Tootfinder

Today is Employee Appreciation Day, announced by mass email to all employees. Get ready for (tokens of) our appreciation next week.
#OfficeWorkerGripes

"It is fair to say that Microsoft spent at least the first five years of its history in relative obscurity. The first appearance of the name “Microsoft” on the pages of Byte was a short mention of their BASIC interpreter in an advertising on page 47 of the May 1977 issue. In contrast, page 34 of the same issue included an article about the Apple II by Steve Wozniak. The Woz and Gary Kildall were the biggest stars of the microcomputer industry at the end of the 1970s."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/where-does-microsoft-want-to-go-today/

"The Tax Foundation is a veteran anti-tax campaign organization from the United States. It has been around since 1937 when it was founded by top brass from companies such as Standard Oil and General Motors. Close links to some of the biggest corporations in the US has been a constant feature of the organization, as has its political aim of bringing down taxes"
#lobbying

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

One thing I think about is how flat-earth types could convince themselves, without having to trust anyone, their model of the earth is wrong. I don't think the earth is flat, but it is an interesting problem in #epistemology.
A model needs to explain observations if it is to be believed.
Lately, I've been thinking about day length as seasons change, and how cycle is opposit…

Des chimpanzés ont été observés en train de partager des fruits contenant de l'alcool - pas dans des quantités suffisantes pour s'enivrer, mais un peu comme l'effet d'une bière.
#science #éthologie

"Many professions can be recognized through dress codes. Doctors and nurses wear aprons. Police officers wear uniforms. Tennis players in Wimbledon must dress in white. Astronauts wear space suits. Dominatrices wear black latex catsuits. The Swiss Guard in the Vatican wears the same outfit since the 16th century. Soccer players have matching kits. Wolverine fights evil in yellow spandex. Software developers wear the t-shirts they got for free at the last conference."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/tenue-correcte-exigee/