So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?

I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.

the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards

Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”

I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn’t even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.

I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.

I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it’s astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.

Diana Rigg from The Avengers. Also from the best Bond movie of all time. Also from Game of Thrones, I suppose, although I’ve never watched that.

intelligence agencies don’t use cute code names for things like this since it makes it easier to work out the operation scope or intent

It’s kind of amusing that during WWII Germany had a penchant for choosing meaningful code names for some of their secret programs, names that actually gave important information to the Allies. Knickebein and Wotan were noteworthy examples, names given to German electronic bomber navigation systems.

Why it’s tolerated, not sure.

Andy Reid tolerated it because he knows that the violent psychopaths playing for him are hopped up on a variety of drugs and need to be cut a little slack.

Shit, they’re hard to start when it’s + 20°F outside. I’m a school bus driver and that was the exact temperature this morning when one third of our fleet wouldn’t start up.

FWIW diesel-powered vehicles are much cleaner now than they were in the '80s. Diesel fuel is now sulfur-free, and since 2004 progressively stiffer EPA regulations have reduced the NOx and particulate matter output of diesel engines by orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, though, “cleaner” in this case does not include a reduction in greenhouse gases - in fact, school bus engines of today spit out more greenhouse gases per mile than did buses of the 1980s. This is because the EPA diesel regulations limit permitted emissions based on horsepower-miles, so an engine with twice the horsepower (like today’s bus engines compared with older engines) is permitted to emit twice as much junk. And since modern bus engines have much more horsepower, they emit much more greenhouse gases.

Long before the '70s. The British arms manufacturing companies Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth merged in the late 1920s to become Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. Employees of the former Armstrong Whitworth were not happy about the merger and joked about being like choirboys - because they were being buggered by Vickers (i.e. “buggered by vicars”).

I mean … could they just use Twitter since that’s not in use any more?

I’ve always said a Libertarian is a Republican who is trying to sleep with a Democrat. Vice versa works too.

It’s not even possible to really remove your data. Databases are backed up and archived regularly - when companies get requests to delete a particular user’s data, they’re not going back and re-mounting old backups to delete the data from all backups, so the data will still exist somewhere.

-Letting a nerd rape your drugged girlfriend. I grew up in the '80s and this one disturbs me the most in retrospect. Like, this seemed totally normal and acceptable.

For me, nothing could ever possibly top Apple’s rejection of strain relievers on their cables. It’s absolutely the perfect blend of their overrated design sense with their unerring corporate instinct for planned obsolescence.

I went to graduate school with a guy who turned out to be from a super-wealthy family but we never suspected because he drove an honest-to-god fucking Yugo. I rode in it once and pulled the window crank off the door before he had a chance to stop me. He drove the Yugo because he wanted to fit in with us poors - we should have suspected something was up because not even the poorest of the poor graduate students drove Yugos. He finally blew his cover when the Yugo died and he had to come to school in his other car, a brand-new Range Rover.

high level management isn’t really about productivity

High level management is about preserving your position as a high level manager and securing the maximum compensation for it.

Even if Elon Musk is putting in 100-hour weeks, he’s the CEO of five companies, which means being CEO of one company is a half-time gig at most.

It’s pretty wild to think that as recently as 1939 commercially-viable sailing vessels were still hauling cargo around the world. Even weirder to think that one of these vessels ended up appearing in The Godfather Part II and is now a floating restaurant in Philadelphia.