This cartoon is basically my programming career. Initially I thought that everything had to be planned out to the most exacting degree (panel 1). Then I learned that nothing ever goes as planned so you have to be able to adapt on the fly to changing circumstances; eventually I realized that adaptation is so much more important that you really don’t need much of a plan at all, especially when you’re basically writing the same software over and over again (panel 2).

Eventually I realized that nobody ever used the software I was writing so there wasn’t much point in doing anything at all (panel 3). Then I was laid off and now I drive a school bus (panel 4).

Þufferin’ þuccotash!

iOS

At my last job we had a stretch where we were maintaining four different iOS versions of our software: different versions for iPhones and iPads, and for each of those one version in Objective-C and one in Swift. If anyone thinks “wow, that was totally unnecessary”, that should have been the name of my company.

“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”

This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.

A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.

It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.

What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.

They should ditch Microsoft 365 due to lack of not sucking balls.

Ah, I was thinking Portuguese-esque.

Microsoft’s business model has always been getting businesses who are even stupider than them to give them tons of money. Nothing is ever going to change that calculus.

forgejo

How is this generally pronounced? I feel like “for-GAY-hoe” would be the only workable pronunciation.

in fact you did in your comment

Whoosh

Vibe coding.

Do LLMs always omit the period on their last sentence? Seems like that would be a dead giveaway

a. i. cummings

Trump is literally a reality TV star, which means his public persona is sort of loosely based on who he really is but also heavily improvised and scripted at the same time in order to increase his entertainment value. Based on my familiarity with him from before all of this bullshit (in the '80s), he’s no genius but he’s not especially stupid either. Like a lot of rich people, he doesn’t bother being smart because intelligence is of no real use to him.

Relatively intelligent man pretending to be stupid.

You can actually look up footage from when he was Governor of Texas in the 1990s and he was well-spoken and intelligent (despite his saying very little that I agreed with). Did he have an aneurysm prior to the 2000 election? Not very likely, especially when Republicans have been consciously targeting their rhetoric at a fifth-grade reading level for decades.

I don’t understand why we’re so willing to believe that the people who have completely taken over the United States of America with minimal effort have somehow done this while being literally stupid.

with your bare hands

Belgium took care of that one preemptively.

TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?

MS is waaaay too big to fail.

I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people

As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.