Dagon @dagon@schelling.pt

2025. you go to a website. you see all the elements on the page pop-in, loading one by one. it's like the 90s again. your internet connection might be hundreds of megabits per second. the web designer is using a 4k video file as a looping background, and that somehow loads quickly compared to all the actual useful elements on the page. three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds. each checkbox and table has to initialize its own software stack of UI abstraction libraries and surveillance middleware

’Tis once again the season to hold this timeless holiday message close to our hearts.

Computer programming is what happens when you wish “I want to learn something new every day” on the monkey’s paw

PROGRAMMING TIP
avoid repeating the same 4 lines of code twice by writing 270 lines of beautiful, abstract, generic code

no no no *you* can't freely scan through the collected works of humanity, that right is reserved for the large language models.

Art.

Every time I do tech support for my family I get very angry about people who whine about lacking "tech literacy".

90% of the stuff I have to teach them is how to navigate manipulative software and dark patterns. This has nothing to do with tech, but with capitalism. Tech is not complicated, it is just made maximally confusing on purpose to remove agency.

Better tech ed won't fix this.

@lcamtuf

@eb "I never thought a sophisticated APT would backdoor *my* volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I got for free" sobs entire industry who voted for the "volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I get for free with no defense against sophisticated APTs" party

I understand that sending texts in meticulously capitalized and punctuated complete sentences makes me An Old and the thing is I am 100% fine with that.

A broken clock fixed by taping a working clock over it is a metaphor for every codebase you’ll encounter in your professional career as a software developer.

Concerns rising that using an "int" for the count of Trump indictments may have been a ploy for rollover to zero out his indictments entirely.

Annoying but true

One of the least plausible aspects of fantasy as a genre is that sorcerers NEVER seem to get bogged down in creating a new spell then spend the next three or four months muttering "I hate this, it's rubbish" under their breath.

Putting Dumbass Computer Programs in Charge of Important Decisions Poses Existential Risk to Humanity, Experts Warn

Ability to mimic human dialog a stupid reason to assume computers are people, say people who program computers

Things that will wipe out civilization:

50CE -- Barbarians

1350CE -- Plague

1950CE -- Nuclear war

2020CE -- Plague again

2023CE -- Fancy Autocorrect

Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away.

SRE: Can I use AWS?

Genie: There are 4 rules.