@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
member since 16 Jun 2023 12:26
comments
- on it's time in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 8h ago
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on it's time in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 8h ago
I retired as a programmer (fancy way of saying “got laid off by giant corporation”) a few years ago and randomly bought a used school bus to convert to a motorhome. I got so much more satisfaction out of doing that than out of any work project I ever did, and even learned to weld and fabricate in the process. Also very happy that I never had to deal with the AI “revolution”. Managing a team of offshore developers got me as close to that shit as I ever want to get.
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on it's time in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 8h ago
I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human
My dad died at home in hospice last fall, and when I called the funeral home that we had selected to handle his cremation to come pick up his body, the answering service was AI. I could tell because of the weird artificial background noises, the strange accent that wasn’t from any language on earth, and the fact that when it read back my father’s name for spelling confirmation it said “Bob common name B O B Smith common name S M I T H?”. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t just hang up immediately and go with a different funeral home.
For extra fun, when we met with the owner of the funeral home later he kept cracking jokes. And he didn’t deliver the urn until the night before my father’s interment ceremony, after I had been frantically calling him about it the whole week before. LPT: don’t go with a funeral home whose owner shares a name with a character from The Sopranos.
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on Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9h ago
I have a wall oven that’s a couple months old and it preheats very rapidly. Unfortunately, it seems to achieve this by just lying about what temperature it’s at. It’s consistently 50°F to 75°F below the set temperature, as measured by a separate oven thermometer. The manufacturer anticipated this potential problem by including a boldface section in the manual saying not to use oven thermometers because they’re “wildly inaccurate”. Oh the irony of an electric oven using gaslighting.
For bonus points, even when the oven reaches the set temperature (which I now set higher than what I theoretically need) it doesn’t bother to maintain that temperature, so I have to frequently turn the oven off and then back on again just to cook something properly. Once again ironically, this was the reason I replaced the old oven. Fortunately it was only $2500.
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on Time for a new course in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Sep 2026
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
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on Time for a new course in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Sep 2026
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
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on Time for a new course in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Sep 2026
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
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on Garlic rules in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 Sep 2026
There was a joke years ago about Ben and Jerry’s making chocolate-covered garlic ice cream called Boutros Boutros-Garlic. I don’t think anyone would get that now (in either sense of “get”).
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on Garlic rules in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 Sep 2026
Black garlic is the next step in your evolution.
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on Garlic rules in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 Sep 2026
Since I’m usually just cooking for myself now, I halve the recipe but double the cloves. And sometimes change “cloves” to “heads”.
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on 420 sandwich rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 Sep 2026
Agreed. I forgot to mention that it was really the mayo plus the lettuce that made it disgusting.
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on 420 sandwich rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 6 Sep 2026
A restaurant near me used to offer a french toast BLT which was exactly what you think: a BLT using french toast instead of regular toasted bread. I thought it would be great but it was kind of disgusting, mainly because of the mayo. The sweetness of the french toast just did not go well with the mayonnaise taste and texture. But I do respect them for trying.
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on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026
Huh, interesting to know. Ninth grade me didn’t give a shit about things like that.
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on [Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation in c/technology@lemmy.world · 5 Sep 2026
The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability
The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.
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on Paradox in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 3 Sep 2026
Eh, it was just BASIC combined with the best (by far) visual forms editor available at the time.
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on Paradox in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 3 Sep 2026
You should see what Visual Basic used to do to people.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
The Japanese took Singapore largely thanks to bicycles. There must be a few photographs of that shit.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
make them want the right to drive unregistered
Lol so many of these fuckwits already think that’s true … as long as they’re just “traveling” and not involved in commercial activity.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
Florida used to use these sort of overturned metal soup bowl things as turning lane dividers. It was a way of giving a tactile warning to drivers of lane departures without damaging the cars. It was also a way of landing drunks riding their bikes at night flat on their fucking faces. You can guess how I know.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
I dream of getting a speeding ticket on my bicycle some day. I would frame that thing so fucking hard. It’s not often that I can actually legitimately get up to a speed above the limit, but it does happen once in a while.
