the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population

My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.

So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?

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.

As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.

Is BeOS still floating around?

They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.

/s just in case.

They get taken over by sales & marketing types

Like Steve Jobs lol.

They don’t even have a duty to know what the law is.

One Boeing 737 MAX = 6.5 million avocado toasts. You’d have to go without avocado toast for … uh … two weeks?

Many places I worked the recent college grads were paid as much as (or more than) the senior developers, so this strategy didn’t work. They still did it, though.

Years ago I got a copy of MSDN which had apparently been put together by developers who all had giant monitors. On a normal laptop screen none of the text wrapped properly so every article had a horizontal scrollbar which you had to work left and right to read every fucking line. I eventually had to start copying the contents into a Notepad instance just to be able to read the damn things normally.

This is why I think developers should always have to work on 10-year-old laptops with 800x600 screens.

I don’t understand why they don’t just put “My” on it: MyMail, MyOutlook etc.

I solved this dilemma by quitting and becoming a school bus driver. Now I only have to worry about middle-schoolers threatening to shoot me.

I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.

the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards

Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”

I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn’t even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.

I don’t remember if she was still married to Bruce Willis at this point, which was 2006 or thereabouts, but she was hanging out with Ashton Kutcher in Shreveport because I kept encountering the couple at restaurants and bars. Also had dinner with Ted Danson one evening because he was sitting alone at the table next to me and my friends reading a paperback book and looking sad and lonely so we invited him to join us - he’s actually a nice, normal, friendly guy.

I used to live in Shreveport LA where weirdly enough they shot a bunch of major motion pictures after production was moved there from New Orleans after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. One day I was walking to work downtown and outside my office building I passed a really scabbishly-dressed and overly made-up prostitute (not a common sight there). I kind of scowled at her and she gave me a what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you look as I passed by and went into the building. When I got to the office everybody was lined up at the windows and they told me that I had apparently walked through a movie set and that had been Demi Moore dressed as a prostitute (it was some movie with Kevin Costner playing a serial killer). They were all kind of outraged that I had interfered with the filming but I had the same attitude towards it that you did with Clooney. Like, why the fuck am I supposed to be happy about a film production interfering with my existence? I didn’t get any money out of the deal, and it wasn’t even a good movie.