We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML
It’s funny, one of the modern UI glitches that I hate the most is when a long bit of text is just truncated with ellipses instead of the whole thing being shown and you have to hold the mouse over to get it in a tooltip, or shudder actually click on the thing. HTML is great at word-wrapping and allowing the whole UI to “flow” with variable heights and widths as necessary - and yet that is never allowed to happen in apps.
I used to work for Cisco but I can’t say what it’s like internally. Not because of an NDA but because I literally have no idea. I worked for a much smaller competitor of theirs that they acquired, obviously just to remove a competitor from the marketplace. We were all allowed to work remotely but given nothing at all to do for six months and then everybody (except the executives, of course) was laid off.
I spent a good fraction of my career taking over and trying to fix code bases that my company refused to scrap and replace outright because they didn’t want to admit their worthlessness. Complete rewrites would have taken maybe a tenth of the time I spent.
My favorite thing to encounter (which was nearly universal) was the phenomenon of a young programmer fresh out of college encountering SQL for the first time, deciding he hated it, and writing a huge mess of code to handle auto-generating the necessary SQL. I remember taking over one C# application that had classes named “AND.cs” and “OR.cs” which just took a String as a parameter and returned that String with " AND " and " OR " appended to it, respectively. In about an hour, I replaced three months of this guy’s work that had bottlenecked the project with like five SQL statements.
It’s insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.
I moved from Visual Basic (3 no less!) to C because I needed to optimize the performance of a software synthesis (like, sound synthesis) application I was developing at the time (mid-1990s). It boggles my mind to this day how much fucking work you had to do just to create a simple window in C. It instantly made clear why UIs at the time were so bad and I went back to Visual Basic for the UI with a compiled C DLL to do the heavy lifting.
There’s no excuse for why UIs are still so bad today.
defects galore
A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.
I live in the Philadelphia area and they’re about to cut public transportation service by 45%. It’s beyond insane what kind of catastrophe this is going to cause. Unfortunately public transportation here is heavily dependent on state funding and the GOP-controlled state legislature is in full fuck-the-blue-cities mode.
Robert Moses needs to be more (in)famous as the pioneer of this kind of bullshit. The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a must-read book for anybody that wants to know how the US got so fucked up.
The 50 miles is in one shot, takes me about 3 hours with a couple of breaks for a few minutes here and there. In summer I generally do four 50 mile rides in four days and then take a day off. I’m a school bus driver so I have the luxury of summers off and even during the school year I have enough time between the morning and afternoon runs to ride 25 miles at least, so I can stay in shape year-round.
I’m sure you could work up to 50 mile rides if you got there gradually. I’m 58 so age is no excuse! Hell, I have older guys blowing past me all the time, although I like to tell myself they have hidden e-motors in their bikes. FWIW I started riding regularly almost 20 years ago and at the time I could barely do 2 miles.
FWIW a lot of modern plastic is made from ethane, an otherwise-useless byproduct of fracking. This, of course, does not improve our situation.
Ackshoolly, only a small fraction (less than 10%) of oil extracted is made into plastic. One of the things lately is that they instead use ethane, an otherwise-useless byproduct of fracking, to make plastic. Unlike natural gas, ethane is heavier than air and since it’s used to make plastic it can’t have an odoriferous compound added for safety. So if an ethane pipeline leaks, the gas collects in low-lying areas undetected until a stray ignition source makes it explode. I happen to know this because I live a few miles from one of these pipelines and I cross it four times a day. Yay progress!
The point of being an executive is depositing huge checks while serving on the boards of other companies and voting for their executives’ huge checks. Are you new to this planet?
“Nothing’s on purpose, ma’am.”
Spin is fucking brutal. I ride a (real) bicycle 50 miles a day but I can’t make it to the end of a beginner’s spin class.
Even the kinds of cardio you can do vary considerably. I bike 50 miles a day (in summer, at least) and a few years ago I signed up for a spin class (stationary bikes) at my gym thinking I would have an easy time of it. Nope, that shit kicked my ass. I don’t think I lasted even 10 minutes.
Lol the YMCA ain’t free - or even especially cheap as gyms go. It can be free for seniors, if their insurance covers it.
“God fucks those who fuck themselves.”
Not really relevant, but: word processors were just starting to be used when I went to college, but I still mostly preferred using my portable electric typewriter. During my junior year the G key broke off and disappeared, so all my papers from that point on have the Gs written in by hand. If they ever invent time travel, I’m going to assume that enough other people are going back to kill baby Hitler and I’ll slap the shit out of 20-year-old me.
The best description of her I’ve read is that she looks like a serial killer who is wearing the face of one of her victims as a mask.
At least he was in Greece and not Moscow - like some congresscritters I could name.
Job interviewer: “What’s the best sorting algorithm for {whatever}?”
Me: “The SORT BY clause in SQL.”