theturtle

The last "fun" I had related to "work" computing may have been as long ago as 2000. Writing something cool or clever that I was proud to show off. By 2010 pretty much everything sucked and by 2015 I left IT entirely, no longer having any belief in the ability to make people's lives better. After I retired I was more willing to go back to just farting around with computers, but it's not the same. The jawbros and pseudo-suits took all the interest out of it.

This is somehow news? I was doing this 30 actual years ago.

Long before Google and Cloudflare stunk up the internet.

We have solar. It so happens the people next door also do, but we didn't know that when we started. In the almost two years since we added ours, no one has asked about them, possibly because our house is on the highest hill in the neighborhood and they are not easy to notice from anywhere surrounding. A side benefit it learning that Generac's support is as crappy as their hardware is good, but we refused to give any money to Tesla.

Fuck CAPTCHAs.

Sure, I have http://www.whatstupidshitdidhedotoday.com

Yeah. This. In 42 years in IT, i saw way too many situations where the last thing engineers need is a "team" or "management," or even worse, an outside "team leader," which usually resulted in the engineer's work or the team's work turning directly into cowshit. "Managers" want to talk about doing a thing; engineers want to actually do the thing, and both cannot happen simultaneously.

When they see results deteriorating, "managers" think the solution is "more management," which is never, ever the solution.

Didn't Carl Sagan (no stranger to selling books) pretty much stomp von Däniken's "theory" into cornmeal well before the turn of the century?

I searched for it, and did not find, the word "backhoe."

Big fail.

I have said for years, never ascribe to terrorism what can be attributed to some backhoe operator in Ashburn, Virginia.

We got a lotta backhoes in northern Virginia.

I actually used Hot Dog Stand as the inspiration for the color combination on a big internal website years ago. A "committee" was still flapping its gums about the color choice a week before a hard launch, so I simply... decided. A moderately-unpleasant but distinctive combination went into production. I figured that would finally force them to make an actual decision after nine months of meetings. I was wrong. Users seemed to like it OK, nobody complained, so it stayed.

For almost five years.

I actually finally TOLD them, "you never actually decided, so I picked the colors to be deliberately a little obnoxious so you would actually get off the pot and decide."

They were PISSED.

Not long after, I came up with a way for users (not committees of the managers of users, who usually know nothing) to choose their own preferred colors, and over 80% of them never used that feature and left the garish original I had pulled out of my butt in 1999, because now they were used to it.

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What else is there to do in Dayton?

No.

In other news, the army thinks someone in the Army could afford one of those bizarre things.

If you remember Atari "Battlezone," one of the targets for your tank looks remarkably like a Cybertruck.

In 1980.

I like making young bros' heads spin by explaining how little intrinsic value gold actually has.

They all start out with "if the shit comes down, gold will --" and I cut them off by saying "-- still have almost zero intrinsic value."

Can't eat it. Can't burn it. Can't really make shelter or a weapon out of it. Useful for tiny microcircuits, but that's not something the preppers will be doing in Montanam

"Well, it'll always be valuable, because people think --"

Aha, dudebro, now you're in the realm of "perceieved value." Whole different game in the end times...

Is there an "or else?" Apple can't afford to just pack up and leave a market larger than the USA. While Apple has no particular interest in or loyalty to the past, without the EU Apple wouldn't have lived into this century.

ICE is probably all "we want our stuff back!!!"

Short answer: yeah.

He probably gets a commission on every freeloading, unneeded, parasitic billionaire he recruits.

A million bucks? Should have made it a billion.

iPhoto still works just fine, and I refused to move. And I never have it or anything else be the only place an image exists. Storage is cheap.

Please do not turn NameCheap to shit, CVC. It was a lot of effort to make the move when NameSecure... turned to shit.

For decades, I've said

You don't go to college to get a job

You don't go to college to get a degree

You don't go to college to learn things

You go to college to LEARN HOW TO LEARN

If you do that, all the other things will come to you.

If you get out of college and have not learned how to learn, your "degree" is toilet paper.

Find a way that is costs trump money or prevents him from making money, and this stuff will vanish instantly.

I only read the headline, so my reaction was "they can't even drive cars right yet!!! Now AI is flying airplanes???"

The problem is, even as you ignore the internet, it goes on without you, and yet your ignoring it doesn't make you immune to it. I suppose you can ignore the Ohio River, but it keeps on flowing and every once in a while it'll rise and get your socks wet or your ceiling wet or just fucking kill you because you ignored the river levels.

It's border on science denial.

"I don't believe in science!"

Well, I don't believe in Tuesday, but it's pretty likely it'll show up tomorrow.

I forgot I enabled the cloud-to-butt plugin for Firefox.

Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML.

1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.

My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.

Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.

This is what blogging was, should be, and maybe will be again some day.

Fuck some companies and their opaque, convoluted and too-precious hiring processes.

This is how shitwords like "impactful" sneak into speech. Say it around me and I can see your credibility flow away like piss down your leg.

There's still a few more months of 2025 left.

In a couple years when he's dead, they are gonna be seriously fuk't.

Yay.