Being a teenager when Watchmen and V for Vendetta had their original run, both had a deep, significant effect on me and I still think about them frequently. But given the ways they’ve been twisted and misused and misunderstood over the years, I find myself wondering if it was really worth it.

Up next? Requiring parents to have at least one child named after Charlie Kirk.

Take copious amounts of ketamine and try and destroy the federal government?

When someone says to you, “I’ve been so good to you, you should be grateful,” the subtext is always “…because I didn’t have to be.” Which says just about everything you need to know about this person.

And the sad thing is that may be for the best!

AI changes things in unexpected ways. One of my personal superpowers has always been writing technical specifications. It's an amazing way to work out the kinks in a design, expose missing cases, and just generally work through lots of problems before ever committing a line of code. The downside...

I miss the key so much! Lots of key paraphernalia from those early days in the team.

I'm shocked that Trump doesn't personally get a cut of all sales for use of his name. Or is that just in the fine print?

Let me fill that in: President Trump's announcement that his administration will impose a [ludicrous] tariff on [basically everybody], unless a company is [paying him personally a lot of money], sparked confusion.

100% this, it’s the same kind of broad-based bubble we saw in the early Internet era. The question is not whether it’s going to be painful, the question is *how* painful will it be?

I don't watch it much myself but I feel like "Trump take SNL" is a message that would get through to the normies

I think the whole point is that, relative to the past, his show *isn't* that popular. So many people have abandoned broadcast / cable television that I imagine affiliates are in a bad place as it is and are particularly vulnerable, and the corporate parent is, in turn, vulnerable to the affiliates.

Whatever may have happened in this interaction, there is no question that Jesse Helms absolutely was a racist, insensitive bully and ascribing ill intent to his motives was never unreasonable. (In college, I specifically kept my residency in NC to vote against Helms, for all the good it did...)

All the bloviating about "political debates" right now puts me in mind of a treatise I read on three-card monte in the pre-web Usenet days. Three-card monte is ostensibly a game that is played on street corners where the player tries to guess which of the three cards is the queen. But in truth...

When Reddit nuked their third party API it was the impetus to get me off of wasting time on Reddit. Now it looks like I'm going to have help getting off of waiting time on TikTok.

Making something polished and consistent enough to put in front of real customers is a pain in the ass, and something that coding models aren't (yet) good enough at. You also need to have a coherent idea of what you're doing, also something that models can't do.

I'm unfortunately old enough to have had chickenpox and to now know folks who have had shingles and ongoing neuralgia as a result. (Yes, you can still get shingles even if you were vaccinated, but it's much less common and impactful.) I also remember having to worry about measles and mumps and such.

100% this. When starting something new I will *frequently* work for a while, say “OK, now I have a better idea of what I’m doing,” revert, and start over. Of course there’s a “point of no return” where I’m far enough in I’m not going to do that, but this is an essential planning strategy.

Tired: This is WAR! Wired: This is a random act of senseless violence.

Two words: Tan. Suit.

The first personal computer that I owned was an Apple ][+ and I have such a soft spot in my heart for Applesoft BASIC.

This is what people were saying in 2016 about Hillary Clinton, and, well... I'm not saying those people shouldn't have held their noses and voted for Hillary in the general, I'm just saying that driving the signal underground isn't going to fix problematic candidates.

Also wondering how much this increased because many of the people who were purged had relatively low tenures. FIFO.

Goodness, I think I wore out every CD of theirs up to Monster. Somewhere between “Driver 8” and “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” although I always remain partial to “Superman,” the first song I ever heard of theirs.

According to ChatGPT, there are five lights.

I can

This article reminded me of a funny story. A long time ago, I just started on the Visual Basic team and was trying to diagnose an issue with some math processing code. I asked someone who to talk to and they say, "Oh, you should talk to Tim, but he doesn't work Mondays or Fridays, so...

This is the XY version of a house full of dolls or little figurines or commemorative plates or Beanie Babies...

We’re being governed by monsters. Just absolute monsters.

Something that has randomly stuck with me through life, and which I think about a lot, is the opening scene of the minor Isaac Asimov novel, "The End of Eternity." Similar to Marvel's TVA, the Eternity organization is a time travel society tasked with maintaining the timeline. As the book opens...

I think there is no algorithm I hate more with a blinding passion than whatever misbegotten one they use on the iPhone when arranging app icons. It's been over a decade and it's still, "Oh, you want to put this app in an open space on this page? Great, let me f**k up every page after that..."

I know this isn't news, but I just have to comment on the night and day experience of learning Rust in 2022 just pre-GPT and learning Swift now. The basic ability to have someone always on call who I can ask "explain what this weird symbol is doing here" and get a reasonable answer is huge.

I guess the lawyers told him "Micro$oft" was too close to the original to work. But, yeah, the 80's called and they want their joke back, dude.

Today, I was thinking about whether we might want to replace our 10 year old car and then thought the better of it due to tariffs + uncertainty. Glad to see that I'm not going to be buying a lot of other stuff for the time being, either.

I suspect "rescued" is too strong a word here. This is more like when doctors successfully get a heartbeat back after the patient has been deprived of oxygen for too long. Yes, they are alive, but: a) it's not life anywhere near where it was before, and b) it's not likely to last for the long-term.

TIL that NPR host Ari Shapiro has been a guest singer with Pink Martini for over 20 years. Who knew?

The tech industry is eating its seed corn. Between massive layoffs due to overhiring + loud statements that AI will replace junior devs, I don’t see how CS programs don’t crater. But the need for CS-trained folks won’t disappear even if they’re not coding. The pendulum is going to swing, hard.

Basically, it's just an unnamed bank account that the governments have to periodically wire the requested sums to, and then their tariffs will not get worse.

I still remember many years ago talking with the lead of Microsoft Access at the time, and him regaling me about how they paid a lot of $ to a branding firm to come up with a name for this new desktop database product, and their big idea was calling it...

It is amazingly hilarious that two decades after the "MS" ceased to mean "Microsoft," that's going to be the only thing left. Also, why is it that naming/branding seems to be problem that seems almost impossible to solve? I mean, this seems terrible.

There's definitely a difference between a bubble where the underlying asset has no intrinsic value (tulips, Beanie Babies) versus the underlying asset has intrinsic value but it's being inflated much faster than the intrinsic value is increasing (dotcom, mortgages). When the former pops...

It's not just AI, although that doesn't help. The number of CS graduates has doubled in 10 years, and I just don't believe the industry can absorb than many new employees.

I would gently disagree. There most definitely *are* moments when you get to cut the proverbial Gordion knot, where your fresh perspective sees the simple solution that eluded all who came before you. Those moments should be cherished, and you should never foreclose their possibility. BUT...

Easy As for any student without a conscience.

I think they’re calculating they can slow walk and soft resist and grit their teeth long enough to make it past November 2026, worst case November 2028, and the fever will break. I understand the wager they’re placing but I don’t believe it’s a good one.

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

New York Times: Oh they died WITH starvation not of it.

The New York Times is out here like it’s United Healthcare trying to deny a claim.

I went to NYC frequently in the late 80's when it was a MUCH MUCH rougher place than it is now, and with my almost non-existent Southern boy street savvy was still just fine and didn't tremble all the time like this dude.

This was true of the early Microsoft folks that I worked with when I started at the company. When they got into the business, it was this weird, niche area that, honestly, no one had ever made that much money from. So what happened next came as much of a shock to them as everyone else...