the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population

My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.

So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?

They don’t even have a duty to know what the law is.

I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.

the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards

Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”

I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn’t even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.

British coins really seem absurdly overly-beefy for the monetary value they represent. I think it’s a way of saving up metal for the next time the Germans need sorting out.

I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.

“Special Envoy Carrot Top” has a nice ring to it.

For a while in the programming world “why are manhole covers round?” was a common question to be asked in interviews. I had no fucking clue the first time I was asked, but subsequently I would put on my deep pondering face and reason through it out loud and arrive at the correct answer, which never failed to impress the interviewer. After a few years I started owning up to the fact that I (and everyone else) had already heard that question.

Jane Goodall made an interesting observation about the chimpanzees she studied: she found that nearly 50% of the fatalities she observed were due to infants falling to the ground as the mothers they were clinging to moved through the trees. This was one of the bases of C Owen Lovejoy’s interesting (and largely unknown today in popular Paleoanthropology) theory that bipedality in the human lineage evolved primarily because it greatly reduced this source of mortality.

I had a squirrel once fall out of a tree and land right in front of me with a nice loud thump. He was stunned for a couple of seconds and then staggered slowly back over to the tree trunk and climbed back up it. Really changed my perspective on squirrels.

I’ve been feeding roasted peanuts to my local gang of crows for almost two years now. The only present they’ve ever given me is to shit all over my car.

When the time comes … clocks will be sticky.

Their spell check sucks too. “I’m the capstan now!”

I don’t remember us ever using the thing. My parents were sort of proto-hippies and we didn’t eat stuff like hot dogs very often.

That thing is built like a tank and a probable fire hazard.

Back in the '70s my parents got gifted an electric hot dog cooker. It basically had two rows of electrode spikes and you’d stick a bunch of hot dogs between the spikes and electrocute them. Dangerous as fuck since it had no kind of guard or anything - and how hard is it to just boil hot dogs anyway?

I recently bought a 1970s Sunbeam food processor to replace my broken modern one. It’s so incredibly quiet that I thought it was broken as well until I tried it out grinding stuff and found that it was even better and faster than the modern one. It is much heavier, though, and a pretty ugly shade of '70s yellow.

Old speakers had enormous, heavy magnets and were great at reproducing audio, especially on the low end. The only major “development” with modern speakers has been the ability to sort of reproduce sound with lighter-weight, cheaper materials.

I don’t still have my dad’s whole 60s-era stereo but I do have the speakers and they’re absolutely fantastic. Heavy as fuck with the giant magnets and solid wood cabinets. Modern stuff just does not compare, especially on the low frequency end.

I went to Olive Garden restaurant once with a friend of mine, and during dinner he made the claim that Olive Garden consumes 20% of the world’s black olive supply. I couldn’t convince him of how ludicrous this was even despite pointing out the measly two slices of black olive in our shared salad bowl.