Semi-Hemi-Demigod

I’m less concerned with them being effective and more concerned they’ll fuck up and kick off Kessler Syndrome

I don’t have any resources but my Volvo has a long, low hood and a heavily padded engine cover

We can’t have pop-up headlights because of pedestrian safety, but you can buy a 5,000 pound vehicle that does 0-60 in three seconds and has a hood level with most people’s heads because that’s totally safe for pedestrians.

You know what, being a dev myself that’s something I’ll try as a hobby project. We’ll see how it work out.

That’s what heroes do

Managers realized that the nerds’ autism could be exploited for profit

I could see it being useful if it was an accessory to your phone. Not having to dig my phone out of my pocket to take a picture of something to look it up, or having a push-to-talk badge or pendant would make it more convenient, especially for folks like me who don’t wear watches. And with Bluetooth it would have decent battery life.

But the damn thing can’t even set a timer.

Yeah, you tend to learn from those sort of mistakes

Apple has a ton of engineering experience with hinges from their laptop days, and even the old lampshade-style iMac.

Did the union buster bluster buffalo the buffalo Buffalo buffalo?

It’s a way to cut headcount without doing layoffs. It’s usually followed one or two quarters later by an actual layoff.

I remember when commercial breaks were the time when you went to the bathroom/got snacks and then ran back and jumped over the couch to get back before the show started again.

But most ads don’t work on a conscious level. They’re there to make whatever is being advertised seem normal and good, like birds singing in the trees, background noise you associate with good feelings. The point isn’t to get people to engage rationally. The point is to elicit positive emotions and associate them with a brand.

I don’t think I’m going to ever buy a car made after 2020. Maybe earlier. None of the new features really appeal to me, and there are a lot of things like this that actively turn me off from wanting a new car.

If they could just give me an electric version of a 1985 VW Golf I’d be happy as a clam. But they want to put me in some lumpy, heavy, clumsy CUV with tracking technology and all the touchscreens and I don’t like it.

I love how microchips look like really well-organized Factorio maps

Intermediate? Nah, junior. They’re cheaper after all.

But senior devs do a lot more than output code. Sometimes - like Bill Atkinson’s famous -2000 line change to Quickdraw - their jobs involve a lot of complex logic and very little actual code output.

I think the reason they’re useful for writing code is that there’s a third party - the parser or compiler - that checks their work. I’ve used LLMs to write code as well, and it didn’t always get me something that worked but I was easily able to catch the error.

favored increasing revenue from ads instead of user experience and functionality

That just makes sense. Companies want to make their customers happy, and users aren’t Google’s customers

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

These higher-paid workers used to be promoted to senior management or even executive roles. But since people are working longer than ever, those roles aren’t available and people are getting stuck.

And then programs it to play a nice game of chess

I agree that the tech isn’t there, but unless we figure out some new physics it’s going to be impossible to put enough battery, computing power, and cooling capacity in something the size of sunglasses. So the tech for VR like we really want is at least 20 years away, if not more.