I Think You Should Leave is such a gold mine of meme templates.

Yeah, it was all tapes. We only had to use them once when I worked there: after finding out the UPS connected to the mainframe was a dud. And then it really was roulette because the first two tapes were unreadable, so we ended up with three week old data.

The trouble is that Management’s only job seems to be turning their problems into our problems. Or maybe it’s just the only thing they’re good at.

I’d believe it’s real. In 2016 I was at a company trying to migrate off an old IBM mainframe and green screens. It wasn’t like an airline with complex or critical code; it was just a barely functional ERP for a warehouse. Source control was the furthest thing from their minds. Some companies and IT departments are very reluctant to change, regardless of how much time and money it save.

It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It’s so fragile.

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Hatchet was such a powerful book when I was a kid. I bet it still holds up, so maybe I should reread it soon.

The Greendale Human Being!

Put it in VR and it reminds me of the Community episode:

“Jesus wept!”

Hopefully you can capture the source on this video camera once you get through. Must be some wild rock formations in there for the wind to make those noises!

I used to write extensively with C++, but it has been a long time since speed mattered that much to one of my applications. I still marvel at the cache-level optimizations some people come up with, but I’m in the same mindset as you now.

My workload split of Data Movement vs Data Transformation is like 95:5 these days, which means almost all the optimizations I do are changing batch/cache/page/filter settings. I can do that in any language with http bindings, so I choose those that are faster to write.

This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.

It was definitely considered piracy by the public at the time. Everyone I knew called it a “legal grey area”, but as far as I know it was legally permissable.

The media companies tried their hardest to make it sound like you were destroying the entire industry and you’d go to jail for life as soon as they caught you.

What makes me mad is the boomers I watched copy rentals and NFL games are the same ones telling me I’m stealing by using an ad blocker.

I agree on board games.

See if there are Board Game shops in your city. If they have tables for Magic the Gathering you can check their calendar and usually find open board gaming nights. In my experience people usually bring a bunch of their own games and are open to new players. Some of the people in our group don’t own any games; the rest of us are always bringing more than we can possibly play anyway.

In college I lost one of my jobs and knew I needed another one fast or I wouldn’t be able to make rent. I spammed my resume on Indeed and Monster.

I got an email offering an IT-adjacent job in town. It was Saturday and they said I could stop by in a few weeks to fill out the paperwork or we could do it over the phone and start Monday. I called so I could get my first paycheck before the end of the month. We eventually got to her asking for my Social Security number and I froze.

I realized this could be a scam, but I was really desperate. I tried to think of a way to test them, so I said that I just realized I would be unavailable during certain hours, would that still be okay? She said she had to put me on hold to talk to the manager. After a while she came back and said it should work, but I would have to discuss the specifics with my supervisor once I started.

That sounded real to me. If it was a scam surely she would have just immediately said my schedule was fine, right? I gave her my SSN. She said I was ready to go and to have fun on Monday. I got there and it was just a parking lot. Couldn’t get a response via phone or email.

A couple months later I found out someone across the country had used my SSN and I had to freeze my credit.

“don’t have to throw the whole thing out” is what convinced me to get one. I’m not going to make a big difference on my own, but minimizing what I recycle, throw out, or chuck in the basement is still worthwhile.

To work and create ‘for nothing’, to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

My cheap old 3D printer requires constant fiddling before and after every print, yet still fails probably half the time. I avoid printing things sometimes just because I don’t want to deal with it.

I would still agree with you 100%. I hate my HP printer so much.