Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?

Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.

Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.

For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.

I was thinking the same thing. It should have at least morphed into an SD card by now.

But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.

Fack.

I want off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride already.

Honestly, a Japanese-style capsule hotel and net cafe would probably do very well in a university environment.

Granted, that’s still charging people for homelessness, which doesn’t help any of the underlying problems. It’s just slightly less dystopian since it’s cheap.

Parents of children affected by the ban shared a spectrum of views on the policy. One parent told the Guardian their 15-year-old daughter was “very distressed” because “all her 14 to 15-year-old friends have been age verified as 18 by Snapchat”. Since she had been identified as under 16, they feared “her friends will keep using Snapchat to talk and organise social events and she will be left out”.

Okay, that’s really bad. On the one hand, this is like “they don’t even card me at the bar”, which is opening up a whole can of worms. Either they’re passing for older, or they’re faking it. As for the kids left behind, it’s also “you look too much like a kid to hang” or they simply get left out for not breaking the rules. All this kind of shit used to happen before, only now it’s technologically accelerated.

And here I was naively thinking this was going to make everyone stampede back to SMS instead.

I’m almost certain Musk has 120mil in loose change, hiding in his couch.

I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.

<rant>

You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.

If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.

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.

deleted by creator

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.