Maybe they asked Quora if it was legal.

In all seriousness, though, I don’t get that site’s popularity. I only ever visit Quora by accident (because Google ranks it highly) and it’s basically always garbage answers. And speaking as a developer, the UI/UX causes my eyes to roll back in my head and say, “REDRUM” in a demonic voice. It’s hard to even tell where the answer is because there’s so much superfluous shit on the page.

Yet another example of leveraged buyouts being bad and dumb. The “risk” may be technically on the company you’re buying’s books but it’s really on the employees who actually face the real consequences of the bet failing.

I obviously got it. But not everyone appreciates high culture.

Are there shared whitelists? It seems like something that isn’t really practical without them. I’m a web developer who has never served one ad but the front-end tools now basically export all JavaScript. You’d probably just get a blank page on any site made recently that’s more complex than a portfolio/resume page.

GitHub owner Microsoft would never engage in IP theft of source code. They leave that to OpenAI and then rebrand it as GitHub Copilot.

Someday, we’ll have the technology to generate an image of a centaur with 4 boobs without using more energy than a small hospital. Very exciting stuff.

Spice Rat and Sugar Ghost was one of my favorite Hannah-Barbera cartoons.

This isn’t about internet. This is about landline telephone service and being able to call 911. For those that don’t remember, landline phones work even when the power is out. No big deal if you have a cell phone and service. Very big deal if you live in a mountainous region where you rely on WiFi at home due to bad phone signal and would have to get in a car to drive somewhere with service to get emergency help or, say, report a forest fire caused by power lines snapping.

In the landline era, AT&T agreed to be the provider of last resort and they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got something in return. And even if “superior” technology exists, it’s not superior for “last resort” situations. One day, maybe we’ll all have satellite internet as a fallback on our mobile devices and landlines really will be obsolete. But that day isn’t today.

On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.

A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.

This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.

They already have Larry Summers, the laziest has-been “economist” on Earth. Sam Altman is similarly a charismatic fraud who continuously fails up. I don’t know anything about Paul Nakasone but given his NSA connections, this might be the worst board in history.

Elon Musk trying to be “edgy” and just coming off like the most divorced man on Earth is pretty funny. I’m still not using Vichy Twitter but it is funny watching a grown ass, 52 year-old man try to be an edgelord.

It’s not just America having an election this year. India just had theirs and it’s the biggest election on Earth.

I did twice a week when I was management: once at the start of a sprint, once on the first Friday where we only identified blockers, and once the following Wednesday where we talked about what can ship and be ready for QA.

The goal was to have a release fully ready on Thursday so Friday could be for emergency bug fixes but most releases are fine. If everything is perfect, great! Everyone go have a three day weekend. If QA catches a bug or two, we fix it and then ship.

If a deadline is gonna slip, just tell me when you know. It’s not usually a big deal.

Personally, I was never great with agile projects. I get that it’s good for most and sort of used it when I was a CTO but as a solo developer, there are days when I’d rather eat a bowl of hair than write code and then some days, I’ll work all night because I got inspired to finish a whole feature.

I realize I’m probably an exception that maybe proves the rule but I loathed daily stand-ups. Most people probably need the structure. I was more of a “Give me a goal and a deadline and leave me alone, especially at 9am.” person. (Relatedly, I was also a terrible high school student and amazing at college. Give me a book and a paper to write and you’ll have your paper. If you have daily bullshit and participation points, I’ll do enough to pass but no more.)

He clearly doesn’t understand how office politics works. If I’m taking a Zoom call at the beach, I want my camera on so I can flex on everyone in the office or home in their pajamas. I hope the CEO joins the call and sees me in my shades so I can get promoted to VP of Staying Light and Keeping it Tight.

They must have some skills if they rose to the level of Boeing executive, right? They wouldn’t put a bunch of useless MBAs who don’t care about safety in charge of a critical aerospace company.

They really should make the Boeing executives be the first astronauts on this mission.

In fairness, that was a pretty solid era. It wasn’t peak tech but I’d be ok going back.

It was probably a mistake for society to advance beyond the era when computers weren’t super portable and phones were just “smartish.” Like that BlackBerry era where you could communicate and get news if you needed it but it was enough of a hassle that you usually just waited until you were at home or the office to get caught up.

If that data is really worth $500 million, Ticketmaster probably “hacked” itself. One last score before the DOJ breaks them up.

Molecular gastronomy.