The collective man-hours this would have saved people, if we had it back in 1999, would be staggering.

people love over engineering the fuck out of technology

Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023

Computer Scientists: Physics is just the application of discrete state machines.

Okay, but do I really need to draw this many circles to prove what value Pi has? Also, it’s all in Greek.

Perhaps…

But then again, they know things.

Finally, we have “thanks, I hate it” as an emoji.

$0.02: good people know enough to not take the job, let alone run for it. It’s expensive to run for office, doesn’t pay enough, eats up your life, you’re constantly advertising to stay employed, and your co-workers are all politicians. It’s very much a “I offer myself as tribute” kind of a situation, even for extraordinary people.

Meanwhile, a corrupt person knows that it’s worth all the trouble if you convert political power into (illegal) money.

Honestly, short of some miracle undoing this whole mess, this was a flavor of outcome I was quietly hoping for. At some point, politicians are going to realize - much like the president’s base - that they’re going to lose power unless they mount some kind of opposition. For the very worst ones out there, power is kind of their whole bag. Take it away and they get very angry; they may even do something about it. It’s kind of the tacit driving force behind any “checks and balances” scheme: power-hungry bastards trying to out-power-hungry-bastard each other. In a gross way, we kind of depend on it.

Like everything in Idocracy, you take something everyday and make it more streamlined and efficient, then stupider, then repeat the stupid part a few more times.

In this case we see the evolution of the employee smock, apron, and id badge, into one all-purpose garment. It’s even one-size-fits-all.

What we want: OS updates that make the system more performant, more accessible, easier to use, smarter at using battery power, and more secure.

Apple: Let’s make everything an unreadable mess and tax the GPU to shit just for fucking UI elements, because we’re out of ideas.

Had me in the first half.

It was uncanny and disturbing back then. It’s uncanny, disturbing, and hilarious now.

Based.

Also, can we take a moment to appreciate the sheer brilliance of username on display here: “quentin quarantino”

I know that’s sarcasm, but your comment made me think. I strongly disagree with those kinds of remarks. :)

This war isn’t like a game of Poker, where everyone is dealt from the same deck. It’s more like MTG, where the real game is about who can make better strategic use of their card-buying budget.

Rust is still in the locker room having an argument with their coach (borrow checker).

I think the preference for Y being the vertical axis in gaming, comes from a legacy of orienting the work around screen-space (roughly 50 years ago). It was more efficient to have a memory layout that is easier to supply data to generate a TV signal. Since a CRT raster goes from upper-left to lower-right, line-by-line, that became the standard for screen-space: inverted y. So screen memory (or however the screen is represented in RAM) starts at address/offset zero, and increments from there. All the other features like hardware sprites, used the same convention since it was faster and simpler to do (easier math).

When consumer 3D cards were relatively new, this was inherited, most notably when the hardware started to ship with “z-buffer” support. Carrying all this baggage into 3D engines just made sense, since there was never any confusion about the screen-orientation of it all. Why bother flipping axes around from world and camera space to the screen?

… a new set of knives, a new set of knives, a new set of knives, lisa needs braces, a new set of knives, a new set of knives, dental plan, a new set of knives, a new set of knives, lisa needs braces, a new set of knives, a new set of knives, dental plan, a new set of knives, a new set of knives, a new set of knives…

War boys from Fury Road?

Don’t forget SCSI termination. There was always some extra piece of junk you needed to make it all work. No wonder we all have “the box” in the basement/attic with all the extra cables squirreled away.

Now you take a tiny board a little bigger than a stick of gum, and press it onto the motherboard. Smaller footprint than a DIMM, mind-blowing amounts of solid-state storage. Drives? Naw, we just have chips where the "1"s stick around after you turn it off.

Why not both?