That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

Oh, the stories I could tell you… I should write a book some day.

My general contribution to the conversation is GitHub should have a donation system. Once a week, some kind of donation raffle happens, and the winner gets GitHub taken down for “reasons” for 4 hours, then 5, 6, 8. Microsoft profits more, and it slowly becomes a technology-and-money-induced vacation day.

Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.

Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?

When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.

Win+R, notepad, enter. The run command still works…for now.

They sure are destroying that platform at lightning speed.

Hah, per window.

On the front end, you can put lipstick on that pig.

On the back end, it has to work and there’s nowhere to apply lipstick.

OTOH, it seems there is a trend in modern dev practices that it’s acceptable for a service to terminate frequently, as long as it respawns, which finally made me figure out all the sci-fi tropes where a ship’s systems aren’t responding. It’s because too many are crashing in concert. But mostly terrifying that this practice would ever be considered practical.

All I ever see is most people using (whatever system cloud provider comes with their computer/phone/tablet) and forking over $3, 5, $10, $20 a month to make the “your cloud is full!” alert to go away.

Somewhere in the middle is the way, and in countries like the US, that something in the middle should probably not be a US cloud provider anymore.

I consider LLMs basically high-frequency StackExchange trading. You gotta be exact and not keep the thread alive too long or driftrot is real though. Much faster to parse, though.

Also, the ones that can access the web are great for “I want specific lib x version y to solve a weird problem, what support libs are needed?”

I just realized how odd it would be to see people walking around in brandless clothes. As odd as when someone removes all the badges from their car.

The advertising has been so prevalent for so long that it has been normalized. Fascinating.

They’re about 2% better at being a telephone IVR than the older ones, probably at 6x the power cost.

I had an AI render a simple diagram for a presentation with explicit instructions. It rendered a Rube Goldberg nonsense graphic. I included it anyway for the lulz. Sure, they will get better, and maybe some day be almost as useful as the Enterprise computer. No way they’ll be Lt. Cmdr. Data this century.

People in the past have used the entertainment bus to get into the flight telemetry data, hopefully only in a read-only state, but that will only be true if you trust the competence of the IT group that set up the programming for the switches.

Just be careful of where you try to write data and you should be fine! (and stay away from /dev/wing0 and /dev/wing1 on the network mount!)

They run Linux now.

Don’t forget BetaMax, MiniDisc, ATRAC, LDAC (which I’m sure is just ATRAC over Bluetooth 😂 ) - amazed they won BluRay, honestly. They also won the 3.5" floppy format, which the kids only know as “the save icon”.

Is Docker caching some file you need instead of the changes applying? Raaaage!

But! My context!!!

Truthfully, it’s amazing how often the next morning, with a fresh brain, it becomes an easy fix.

Reverse-compression!

Season 1 still feels great. 2 gets a bit weird and feels more like a B show. 3 is like shark-jumping, but seeing a timeline jump that shows the now-very-near future is good for some “whoa” moments like, “this is what the continents will look like with sea rise,” but probably feels more like having to work your way through season 1 of TNG.

Didn’t mind spending exercise time watching all three though.

He also apparently watched a lot of SeaQuest DSV, and is trying to make it a reality. Hyperloop: SeaQuest. Electric cars: SeaQuest. Big car dashboard screens: SeaQuest. Magic Space Science: SeaQuest. CyberTruck…Apple Mouse ADB gen 1-ish wrapped in aluminum foil. I guess what I find most fascinating is that I have similar mental maladies to him, but I learned instead of just being perpetually dumb. It is actually disappointing that he chose to not learn and just ride the walrus instead. No idea why anyone worships him.