I think whip-its are a much more fun way of teaching that concept.

He has limits, though. I thought his abbreviated dishwasher video would be enough to convince my mother to stop using those stupid pods, but nope.

I’m with you. My undergraduate degree was in Physics 35 years ago and all I have left is vague impressions of very general concepts. I’m quite certain that I would be unable to do even the simplest derivative or integration at this point.

Do LLMs ignore the /s even?

Seriously, that would have to work better than those giant fans they’re building offshore.

Don’t forget about being able to build overpasses too low for buses to fit.

I do like the thought of Moses rolling in his grave over the fact that they eventually started building lower buses.

I meant to say commits and not merges, and yes he removed the comments before committing. It made no difference in long run because every new release broke all the accessibility stuff anyway. It’s amazing how little developers can be made to care about blind people - almost as little as managers. The only reason my company cared at all was they were facing million-dollar-a-month fines from the FCC.

I spent a year making my company’s iOS apps accessible (meaning usable for the blind and people with vision disabilities). I had to do a lot of weird shit either because of bugs in Apple’s VoiceOver technology or because of the strange way in which our code base was broken up into modules (some of which I did not have access to) and I would always put in comments explaining why I was doing what I was doing. The guy doing code review and merges would always just remove my comments (without any other changes) because he felt that not only were comments unnecessary but also they were a “code smell” indicating professional incompetence. I feel sorry for whoever had to deal with that stuff at a later point.

I’ve never had a manager that was even aware of the comments vs. no comments issue. If I ever had, I would have just told them that a lack of comments makes the original coder harder to replace.

lazy programmers

I don’t think they’re lazy, I think they’re not good writers. Not being able to write well is very common among programmers (not having to communicate with written language is one reason a lot of people go into coding) and in my experience the Venn diagrams for “not a good writer” and “thinks comments are unnecessary” overlap perfectly.

Why the kitana was a super-sword.

Kinda random, but: the first device capable of measuring the size of an object to a one millionth of an inch resolution was built in the 1840s. So this would have been old technology when Abe got his fax.

I frequently drive between Philadelphia and the DC area on I-95, and it’s like Bizarro Earth as far as lanes go: the slowest cars are always in the left-most lanes with people passing on the right at 25 mph or more over the limit. My favorite is people who get on the express lanes (which you pay extra to use) and then go 10 mph under the limit.

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.

And viagra.

It was the Saudis. Apparently, the Jewish Saudis.

Soundtrack for this cartoon.

I actually grew up next to the Cuyahoga in the '70s, and it’s mind-boggling how disgusting that river was. Used tires and rusted steel chemical barrels everywhere, and the surface covered with a sheen of oil or who knows what the fuck it was. The concept of a beautiful rivers edge was laughable back then, as the river was lined with various plants and factories with big drainage pipes jutting out over the water discharging … stuff. And this was about 30 miles from the part that actually caught fire (which was in Cleveland). I really don’t understand why that river wasn’t just on fire all the time.

My parents founded an organization that cleaned the river up (at least the part of it in our town) and turned it into a beautiful park and walking trail. I’m so proud of them for that, but sadly these victories are never permanent.

When I say “I’m not interested in politics”, what I mean is “I can’t bear to listen to another right-wing crank regurgitating the latest bullshit he’s read on Infowars”. Sometimes it means “I can’t bear to listen to my 100% white sister-in-law castigate me for not using the term ‘LatinX’”.

The books are great but they’re not really broken up into self-contained stories. It’s more like one incredibly long adventure and the books just end when they get to a certain length and then the story picks up in the next one. A series would be perfect for that. Only problem is that it would have to be heavily CGI.