GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.

I had it worse. I needed to book a hotel for a business trip, and they offered me two prices: Either take them cheaper, but you cannot cancel or get a refund, or you can spend a bit more, and cancel it up to one day before arrival for a “cancellation fee”, which amount was not disclosed at that moment.

I booked the latter one, and in the booking confirmation it said that the cancellation fee is exactly the same as the cost for the room!

The Mitochondrial Eve.

I was just using it. But the behavior/reaction to button presses showed me that a button was obviously connected to the wrong function.

I don’t know how to see a memory bug in an out of order elevator, but I once saw and reported a wiring error of a working elevator. It was an interesting talk at the reception desk, but as I could precisely describe what was wrong and the verifyable consequences, they took me seriously. And sent me a “Thank You” email later ;-)

One key point here is: While you actually can replace a bunch of junior developers with AI in some places, any replaced junior developer will never become a senior developer that cannot be replaced by the AI because he/she is basically experince on two legs.

So, corporations, don’t complain about the lack of experienced, senior personnal because YOU have been the main reason they don’t exist.

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

But that would miss out the large amount of government control over the masses! Think of the kids, not of your rights being trampled on! /s

Counter-Argument: Each camera in a bedroom can be free entertainment for millions!

Good luck holding a company sitting in China “responsible” for about anything.

I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.

Ah, so you are just an asshole, not an idiot. OK, I get it.

I’ll still do my things, do whatever you think helps best, like pissing off people with the same goals.

What the heck is your problem? Are you unable to do something by yourself? Can’t you be bothered to think on your own? EOD.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.

You can stop insisting that this is my personal problem for a start.

What you do is inherently your personal problem.

Are you fine with the rise of fascism?

I am definitely not fine with that.

What are you doing against it and how do you believe is it going to work when it hasn’t all those past years?

What I can do, I do, and what makes you believe it has no impact? You don’t know what I do, and, for a number of reasons, I’m not going to make public what I do.

I don’t “subbornly refuse to engage with” it. I cannot help you to find your personal path to your goals.

Sorry, but I cannot help you decide what you want. Maybe it is time to think about that first.

What are your personal goals in life? How could you achieve them, what would be the path or paths to your goal?

Then you might find some political group that matches those paths or even goals. But finding clarity is something you need first and foremost. Anything else is “just” a consequence.

Oh yea? I don’t see the US deal with their blatant fashism problem. One of the biggest American fashism problems actually wants to get back into the White House.