I’m seeing this the other way around. It’s possible the normalization is incidental: the comic exists because it’s a common interaction these days.

At the same time, the comic is from the New Yorker. Magazines have a different attitude about advertising in general, so (IMO) this is as anti-ad as a magazine comic can get away with.

I was gonna say: I have no idea what this is like.

I’m simultaneously living my best life, (mostly) ad free, and at once unaware of how the rest of the world navigates an ad-encrusted digital space.

To quote your quote:

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

I think the author just independently rediscovered “middle management”. Indeed, when you delegate the gruntwork under your responsibility, those same people are who you go to when addressing bugs and new requirements. It’s not on you to effect repairs: it’s on your team. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise. The idea that relying on AI to do nuanced work like this and arrive at the exact correct answer to the problem, is naive at best. I’d be sweating too.

Eh, there’s a little more than that.

• Lots of piracy museums
• Open beverage carry on Duval St.
• Lots of gay clubs
• More tour boats than you’d think possible for such a small island
• Drunken cruise passengers
• Drunken tourists on bikes/scooters/ATVs.
• Military base
• Old Civil War era fort (not the same thing)
• Margaritaville

Most of those things are up for debate following each hurricane season.

Eh, I went to a few pretty good museums in Key West once. Although, they also tried to become The Conch Republic for about a day that one time, so maybe they don’t count as mainland Florida.

Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.

Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn’t even think about “underpowered desktop as company server” as another pattern, but here we are.

Sorry you didn’t get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.

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The amount of work I have completed with Tampermonkey in situations like this should have made that same IT department quite anxious.

I mean, it’s a pretty good illustration of a deadlock. Most traffic intersections, especially 4-way stops are basically mutexes anyway.

Jamming a circle though… that’s like deadlocking a ring buffer message queue with threaded consumers. Or something. It’s just a spectacular way to break stuff any way you slice it.

That environment was wild though. At the time, you basically needed to be an electrical engineer and/or a licensed HAM operator, just to have your head wrapped around how it all worked. Familiarity with the very electronics of the thing, even modifying the hardware directly when needed, was crucial to operating that old tech.

Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I’ve made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:

• email as workflow
• email as version control
• email as project management
• email as literally anything other than email
• excel as an relational database
• excel as project management
• help, our wiki is out of control
• U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
• The CEO’s nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can’t get rid of it

In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we’ll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.

65: Kids are out of the house, you have some money to fix a broken door, but you’re just too damn tired to go breaking things or screaming about it. Also, the reason for the tantrum happened 30 years ago. So you tell your family a pointless, rambling, mind-numbingly boring story about it at Thanksgiving, instead.

NGL, I was hesitating on building a MAME cabinet, but having one with the art and build of a legendary fake game? Sounds perfect.

A couple of extra things about this.

The episode was co-authored by William Gibson of all people. The fact that one of the key authors that gave us cyberpunk as a genre, went on to write a painfully mediocre TV episode about virtual reality, still leaves me kind of stunned.

WRT to “live-action standing-in for VR”, it can be done artfully. Avalon does a great job of using practical effects and creative set locations to portray cyberspace. Also: there’s a lot of run-and-gun here, and nobody stands around. Which is to say: they really whiffed hard on the x-files episode, as there’s clearly a better way to do this.

In a small, anecdotal way, I can say with confidence that the level of fiber trenching that happened (in a major metro area) from late 1999 through 2002 was on a whole other level.

Ooh, I did not consider the possibility of a military court case on this. That could be a game-changer.

It’s been more about disliking the opposing candidates.

This describes GOP/right-wing politics too. Nobody has the representation they actually want., before or after any election. It’s a mess.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

This also goes for some NAS appliances and the in-dash console of newer cars. Underpowered ARM implementations are the scourge of this decade.

A bid for immortality on the back of an LLM is just… asinine. What are they thinking?! That’s like saying we can bring Shakespeare back from the dead because we created a very clever digital knot based on all his written works, and he can only speak to us from a web browser or text terminal. Do these animals really think they can just model their Reddit posts and live as a ghost in the machine after that?

I would love to hear what Kurzweil has to say about all this.