I have a giant oak tree next to my house, perfectly positioned so that my house is in direct sunlight in the morning but completely shaded by the tree from noon onwards, so even when it’s 100°F outside my house doesn’t get above the low 80s. I love that tree - except for right now when I have to rake the fucking yard.

Elon Musk’s vertical is horizontal.

I heard the older folks say that I would wake up and be old one day and it would feel like barely any time has passed.

I’m almost 60 and I feel more like I should be 100 or so. I’ve had many different careers and technology has changed so much that I feel I’ve lived through multiple lifetimes. I think people who do basically the same thing every day (and night) over and over again, with the same people, tend to perceive life as flying by because there’s no real difference between one day and the next.

It’s a slur for Asians, more specifically Vietnamese. I can actually trigger my coworker to say it, by merely mentioning that I like Chinese food.

Even before AI, I definitely encountered people writing things on their CV with no actual idea about them.

I’ve actually done more than one phone interview where I would ask a question and then hear either keyboard tapping or multiple people whispering (or both) in the background during the long pause before the interviewee answered. It was hard to not just laugh and hang up on them.

I will never implement a sort IRL

My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.

I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.

I mean, he’s promised to deport Americans who protest on behalf of the Palestinians. He sure wouldn’t hesitate to deport Palestinian refugees.

“How can be such terrible soldiers when have such big caps?”

At my last company, they usually gave end-of-the-year bonuses instead of raises. They were pretty generous, usually amounting to about half of our annual salaries, but it of course prevented us from being guaranteed that level of compensation the following year. That’s why I always describe bonuses as raises followed by pay cuts.

I once quit my job at a software company I really hated. They were desperate to keep me around for the projects I was leading so they asked if I would work hourly for a while. I quoted them a go-fuck-yourselves hourly rate which they immediately agreed to, which made me even more angry about my prior years of poor compensation. I worked under this agreement for about half a year and further improved my effective hourly rate by not working very hard.

I’ve traveled in India - there’s no way that would produce anything but piles of dead children. My money’s on being replaced by AI first.

About the same for me. My solution was Accutane.

Congress is already a sea of color: green.

I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.

At my last job I managed a team of developers in India (while residing in the US). It was pretty much necessary for me to be available outside of my company’s normal work hours. I always compensated myself for middle-of-the-night activity with time off during the day and nobody ever mentioned having a problem with it. I was eventually rewarded by being laid off with everybody else when my company was acquired by a west coast tech giant.

I’m not allowed to work from home and it seriously pisses me off. Whenever I complain about this to my boss, she always gives me shit like “you’re a school bus driver”.

I have an app on my phone that plays rain noises for sleeping. It occasionally shows ads, like one that popped up yesterday that featured three pruney old women talking about why they were voting for Trump. Not very remarkable except that above the ad was a fixed label that read “JEWS ARE DANGEROUS” and the close button was barely visible in the middle of this. Never been so afraid of missing that button.

Whenever I go out to dinner with my octogenarian parents, at the end of the meal my mother always says “well, I hope we can do this again some time” in front of the waitress using her best “you’re a neglectful son” frail old woman tone of voice. I live with my parents.

People don’t seem to be generally aware that the Nazi/Soviet nonaggression pact included an enormous loan to Germany from the USSR, which temporarily helped to bail out Hitler’s collapsing finances. So Russian money literally contributed to all three things on that list.

Another fun fact is that the deal also included a technology transfer of various advanced weapons systems from Germany to the USSR. Almost none of the stuff ended up being used by the Soviets in significant amounts, but one of the things transferred was advanced 37mm anti-aircraft guns that had been earmarked for installation on the battleship Bismarck. Bismarck went off on her first and last sortie with much older anti-aircraft weapons - and was fatally crippled by fucking biplanes.