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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • My favorite thing about the “all comments are bad” crowd is that their first example is almost always something like this:

    // Add 1 to x
    x = x + 1
    

    Like, nobody that thinks comments are good and important would ever add a useless comment like that. The point of commenting is to add documentation (usually the only form of documentation that a future developer is ever going to read) only to code that would otherwise be inscrutable.


  • That long-ass horizontal scroll bar reminds me of how I used to put unfindable easter eggs into my Visual Basic apps. I would have amusing little messages pop up from time to time in message boxes. To prevent anyone from just searching for the exact text in the message box, I would reduce it to a series of concatenated Chr() statements and then I would put like 200 characters of whitespace in front of the message box call. The only way anybody would spot it would be if they noticed the horizontal scroll bar this produced and nobody ever did.

    At least that’s my theory. It’s also possible that nobody ever used the software that I produced.


  • When I was in graduate school I got snared into evaluating potential new professor hires. One guy had like a couple of thousand publications, but they were all in journals that he had founded and was the editor of and nobody but himself and his friends ever got published in them. Amazingly, his CV included the publications and also all the journals that he founded and was the editor of. I pointed this out in a meeting and somehow this did not disqualify him from consideration. I was like, is this what everybody in academia does?






  • I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it’s still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that’s also the part that is less important.


  • I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the “innovation” of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done – not a “progress” bar at all, just a “well, maybe something is happening, it’ll be done when it’s done” animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.





  • I started watching TV cooking shows in the late 90s (e.g. Good Eats, Iron Chef, Naked Chef etc.) and I would just cook what I saw for my friends. They were all “wow ChickenLady you’re such an amazing chef” for a few years until they started watching that shit themselves. Then they were all “you should have used white balsamic vinegar and black garlic in that”.