I was laid off in 2019 by a large west coast tech giant as part of a mass layoff. We had the option of trying to find a new internal job but every job posting involved AI (seven years ago!) and nobody that I knew even got a reply from any application. Now I’m a school bus driver and 100X happier even though I make like 1/5 of what I used to make. The plot twist is that AI is probably going to replace school bus drivers sooner or later, flattened children be damned.

Cops and big city racism

Jesus Christ you still have a DOS umbrella?

A friend of mine had a Commodore 20 with no tape drive. Not only could we only have one game at a time installed, but also we had to manually type in the code for the game each time.

When my main (only) programming language was TurboBASIC, I was amber all the way. On the other hand, that sweet sweet Apple IIe was green.

I vaguely remember somebody sending me a bitcoin many many years ago, but I haven’t been able to find it.

Angel is a centerfold!

I remember getting a Hotshot/286 card which allowed me to upgrade my 8088 to a 286. I don’t even remember what programs I used back then but I’m sure they ran a lot faster after that.

IIRC correctly, the card was normally around $400 but I managed to get one for $150 and I was so proud of my dealmaking.

Anybody here remember Plastic, circa 2000? It was a forum kind of like Reddit, although I don’t remember if it had upvotes or not.

I can’t believe people still believe Bigfoot is real. It’s so obviously just a Yeti in a gorilla suit.

I give peanuts to crows but sometimes one squirrel shows up and chases the crows away (and there are usually 5 or 6 crows there). I don’t get it – this particular murder will gang up on red-tailed hawks and chase them away but they’ll just sit there looking sad at the one squirrel as he eats the peanuts.

Aren’t most people on a fixed income?

No, most people are on broken incomes.

I’m so glad my parents and brother have (nearly) the same politics as me. Having to regularly deal with trumpers (without being able to laugh in their faces as with my co-workers) would be a perpetual torment. My brother did have an inexplicable phase of loving Putin, but that passed quickly.

Every cybertruck I see where I live has some company logo or wrap on it. It’s great advertising – it lets me know never to hire that company for anything.

The most hilarious one is for a company that does waterproofing. Like yes, I’m going to hire a waterproofing company that just spent $100K on a vehicle that can’t go through a car wash.

I can’t hang in there 'til Friday.

almost always knew

I mean, he had no idea the shoot-up of his bedroom was coming. And he only found out about Fredo’s betrayal because Fredo was an absolute fucking moron.

My mother was born in the mid-1930s and from time to time she likes to talk about “the good ol’ days” of her childhood when people respected each other blah blah blah. I remind her of the horrific racism and she’s like “but I didn’t even know any black people!” lol.

The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case “Notepad” was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely – hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn’t fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people’s computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn’t even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named “Notepad” would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to “NotepadX” fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

another major tool in a designer’s workflow is testing with target users before release

Lol you should have seen this UX dude’s face when I suggested doing exactly this. It’s hard to imagine an actual live human being saying “users don’t know what they want” but that is exactly what he said. It should be no surprise that this company routinely produced one-star apps, and also no surprise that the company was a routine winner of the Worst Company of the Year contest.