ChickenLadyLovesLife

My tax preparer randomly started telling me about how he’s invested money in a guy that is developing a “reactionless space drive” that works basically like this drawing. I was fighting the eye-roll when he added that the guy solved all the problems he was having with the design by asking ChatGPT. I started to explain how ChatGPT works then thought better of it. Easier to just find a new tax preparer.

I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human My dad died at home in hospice last fall, and when I called the funeral home that we had selected to handle his cremation to come pick up his body, the answering service was AI. I could tell because of the weird artificial background noises, the strange accent that wasn’t from any language on earth, and the fact that when it read back my father’s name for spelling confirmation it said “Bob common name B O B Smith common name S M I T H?”. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t just hang up immediately and go with a different funeral home. For extra fun, when we met with the owner of the funeral home later he kept cracking jokes. And he didn’t deliver the urn until the night before my father’s interment ceremony, after I had been frantically calling him about it the whole week before. LPT: don’t go with a funeral home whose owner shares a name with a character from The Sopranos.

Your work is beneficial In my 25 year career as a programmer, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the software that I worked on never actually got used by anyone. It’s incredibly depressing to think about. And that’s not even counting the fact that I probably spent more than 50% of my time doing non-programming tasks like attending meetings and such shit.

Lol that’s still genuinely disturbing the more you look at those pictures. The bacon ripples are hilariously regular and the french toast looks like slices of alien skin.

There is no brown person in America that thinks themselves white My two cousins are half-Thai but thanks to the genetic dice they both look vaguely central american. They got abused quite a bit growing up both for being asian and for being “mexican”. This taught them empathy for others who … lol just kidding. They’re both trump-loving white supremacists who rant against immigrants despite their own mother being an immigrant from Thailand.

I retired as a programmer (fancy way of saying “got laid off by giant corporation”) a few years ago and randomly bought a used school bus to convert to a motorhome. I got so much more satisfaction out of doing that than out of any work project I ever did, and even learned to weld and fabricate in the process. Also very happy that I never had to deal with the AI “revolution”. Managing a team of offshore developers got me as close to that shit as I ever want to get.

Makes me question the food. How dare you? I’m sure the food is the finest Sysco has to offer.

You leave Visual Basic alone!

Sometimes the world is a Mandel Bro and sometimes it isn’t.

I get at least one call a day from people offering cash for my house. You’ve given me a good idea for a response: “I’d like to sell, but I’m actually dead.”

The electrical… Ugh My house came with a 100A box with six breakers, all unlabeled. One of them did nothing at all when I flipped it, another produced a loud humming for three or four seconds before tripping off. I still don’t know what the humming was but when I rebuilt one of the walls I found a big scorch mark on the stud next to one of the outlet boxes so I suspect that was involved. The one that did nothing it turns out was connected to an MC cable that had simply been sawed off clean – not even some electrical tape wrapped around the cut end – and jammed down into the framing completely live. At least I was able to repurpose that one into a circuit with receptacles and lights in the attic.

The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.

I know, right? Fucking vampires.

I think they mainly do cash only because fuck paying taxes.

I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB's On Error Resume Next "solution" to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn't actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.

I would’ve upvoted you, but …

Reminds me of "yellow snowcone" from the first *Jackass* movie.

Well, the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) was never seen blinking because he (almost) always had shades on. The T-1000 never blinked because the actor Robert Patrick spent weeks practicing shooting without blinking.

I remember running from my car straight onto the field to play Ultimate (frisbee). Nowadays I hurt myself walking to the fridge.

In one of the early UFCs there was a dude in his 50s competing. He lost, but that's still pretty fucking impressive.

From the river to the C

My favorite:

for (int i = myArray.Length; i --> 0; )
{
    //do something
}

Perfectly valid in C-style, even if it does look a bit puzzling at first.

I'm waiting for Melon to ruin "Butlerian jihad".

Yeah, I always get them mixed up. Them garlic bullets don't do shit anyway.

I make bread and pizza dough with honey or molasses instead of sugar and it's fantastic. Honey is always better than sugar -- except in coffee.

A rule of thumb is that a corporate employee costs their company roughly twice their salary. Probably not very many Oracle employees are making just $37,000 a year.

I'll give it a try, but ... jeez.

Eh, it was just BASIC combined with the best (by far) visual forms editor available at the time.

sare-en-get-EEEEEEEE

you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead AI discovers compression algorithms.

“I wish I could lick my own balls like Bob can.”

I live 5 minutes from work and I am still unreasonably pissed about that. I’m a school bus driver, we have morning and afternoon runs with about four hours in between, so I have twice as much commuting as a normal job. Some of my coworkers live as much as an hour away and they just sit in their cars between 9 and 1 looking at their phones, so I really shouldn’t be complaining.

