run our design past a focus group before implementing it

once you’ve built something, you’re not asking users for whether it’s perfect

I was laid off in 2019 by a large west coast tech giant as part of a mass layoff. We had the option of trying to find a new internal job but every job posting involved AI (seven years ago!) and nobody that I knew even got a reply from any application. Now I’m a school bus driver and 100X happier even though I make like 1/5 of what I used to make. The plot twist is that AI is probably going to replace school bus drivers sooner or later, flattened children be damned.

“You’re the love of my life!”
“…”

I mean, Julia Child worked for the OSS during WWII and wasn’t a POS (as far as I know).

Or making anti-semitic comments like Roald “The Little Bastards’ll Swallow Anything” Dahl.

Yeah, NOTHING in ALL CAPS.

It was a great way to dispose of surplus bombs from WWII.

They were designed for the faster speeds. Speeds were lowered to 55 mph in most of the country during the 1970s as a (perfectly rational) response to the OPEC oil embargoes in that decade. Lower speeds = lower fuel consumption per mile.

I once ran afoul of our UX guy for suggesting that we run our design past a focus group before implementing it. Dude literally said “users don’t know what they want”.

I had a job like that back in the day (circa 2000). I remember one stretch where for a solid month around 50 developers did nothing but call in to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? to try to become a contestant. Ironically, one web app I wrote for them (with Visual Basic and “Classic” ASP) is still in use today – and it was a front end for a mainframe system that dated to the 1980s, which means that’s still up and running as well.

I always say: when Life gives you lemons, jam them up Life’s tailpipe.

Because the last time Congress declared war was 1941, and we have fought a shit ton of wars since then.

I remember reading for four years that Merrick Garland was just making sure his T’s were crossed and his I’s dotted before putting Trump away. Whoopsie.

Are we going to start polling on things like what the current temperature is outside, too?

My stats prof in college actually used to do this, and the average guess was always within half a degree of the true temperature. Still not worth doing given that thermometers exist, but interesting nevertheless.

Aren’t most people on a fixed income?

No, most people are on broken incomes.

Yes: Features no original members.

This is technically true, but Yes does still have Steve Howe who was the guitarist on their first hit album (“The Yes Album” in 1971).

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

It would also be nice if it weren’t going to be used for the killer robots. When it very obviously is going to be used for the killer robots.

The Dune books had the “Butlerian jihad” where humanity banned all thinking machines. As a kid I was like “who would ever ban cool shit like that?” Now I’m all “where the fuck is this Butler dude?”

I grew up in the '80s with Reagan and Bush. When Clinton won in '92 I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped paying attention to politics, thinking everything was going to be OK for a very long time. November 2000 was a rude shock when it became apparent that the world didn’t work the way I thought it did. Far more of a shock than 9/11 was.