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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • Ok, so cautionary tale time.

    Regarding the “mac and cheese for life” bit…

    Once a guy I knew received a “lifetime supply” of a brand of soap. Well-known brand. Not the cheap stuff. Showed up one day as a full pallet of boxes of soap. After about a week, he figured he needed to start figuring out ways to get rid of the stuff. He offered me a box (crate?) of the soap the next time I visited him. He offered another the next time I visited. And another. I soon learned to stop visiting. Soon all his friends and every person he knew were walking away with boxes of soap. Not individual boxes of soap. Boxes of 50 bars. His garage and soon his entire house smelled of soap. I’m sure delivery people stopped entering his neighborhood just to avoid having soap snuck into their trucks when they weren’t looking.

    Long story short, I was in school at the time and free anything was a godsend. But after trying to use up 50 bars of the stuff, it was just too much. To this day I can’t even look at that soap when I’m at the store. The smell of it turns my stomach.

    There’s definitely such thing as too much of a good (ok?) thing.






  • One of the main “brag points” in Apple’s internal “what makes Apple Apple” training was about how Steve swooped in and vastly simplified a very overfull and muddied line of Apple products when he returned.

    It was a big talking point about how Steve greatly reduced the number of products to make it simpler to build, stock and sell.
    This would tend to indicate that Apple is moving further away from Job’s simplicity.




  • Big endiant is great for intellisense to quickly browse possibilities, since it groups it all in the same place.

    If only someone would train a program… we could call it a Large Language Model… to knowingly group the names together so we wouldn’t have to choose between human-readable format or dB format.

    Guess that will never happen because instead we’re stuck using “AI’s” to inflate stock prices instead. /s

    I remember seeing a proposed language that would allow each programmer to choose what name to use for each item. Don’t like ‘open_file’? Choose to see it as ‘file_open’ every time you review the file in the future.

    While we battle with each other endlessly, we keep forgetting that the computer doesn’t care.


  • I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I know how all of this works, but from experience, the people running these scams are rarely the people who suffer.

    Here’s one I’ve seen myself:

    There’s a new hot startup. Wall Street rolls up to the C-suite of this company and makes an offer: Go public and we’ll give you thousands of “special” shares. (Some companies might even get multiple of these offers from different Wall St. investors.)

    Once the company agrees to go public, Wall St. gives that company’s C-suite Special Shares. Wall St. also gives these shares to friends, family and power people they would like to reward and/or influence.

    On the big day, the company goes public. (To the Moon, Baby!) Everyone with Special shares can sell anytime they like. Company employees have a 6-month “blackout window”. The general public is encourages to “invest now before the shares go up so they can sell after they go higher!”

    After the stock climbs in value, the Special Stock holders dump their shares and rake in the cash. Everyone else is left holding the bag.

    So who in this scenario are the losers? The people who bought the stock and watched it lose value? The people who sold their Special Stock after it went up and before it crashed? Who gets punished? Who goes to jail? Where does the money go?

    You saw this whole scam condensed to it’s essentials during the Crypto Currency scams a few years back.

    So many different variations on this scam. Keeps working too, so long as you don’t get sloppy and steal from rich people like Bernie Madoff did.