- For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.
I detest newsletter modals.
- There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
- >"you’ll sooner or later end up dead."
What a defeatist attitude, I plan to live forever or die trying! /s
- Don’t forget the Thagomizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
- Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.
- While Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons, it did not have the launch codes, infrastructure, technical knowledge, or the economy needed to convert them into an arsenal under their sovereign control. Moscow still “held the keys” for all of those warheads.
Given how insistent the international community was on making sure those nukes were disposed of, and how economically devastated post Soviet countries were, I don’t think Ukraine stood any chance of having a nuclear deterrent.
- While spores seem hardened against the extremes of space, we haven’t shown that any of this hardy life is capable of colonizing a barren world. It seems like all life on Earth depends on some already functioning biosphere. In other words, even if we sent tardigrades to a world with oxygen and liquid water, what would they eat? Where would they get nutrients such as vitamin B? All the vitamin B we consume is created by bacteria, no animal produces it on its own. So we would have to send thousands of interdependent species. And I’m willing to bet the majority of them aren’t nearly as hardy.
Sending spores to a planet that already has life might work. But I can’t help but think whatever life we introduce would be at a disadvantage. Maybe life on that planet never incorporated certain proteins, vitamins, or amino acids and whatever we send just ends up getting scurvy and dies out.
- Let’s bump up the AI even more, instead of “dead giveaway” you should have used hence.
- A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic.
I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.
- >”for significantly-better-than-junior-dev work.”
Not even close. We had two offshore contractors working with our team for about two years and they were consistently terrible. Despite this, some higher up pressed us to “hire” them so we conducted an interview. One of them said they had 8+ years of SQL query optimization experience and could not explain what a table scan was. The other claimed to have 5 years of C++ experience and thought a pointer was a url. I am not exaggerating.
Whereas our team’s college intern turned junior dev has consistently delivered increasingly valuable contributions and doesn’t lie to us.
- As a fun aside, have you heard of Nominative Determinism? From a purely rational standpoint, it is mere coincidence that I know a dentist with the last name “Pullum” and an electrician with the last name “Cable”. My confirmation bias doesn’t account for the 99.9% of other people with unremarkable names.
But then I realized… whenever I create fake people for unit tests I give them names that correspond to what they do. Could this be a sign that the universe is a simulation? And, that God is just a QA running some tests on it?
So maybe we’re living in an edge case!
- Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a bad thing. Microsoft has really ticked me off lately, and I lament the fact that there’s really nothing I can do to change this. Microsoft doesn’t really listen to feedback, and when they do, they tend to just delay the rollout until after the controversy has died down (Recall).
- Thankfully this “update” shouldn’t affect me too much. We already have well established guidelines and schedules for remote work.
That being said, I feel like complaining about Teams. Who else is frustrated by its unusually short idle timer? Setting my status to “Away” after only five minutes just makes me look bad. There are definitely managers who somehow think that an 8 hour workday actually means 8 hours of continuous activity. Why can’t this be changed or configured to some other span of time? I wouldn’t complain about 15 minutes.
I got around this by downloading a program called caffeine. There are some other workarounds like preparing to start a fake call, or by entering a PowerPoint presentation and then alt-tabbing away from it.
- I can’t watch YouTube without an adblocker. On a surface level, I hate the ads. But, the main reason is the fact that I can’t stand how YouTube is fixated on trying to make you watch something else at all times. I need something to hide all the little cards and interstitials that pop up when pausing the video, the badges, all the obnoxious thumbnails, etc..
I also hide all of the videos on the sidebar except for the one that would be recommended next, just so I can know what might play if I leave autoplay on.
It is insane to me that the product got to this place. I get Google is all about advertising, but my goodness, YouTube is just designed to make you not pay attention for more than a few seconds.
- I am surprised at common it is for software engineers to not treat booleans properly. I can’t tell you how many times if seen ‘if(IsFoo(X) != false)’
It never used to bug me as a junior dev, but once a peer pointed this out it became impossible for me to ignore.
- I was willing to give Edge a chance years ago. I didn’t see a compelling enough reason to switch, so I stuck with Firefox. However, while troubleshooting some problems on a family member’s PC I got to see what a ‘default’/‘opt in to everything’ Edge experience is like in 2025.
It’s horrifying. Edge is jam-packed with bloat and the entire browser is geared towards monitoring and hoarding every scrap of user interaction that passes through it. The worst part is that the average person likely has no idea just how pervasive Microsoft’s spying and ad-targeting is.
I envy the fact that EU Citizens have the right to decline all of these intrusive “features” foisted upon them by Microsoft. I doubt Congress would ever come close to affording us a fraction of these same consumer rights. Sigh.
- Microsoft will clarify the situation by offering “CoPilot One”.
- >”Or just have a police state. Problem solved.”
The you can send the copper thieves to work in the copper mines. That’s killing two birds with one stone right there!
- The company I work for was “coerced” into forcing more people back into the office due to pressure from the city and the local chamber of commerce.
I say coerce, because there are absolutely people in middle and upper management who feel the need to preside over their little fiefdoms and were more than happy to relay this info as a convenient way to deflect criticism. “Don’t blame us, the city would start making things difficult for us if our occupancy numbers stayed so low. We don’t want our taxes going up.”
- I remember a long time ago you’d click on a direct link and it would redirect you to the image’s page. Then, it would superimpose a cat paw beckoning the user to swipe and see other images. I recall people really hating that.
Now the site can’t help but show you some tacked-on TikTok style video or animated gif underneath the image you actually wanted to view.
- Modal windows are just popups reborn.
- The trouble with rejoining is that the rest of the EU won’t want to let them back in with all of the same privileges and opt-outs they were once afforded. I suspect the single greatest hurdle would be having to adopt the Euro.
While many in the EU may be sympathetic and forgiving, I sense countries like Germany and France want to ensure the UK rejoins as a far more integrated and dedicated member state than they were before. It doesn’t seem like the UK has much bargaining power in any potential application to rejoin.
- It’s almost as if these stories come in waves.
- Well, the setting is for kilometers, so the metric is metric.
- Isn’t it fascinating that life on Earth began and evolved in such a radically different chemical environment? What we consider inhospitable was actually the cradle of life itself.
- If they’re trying to measure skill, I can understand the rationale. The competition is more of a spectacle than an attempt at finding the most reliable and best tasting rib making process.
Imagine a glassblowing competition where participants were judged on how consistently they could make a certain piece. The people using moulds would end up winning, and they would do so with a fraction of the skill and effort.
- >” But the people with this specific noose prop probably only had good intentions.”
I never said they had good intentions. What I am saying is that that noose and gallows were obviously never intended to be used. The construction and dimensions of it are comical.
- Said noose was some poorly tied nylon rope affixed to a rinky-dink prop gallows on the front lawn. It was some protestor’s prop, and a really shoddy one at that.
Most photos don’t convey the actual size of it, because they just focus on the top crossbar, but even so, you can see just how ineffective that “noose” would be. If you search for a photo that shows it in full, you will see that a person could easily stand underneath it. It’s too short, and it is visibly crooked. If you tried to hang someone, it wouldn’t work.
I seriously doubt the people who made it had any connection to the people who stormed the building.
The bloat is astounding. This is especially egregious now that RAM costs a fortune.