My "favourite" Giorgio Mammoliti memory was when he was pushing for a casino in Toronto and basically referencing problem gamblers was like "They're our gamblers, they should be our revenue, and they're going down to Niagara." Like these people were an oil well for him to tap.

Historian of medicine here. Yes. Yes, they did.

I'm not really an expert in anything but wherever I've worked the greatest shortage has always been "people who even kind of understand what we do here" and if anything AI is going to exacerbate that problem. If I had any advice it would be hone and protect your ability to understand things.

It is pretty crazy that I can type in the explicit name of a 2FA application I require in the App store and Apple will serve me an ad at the top for a different 2FA product. Like... guys. That's not how this works.

The weird thing about video game companies embracing AI is that, if AI boosters are to be believed, eventually these models will be so good you can ask them to write the game you want for you, at which point, why video game companies at all?

I shouldn't be surprised but this dark pattern where you cancel a subscription, go to a page that asks you to confirm again, and then go to a different page that asks a third time to confirm is clearly designed to make people think they've cancelled and navigate away. I hate everything, thanks.

The doc I'm producing recently popped up on Letterboxd and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't extremely stoked by this fact. Add it to your watchlists, nerds: letterboxd.com/film/legends...

Most pies are good. The pie takes on BlueSky are mostly bad. File this one (yet again) under my Old Man Stance that everyone should have fewer opinions.

All fathers should love their sons the way Buck Martinez loves Trey Yesavage.

2005: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this can't be a trustworthy source of information 2025: Your website looks like it was designed by a 3-year-old and barely works, this is the last bastion of truth on the Internet

Exercising in my 20s: *Do something wrong* Whoops. *Shake it off* Exercising in my 40s: *Do something wrong* Oh God!! *dies*

Coming around to Java having a default toString method for objects. Thought it was heavy handed at first but the number of times I'm like "how can I get a String representation of this?" is changing my mind.

Teaching myself React and like, I'm a JavaScript agnostic, it's fine, but really starting to see why the JS haters lose their minds with these frameworks. "Let's redo the entire architecture of a multi-page website, but all on one page, the user none the wiser, entirely with JavaScript! Muaha ha!"

I hope whoever popularized thin scrollbars has had a lot of minor misfortunes in life. Like I wouldn't wish real calamity on anybody, but this person does need to suffer periodically for what they've done.

I know the correct response is to be slightly exasperated every time you need to use '===' with JavaScript (which is basically all the time), but honestly I crack a little smile. It never stops being a little bit funny to me and you have to find your joy where you can.

The internet will soon be turtles all the way down

2036 is doomsday for baseball writers - the year where you can no longer pump out a Bobby Bonilla contract article when there's nothing else going on.

Audaciously using a semi-colon in my cover letter, because how else will I prove to them that I did an English degree before doing CS?

One thing that's not constantly getting worse? HTML and CSS. Every time I go back to use them things are a little better than before. Of course, it helps when your starting place was people contorting tables with endless <tr><td>'s and manually inserting images of rounded edges for their borders...

Reading the docs, hard! Yuck! --> What if we had resources that nicely summarized the docs --> Brief happy period --> Aggregators and AI churn out bad summaries of the summaries --> Can't find anything useful --> Back to reading the docs

This is the world's least important complaint but I really hate when word processors have multiple ways to insert vertical space after a line and I spend more time than I'd like to admit figuring out which one it is so I can remove it.

Starting my Java journey and I'm trying out Eclipse but it feels very... clunky. Like something Microsoft might have designed in the 2000s.

I've always preferred text over video for learning things but finding decent informative articles on the web has become such a chore that I'm gradually throwing in the towel and using video resources more and more.

Wonder if at some point the world, sufficiently antagonized by the US, will realize all those international property law treaties that benefit America so much might be due for a revisit.

Bummer that capitalist democracy has succeeded in spite of a bunch of middling morons for years, but those same morons believe every success is because of them, and now they're all in charge.

So many applications will pop up with some annoyance and a "Not Now" option when what I desire so fervently is "Not Ever."

The thing that sucks about Ryder is that whenever there's a problem he doesn't figure out what he needs ahead of time, calls the entire Paw Patrol in, and then it turns out he only requires like 2 of them to get the job done. He's like every crappy project manager I ever had to work with.

When I install your app, does it set itself to automatically start up when my OS boots? If so, I kind of hate you. Does your app minimize to the system tray when I hit the X to close it? It does? Okay now I legit hate you.

Spotify's web app is so terrible and unreliable but I don't care you guys can't make me download your native app not in a million years. I'll suffer and seethe instead.

For reasons I'm sure are entirely unrelated to the current political climate, I've really been getting back into Metallica's ...And Justice for All

I don't know if it's a boomer or millennial or what complaint, but widespread legalization of gambling is a colossal mistake and I think we'll be stunned when the bill really comes due. Funny part is intellectually it seems insane for me to have the State say you can't make a bet. But it should.

Also Trudeau claiming he regrets not doing electoral reform when he had a majority government that could have easily done so feels like a trolling move targeted to drive me, specifically, insane.

Been a while since we had a good food fight over prorogation of parliament. Canada's back, baby.

Wonder if Trudeau mentioned to Trump that Canada as the 51st state would carry ~50 electoral college votes?

Back in my day, digging through ditches and burning through witches were two separate jobs. Union jobs, no less. These days if you want to get slammed in the back of a dragula you have to download some lousy app.

The internet, distilled.

There are a lot of programmers who are absolute wizards and evangelists when resource sharing (or stealing!) is required to improve a computer system, but when you try to do it to improve a society they lose their minds.

When the enormity of the world's horrors makes you feel helpless, narrow your focus. Find one stranger and scold them for posting a recipe while kids are dying. Call out a new mom for not adding alt text to a baby photo. Critique a selfie. Correct a joke. Show people you care more than them.

So strange to have watched the internet go from kind of okay static docs, to JavaScript pop-up ridden mess, to kind of okay again with the right software, to now - an utter ad-ridden hellscape. The mobile web in particular is such a dumpster fire.

"Prompt Engineering" is the true, final denigration of the word "engineering".

Me(naive): Surely in the year of our Lord 2023, my gender has run out of ways to thoroughly embarrass itself. Some guys, all the time, apparently: OMG Ancient Rome!

Seems redundant for Microsoft to add AI to their operating system. Windows already does a masterful job of executing bizarre behavior that no human can adequately explain.

Professors will lecture you on honesty while their department picture is clearly 20 years out of date.

First it was letting the kids watch a bit of YouTube, where they learned of Blippi. Then it was them constantly demanding I play his inane songs on Spotify. But finally, and horrifyingly, it was me developing strong preferences about Blippi songs. "Sweet, the boat song!"

I am unclear as to how Bluesky solves the "someone has to pay for the servers" problem, but I'm happy to be here until the house of cards collapses!