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.

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.

The Art of the Squeal

Ha ha “asks”.

there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%

Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.

I’m old enough to know that but I had virtually no interaction with computers until 1995 when I conceived the idea for my software (after reading Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker) and bought a PC and Visual Basic 3 to try and make it happen. I understand that Ataris and Amigas were pretty damn advanced for their time and I wonder what I could have done with them if I hadn’t been busy smoking dope and trying to be an Anthropologist.

Fun Creative Labs fact: the reason soundcards were popular in the '90s was that while most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers, the instrument sounds were created with a very cheap version of a synthesis technique known as FM (for frequency modulation) synthesis. The first synthesizers (e.g. the Moog) used analog circuits known as oscillators to produce sounds in the form of sin waves, square waves, triangle waves etc. These were really not able to mimic the complex waveforms generated by real instruments, even when multiple oscillators were combined into one sound - and in those days adding oscillators just increased the cost of the circuitry in a linear fashion. FM synthesis essentially used one oscillator to modulate (aka change the frequency of) another waveform-generating oscillator, and this produced much more complex waveform output that could (sometimes, at least) mimic real-world instruments. So much more realistic sounds could be produced by just doubling the number of oscillators in the circuitry, instead of multiplying the oscillators by 10 or 100 or whatever and still not achieving very much sonically.

When it came time to build sound generators into PC chips, FM synthesis was the natural technique since the manufacturers still wanted it to be as cheap as humanly possible, even though the circuits were now digital instead of analog. And so was born a generation of shitty, tinny-sounding PCs. Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM. Wavetable synthesis stored an actual digitally-sampled sound bank of a real instrument for each of the defined MIDI instruments, with added loop points for instruments (like flute, strings etc.) that needed to be able to produce an arbitrarily long note. By today’s standards, the AWE32 sounded nearly as bad as the cheap FM stuff, but at the time it was fucking mind-blowing. It even had the capacity to load in your own instrument samples to replace the built-in ones, although this was a bit of a pain in the ass to do.

At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, and while it worked well, the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful and I had a lot of trouble convincing people it was a worthwhile endeavor (my parents were particularly prone to eye-rolling when listening to the chintzy notes). My first AWE32 improved things massively - the problem was that nobody out in the world had one so it was impossible to target it with my application. I dealt with the problem by essentially giving up until years later when PCs because powerful enough to do wavetable synthesis entirely in code using just the processor itself. And nowadays I can run the stuff on a first-generation iPhone!

you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones

Pretty specific - I guess that closes the “get them high” loophole.

As Moses said, “fuck the Cowboys”.

nor his manservant, nor his maidservant

“Slaves” in the original, but of course we can’t allow any hint of three thousand year old shit not being strictly relevant any more.

If George Lucas had directed Spinal Tap, he would have already gone back and made Stonehenge orange.

No … Wingdings.

I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.

c-suite

CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.

giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases

Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.

Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.

How is a database a trick?

The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).

Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.

Nothing drives me as crazy as my phone constantly putting in “thus” instead of “this”. Nobody fucking ever uses the word “thus” in a text message.

Take WWII for instance, being neutral kind of says yeah we are cool with both sides.

Being literally surrounded by the Third Reich meant their choices were neutrality or actually joining up with Hitler, so they really can’t be criticized for choosing neutrality. They can be criticized for their actions during and after the war in helping the Nazi leaders squirrel away the wealth they stole from the Jews, something that was not necessary for a neutral nation to do.

I’d rather rip on Sweden which at least had some possibility of joining the Allies but instead supplied Germany with the high-quality iron ore they absolutely needed to keep their war machine running - the exact same thing they did in WWI. They also supplied Germany with much-needed ball bearings, but at least they sold them to the Allies as well.