Boomer Humor Doomergod

I played Drug Wars on my TI-89 almost 25 years ago which sounds like the same game but with better graphics.

I agree with a lot of what you said, and maybe “fractured” wasn’t the right word to use. It’s more like “shattered”

Take advertising, for example. Back in the days of broadcast media they had to make broadly appealing ads. Ads people would talk about around the water cooler.

Now we can target ads very specifically, so I may never see an ad that you see.

People are still talking about inane things because that’s how we do, but there’s more niches and communities than before, and they’re more siloed.

I especially agree with this part:

I think we are seeing the ends of the safeties this form of democracy has to provide

The printing press brought down hereditary monarchies. The Internet may bring down nationalist liberal democracy.

Let’s hope what replaces it is as much of an improvement.

This is ancillary but perhaps contributing to it due to a lack of shared context. (For example, if someone asks me about a funny commercial I won’t have seen it and can’t relate.)

I’m thinking more like the zeitgeist has fractured.

If you’re lucky it might be cut with something cheaper like pure cocaine

No, we sell water usage data to water companies, so they know when to put water in the pipes!

That printer is a 2000’s HP LaserJet

One could argue that the lack of a shared, verifiable experience like radio or live TV has contributed to the breakdown of social cohesion. Everyone can see what they want, whenever they want, instead of seeing what everyone else sees.

I learned more about how computers work from them than I did in all my schooling.

Most of the best QA folks I’ve worked with had teenage children.

I imagine dealing with developers is similar.

At 4:30 pm on my last day at my previous job my boss asked me to email a customer something.

I left that shit on read

My fiancé works at a vet clinic that uses it and she says the doctors love it. The customers, however, don’t like that there’s an AI that listens to their visit so they just say it’s “software”

The best way I’ve heard it said was “if a woman can make a baby in nine months, then nine women should be able to make a baby in one month, right?”

Williamsport, PA has a “Millionaire’s Row” of Victorian mansions that the timber barons built.

I was briefly employed at a firm that maintained the sales commission software for a large telecom firm.

It was 1.5 million lines of VB6, though VB8 was already three years old. Nobody knew all of it, so they couldn’t possibly rewrite it to handle all the edge cases and special incentives we kept having to add.

Except maybe the lone QA person, who would frequently begin sobbing at her desk. And we could all hear it because it was an open plan office and we weren’t allowed to wear headphones.

That job was so bad I quit and began freelancing.

Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.

Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”

Solution: Create an open source foundation, cram the board with Google employees

Amazon’s gonna buy the rights and do a James Bond crossover.

They can extract value from just the existence of your account. If they wanted to run an ad campaign to convince people to use them they can cross reference your email and any other demographic info.

Someone - maybe not you but someone like you - will buy an Apple product because of this.

Source: I used to work for a big data company

Yeah but it got you to create an Apple account

It’s a loss leader. They make money selling the hardware and use AppleTV as a feature. That’s why the content is so good; it has to be to make it a compelling addition to their existing products.