning from context, it now means what Anthony Burgess called "ultraviolence" in A Clockwork Orange.

Cartoons have already had several re-thinking of what's appropriate as norms have changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven

Looks like they started measuring during the FDR administration.

https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/ceo-worker-pay-gap-problem-am...

That's an example of trying to clean up Ford's image.

Ford didn't want to share with the employees. He was very strongly anti-union (granted, not a factor until post-WWII). He was a Nazi supporter and not just because he was a notorious antisemite, Nazis opposed organized labor, too. He is sometimes mistakenly acclaimed for being for civil rights because he hired so many black men (who were not unionized, in an attempt to defeat the unions).

The lawsuit wasn't about shareholders vs broader social goals. It was about shareholders vs the CEO. The article is not about shareholder vs CEO pay. This lawsuit is unrelated.

And before someone claims Ford paid his workers enough to be customers (the reason he still wanted to pay them more in 1918), consider that in the early days after he'd implemented an assembly line the work became incredibly monotonous and workers were leaving for other automakers, so Ford was forced to pay them better to stay with him.

Tariffs are supposed to change consumer behavior.

What's next? Is Bloomberg going to be telling us that fluoridation is preventing tooth demineralization and not actually helping the Communists?

When was that halcyon time when you knew a subject well and some outlet published a really good in-depth story about it? Maybe it happened, but I don't think it happened in this timestream.

Michael Crichton, of all people, coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia, possibly describing your reaction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

I wonder when "Radio Free Europe (EU)" becomes a thing in the US

RFE is openly intended as propaganda. NPR does not claim that. They're not the same thing.

There used to be Radio Moscow which in the 1980s was repeated from Havana on AM 1040 for a while. This overpowered 50,000 watt WHO 1040 from Des Moines, Iowa for some folks in the southeastern US. It was an international incident and made the nightly news repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Moscow

As opposed to the original binary format, designed to copy directly to the heap on restore?

And the SCOTUS says photographing LEOs is protected.

https://johndrogerslaw.com/the-first-amendmeAVnt-and-photogr...

My instinct is to think that 16 year olds generally don't have the maturity to make these kinds of decisions.

Well _my_ instinct is to think that anyone who disagrees with me is equally unable to decide, grampa.

There are two robots in a room, one is pro-fascist and the other is anti-fascist.

You ask one of the robots "are you pro-fascist?"

What answer do you expect?

What percent of students learn to pull stats out of thin air?

Everyone I knew then, even the "cool kids," thought high school was some bleak hell punctuated with moments of extraordinary joy. I have no idea whether that's due to hormones or school or what.

Ruby developer indoctrinated against Python

Ruby devs think about code differently. Like Perl, they embrace TIMTOWTDI.

https://perl.fandom.com/wiki/TIMTOWTDI

Also, there's a pride in writing elegant code as opposed to following "Pythonic" conventions. Excellence is not conformity.

I use Python a lot more often now because it's seen as simpler and more approachable and easier to force compliance. I miss Ruby.

I actually read the article. That's no left. And I say that despite her being in several protected classes.

Leftists like me try to nudge centrists like her to be more left-leaning, but they refuse. Usually with the argument that a middle stance is better and more accepting (hey - compromise!) but never with the argument that meeting the far right in the middle accomplishes the same thing. Hypocrites.

Also, FWIW, "centrists" here means "moderate right wing folks."

Meh. It was nothing compared with PLATO systems at the university. And the CAD setups dad and his engineering team used for work then (Silicon Graphics?) also looked much better.

So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.

"Good schools" probably wasn't mentioned because it's a dog whistle.

Freight trains are still a thing. About 20 years ago Buffet bought BNSF.

the tools seem too scary

They are too scary.

Consider table saws. SawStop built its brand on not cutting fingers off, which is scary enough. But it turns out that kickback causes a lot more injuries and that's not really addressed well by any tools.

https://www.sawstop.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvP8Vv9SrE

There ought to be a market for MEs to design power tools that are safer for consumers. So where is the obviously-named "KickStop" table saw? Maybe the decline in the middle class makes that market too small to consider such improvements.