I like saying “CHRIST-ee-en”. It really pisses them off although it obviously shouldn’t.

Every time someone tells me about the ten commandments, I ask them to name all ten. They can never name all ten. On the flip side, if somebody starts talking about UBI they can usually say what all three letters stand for.

I’m a school bus driver. Last year I had a cop blow past me at 40 mph in the opposite direction when I was stopped with my red lights flashing and stop sign out, about to let off a large number of kids who cross the road at that stop. If I hadn’t kept the door closed, they probably would have been hit. I glanced down at the cop as he passed and he was driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right handing holding his phone - he never saw my bus at all.

We now have the external cameras that auto-ticket cars that pass us when our red flashers are on, but I wish to fuck we’d had them last year to catch this guy.

What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.

I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had “way more power than Obama” and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a “foundation” which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.

In Gates’ case, a lot of his “charity” involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying “fuck your patents” and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.

I ran into a similar situation many years ago, when I was trying to write a software synthesizer using Visual Basic (version 4 at the time). The big problem is that if you’re doing sample-by-sample processing of audio data in a loop (like doing pixel-by-pixel processing of images) and your chosen language’s compiler can’t compile to a native EXE or inline calls, then you end up suffering the performance hit of function calls that have to be made for each sample (or pixel). In many applications you’re not making a lot of function calls and the overall performance hit is negligible, but when you’re doing something where you’re making hundreds of thousands or even millions of calls per second, you’re screwed by the overhead of the function calls themselves - without there being any other sort of inefficiency going on.

In my case, I eventually offloaded the heavy sample processing to a compiled DLL I wrote in C, and I was able to keep using Visual Basic for what it did really well, which was quickly building a reliable Windows GUI.

I’m trying to get the image of spez wanking to that price graph out of my head.

Welcome to “soft delete”, where database entries are marked with a “deleted” flag instead of being actually deleted. Makes it trivial to restore things a user has “deleted”. Actually, even without soft deletes, modern databases maintain an audit trail which tracks all changes made anywhere, which also makes it easy to restore “deleted” items. And actually actually, databases are regularly backed up and when a user “deletes” their data the sites don’t go into the backups and delete the data there, so everything anyone posts is technically in existence forever (not really because because backups won’t last forever but they can last a very long time).

I’m sure that when reddit sells its data to companies to train their AI on, they’re selling backups from before users started mass-deleting their histories.

I heard of a rumor; all of reddit was frequently backed up and available for download

I don’t know about “available for download” (probably not), but: modern websites tend to have their content stored in a database, and databases are (or should be) regularly backed up to tape drive or optical disks or whatever. This means, fundamentally, that everything ever posted to a social media site like reddit or facebook will be in existence permanently, regardless of what efforts users take to subsequently delete their history from the current instance of the database.

The only way to truly “delete your data” would be to re-mount each old backup and delete the data in each of them before re-backing them up (or else destroying all the backups). No social media site does this or even could do this. Furthermore, when it comes to keeping your comment history out of the clutches of AI, I would almost guarantee that when a site like reddit sells its data to companies to train the AI on, they are selling old backups from before users started mass-deleting their posts.

The bible should have had Space Marines in it.

I had a friend my first year in college who was black, gay, Republican and a fundamentalist christian. He gave most of what little money he had to the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker - and this was after the sex and financial shenanigans that brought down their empire were exposed. And it’s not like he didn’t believe the truth of the scandals. He did believe it and was still that fucking eager to give them his money anyway. I just can’t understand the people that support these frauds.

Musk brags about working 100-hour weeks … while being the CEO of five companies. That means that at best being a CEO of one company is a 20-hour-a-week part time job.

I never even had a manager who could do my job, let alone a CEO.

The reason a CEO gets paid what they get paid is that they also sit on the boards of other companies and vote for the compensation packages of their CEOs, who also sit on the board of the CEO’s company. It’s literally a circlejerk.

Uh, airline tickets to India?

I spent a summer in south India a few years ago during monsoon season. I was fucking miserable in my jeans and shirts until I switched over to wearing loose, flowing clothes made of bleached kahdi (loose homespun cotton) like the locals. It keeps the sun off you and even when it gets soaked it doesn’t cling to your skin, and then whenever the rain stops it dries completely very quickly. Other westerners I met made fun of me for pretending to go native, but they had no clue how effective it was.

D365 CE is a platform for Sales teams to organize and track leads, quotes, contracts, etc.

Huh, I would have thought “CE” stood for “compact edition” like it did for Windows CE back in the day. Which was unironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft.

I just went through that for a while and saw nothing that doesn’t look exactly like C#. If it’s based around .NET and looks exactly like C#, why the fuck not just use C#?

As somebody who first started coding BASIC on an Apple IIe in 1981, I am just so tired of new languages. They all do basically the same shit and there’s just no real point to any of them.

Wait, are they doing a Boeing over there at Microsoft?

What, killing whistleblowers?

They’re not in any way associated with Amazon, as far as I know. But apparently they sell their customer data to them - and immediately.