Java the Nut

I have the opposite problem. In my resumรฉ there is nearly nothing about programming, coding, or developing and yet I get recruiters sending me jobs for developer positions all the time. The latest one was for a Sr. Java developer. I have never once used Java, know almost nothing about the language itself, and have no interest in it at all. My resumรฉ doesn’t have that keyword or anything vaguely similar to that.

It was probably an algorithmic error, but how can the algorithm be so atrocious?

Crying Uncle

We ran into this same problem with the software my company distributes. I figured out the same thing. Yay, computing in 2019: problems are both nearly impossible to troubleshoot, and nearly incapable of being fixed, just so all the droolers don’t click on shit they should’ve never clicked on in a million years anyway. Meanwhile, a ton of other things break in an attempt at preventing your Uncle Milton from sending all his fucking money to Nigeria (and it doesn’t help, he sends it anyway).

Clipped

Clippy was the first popular (as in many people saw it) instance of ceding computing to the droolers, yet it also causes feelings of nostalgia because at least Clippy could be banished, never to be seen again, while modern software and computers are just permanently broken. Firefox and such can no longer be fixed. Same with Windows 10 and now even MacOS.

At Least Not Bronies

I’m glad to see notable Bernie Bros like *checks notes* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ihan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have endorsed Sanders. You can tell they are Bernie bros because anyone who endorses Bernie automatically becomes male. Isn’t that the way it works now in braindead centrist land?

I’m not a Bernie voter. I will vote for Warren, if Florida lets me vote. I am going to attempt registering again for the third time. But I kind of want Bernie to win anyway because of all the ridiculous and inane “Bernie bro” centrist lying.

Convo

I notice that email programs in general are pushing fucking worthless conversation view hard now. I wonder why? Outlook (on Mac) auto-switches to it now regularly, and I have to constantly change it back. Absolutely impossible to find anything that way.

But I do wonder why it’s being pushed so hard? Certainly it’s not to benefit the users; absolutely no one cares about that, not even the users, who are utterly clueless anyway for the most part.

Nuke From Orbit

Pretty much my reaction, too. I can’t believe how much we’ve squandered, and how quickly. We’ve laid waste to our own society and our own minds for “convenience” that’s not even real.

No Stretch

Disaster Recovery Faking, Take Two.

That is why you don’t use stretched VLANs. MBA types (and poor infrastucture engineers) say, “But it’s the same!” Sure, it’s the same and that’s the whole damn problem. Making things “the same” in a disaster recovery scenario is not what you are going for.

Routing and DNS exist for a reason, and they work. Freakin’ use them. All of this layer 2 stretched across half the continent means a world of pain when you actually need anything to work. Looks pretty on paper and to the MBAs, but in practice your DR becomes all disaster and no recovery.

And just wait till spanning tree has a problem and it’s all layer 2. That’ll be a whole other level of pain for you to enjoy!

Warren E Gonna Regulate

Yes. That AP “fact check” is absolute garbage and doesn’t at all match up with the best studies of the issue. Automation is not (yet) the principal problem. It is corporate power and offshoring of jobs.

Or as Matt Stoller says:

What the crap do economists know, anyway? They’ve been wrong about everything for the past 50 years, and continue to be wrong today.

Future Should’ve Been Cooler

I too miss these days. What we have now is far, far worse. This isn’t nostalgia — just the way software and computers/smartphones are now is utter crap.

Back then, we called them applications, or software, or sometimes just downloads. Itโ€™s hard not to drown in nostalgia over those good old internet days, when a free app almost never meant that you were the product. The industry was dominated by a few big players and a lot of software cost well over $100. But there were also independent developers making all kinds of amazing games and utilities.

Computers have been getting less useful yearly for about the last decade or so, with it really ramping up around 2014. It’s a huge loss. The “bicycle of the mind” has been melted down and smithed instead into a manacle.

I used to love computers; loved working on them, figuring out how to make them do things, and the joy of discovery. Now I mostly just tolerate them or actively hate them as they have turned into nearly-useless surveillance devices with most functionality removed.

I really did think the future would be cooler.

Let’s Excel

Agreed. Excel is often not the right tool for the job, but a lot of the Excel hate is just snobbery against a tool that allows people to do something they otherwise could not.

Doing something in code often take 100x as long as just doing it in Excel, and even that is going to have bugs. Sure, if it needs to be reproducible code is the way to go, no question. But recognize that path is going to take at least two orders of magnitude longer. And, Jill from accounting is never going to spend all the time slogging through C# or R so that she can spend years learning something that she can already do in Excel in 10 minutes.