You should see what Visual Basic used to do to people.

Marvel has clearly shown that in their world mutations just unlock some sort of magic. This never gets mentioned, but I wonder what responsibility Marvel bears for the generally low level of comprehension in our society of how evolution by natural selection actually works.

TBF, my colleague also managed to produce complete disasters in a language (C#) that he knew, the entire company knew, and lots of other programmers in the area knew very well.

Some school districts will train you for the CDL, and some even pay you while you’re training (mine didn’t at the time). My training didn’t take very long because I already owned a used school bus and knew how to drive it, at least. You have to take four standardized tests (general CDL, airbrakes, passenger endorsement and school bus endorsement), have a driving exam, and take a 14-hour special school bus class (this is all in PA, at least). The standardized tests aren’t super-difficult, but you do have to actually know the shit, you can’t guess your way through it and hope to get a passing grade. I just crammed the free online tests over and over until I was getting 100% on them. I think it was maybe a month and a half between when I started my training and my first day on the job, but that was with not doing a whole lot each day. My district was (and still is) a weird combination of desperate need for drivers with a frustratingly slow pace of actually training people. I have a class C. I wouldn’t bother with a class B unless I actually needed it.

I’m a school bus driver and a few years ago I had a cop pass me while my red flashers were on and the stop sign was out and kids were about to get off the bus and cross the street. He was driving with one hand and looking at his phone in the other hand. He could have easily run a kid over. And then they probably would have found some way to blame me for it. We have cameras now that automatically detect this and send out tickets, but we didn’t at the time. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since the cops have to review the footage before any ticket goes out.

I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.

The most insane thing I ever worked in was Qt Creator, which used JavaScript for the UI and C++ for the lower level back end stuff. The switching your brain had to do to go back and forth between the two languages was remarkable. I think Qt is the real reason the suicide and alcoholism rates in Finland are so high.

A radio station where I grew up (Cleveland) switched formats to alternative/grunge/whatever in 1990 or 1991 and they kicked this off by playing that song over and over for three straight days. It was a surreal experience to hear it on the radio every time I went to drive anywhere. For me, this was the real moment the '90s began (the other contenders being the premiers on MTV of “Groove is in the Heart” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Apparently many stations all over the country switched formats the same way, by playing “End of the World as We Know It” over and over again.

I was a programmer for 25-some years but I haven’t written a line of code since 2019. I now get my engineering jollies from the used school bus I converted to a motorhome and from the house I bought three years ago and am finishing up renovating. For money I drive a school bus, which pays about 1/6 of what I used to make but is infinitely more satisfying. As far as retirement goes, I’m hoping to die a painless death before AI replaces all the CDL jobs in the country. I think AI will work fine for school buses, mainly because kids are easier to replace the younger they are.

You can also make banana bread in the bleach dispenser at the same time.

I’m a school bus driver and a majority of my colleagues smoke. Some things will never change.

love me plain html I miss the days of creating web sites in Notepad.

The cameras are from a company named Bus Patrol. They haven’t really told us much about how the program works, but as I understand it the district pays nothing in upfront costs. Supposedly Bus Patrol pays for the installation and then they get all the revenue up to the point where the cameras and their profit margin are covered; after that the ticket revenues are split evenly between the local police department and the school district. A figure of a million dollars as the cost for installing cameras on our 40 buses was thrown up by somebody, but that seems a bit unlikely as that means the cameras cost $25,000 per bus. Maybe that’s correct, I dunno. I have nearly no info about the legality of this, but they’re pretty common at this point. I know one difference is that if you’re caught by an actual cop speeding past a bus’ red lights you get a fine and points on your license, but if you get a mailed ticket from one of these cameras it’s just a fine. Presumably it’s because they can’t always tell who was actually driving the vehicle. It might be a case where they can’t really take any action if a person just refuses to pay the fine, and they just send out tickets because some or most people will just pay it.

In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.

I had a coworker adopt Ruby for a major project about 20 years ago. He didn’t know it, nobody on his team knew it, and nobody else in the entire state had ever heard of it, so when the project failed after two years there was nobody around who could save it. I’m sure Ruby (on Rails) is a perfectly viable language/platform, but you wouldn’t know if from these guys.

obviously the product of too much booze, coke, and resultant self-confidence And that’s exactly how Toto got the gig doing the soundtrack for the 1984 version of Dune.

I never notice when a user or a thread comes from ml until I say something that is real-world uncontroversial like “Stalin had some people murdered” and get flamed for it. I’ve never really felt the need to block servers on Lemmy but ml sure makes me think about looking up how to do it.

As long as they keep all those land mines on the border, they’ll be fine.