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on bike rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 Sep 2026
For a long time Vermont allowed people living out-of-state to register their vehicles in Vermont and get a VT license plate. They do require inspections but if you were out of state and never actually went to Vermont, the inspection requirement was irrelevant. This was often used by the skoolie (school bus converted to motorhome) community to get a bus registered and legal before it was converted to a motorhome (at which point you can register it normally in most states). And it was used generally by people with shitty old cars that couldn’t pass an inspection and didn’t have a valid title. However, they closed this loophole three years ago and now you can’t newly register an out-of-state vehicle there any more.
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on New compression technique in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 3 Sep 2026
Sometimes the world is a Mandel Bro and sometimes it isn’t.
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on The studio behind Star Wars Zero Company, which is currently a Steam bestseller, has reportedly furloughed the majority of its staff in c/games@lemmy.world · 2 Sep 2026
they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”,
I always had this arrangement at the companies I worked for, except the “normal hours” were actually me doing next to nothing, and the “crunch time” was me genuinely busting my ass for a few weeks nearly every waking hour to get the software finished and out the door. It was nothing more than an extension of how I handled college rather than some arrangement that the companies intentionally offered. Management was always just so utterly fucking clueless about anything related to the technical side of software development that it was easy to fool them into thinking that my way of doing things was just normal for the field.
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on The cure! in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 Sep 2026
I think that at some level they understand how easily their own views are shaped by the people around them and by the media they consume. So they assume everyone is like that and that if you’re gay or trans it means you’ve been manipulated into it by external forces. It’s weird to me to imagine being so malleable to social pressure that you would undergo trans surgery because of it, but conservatives really think that’s what’s going on and it’s because they are that malleable to social pressure.
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on reason enough to fail the interview in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 31 Aug 2026
My mom taught me ORM. I’d rather have had the SQL mom.
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on reason enough to fail the interview in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 31 Aug 2026
They later added an Anthropologist, who understood that more questions needed to be asked. His first question was “do you want fries with that?”
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on World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea in c/technology@lemmy.world · 30 Aug 2026
All you really need is to see the Jovian eclipses.
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on 80% of developers find AI coding more addictive than helpful in c/technology@lemmy.world · 23 Aug 2026
it might be nice to get out of this entire industry, if only I could afford to
I got pushed out of the industry right before COVID hit, so I haven’t ever dealt with AI. I’m a school bus driver now, which is infinitely more satisfying than programming since I get to drive a big Tonka truck around and gaslight children all day. The only downside is making 1/6 of what I used to make so this is not really a viable alternative for most people. At least I get subsidized health insurance.
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on GitDown is Hub in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 18 Aug 2026
Kids today will never know the joy of writing apps for Blackberry. You wrote them in Java, which was cool and the gang, but when you tried to compile your app and deploy it to your test device, every library module you incorporated into your app had to be signed independently by RIM’s signing servers. If you were lucky this took a few minutes; if you were unlucky it took 45 minutes to an hour. If you were really really lucky it never happened at all because one or more of these signing servers were completely down, and then you could just tell your manager that the signing server was down and go home for the day.
And this would happen even if you’d only changed a single line of code. I got in the habit of making an enormous number of changes before running and testing anything, which is obviously not an ideal practice but was completely necessary in this case. I would also sometimes roll my own code to avoid having to include a particular module. My custom UI, for example, needed to use trigonometry functions but these were part of one of the cryptography library modules which were especially notorious for taking forever to sign. So I wrote my own
sin()function instead.This was probably the main reason Blackberrys were murdered by iPhones, even more than their tiny screens with 16-bit color that RIM refused to upgrade until it was too late. iPhone app development also sucked thanks to its antiquated C-style language, but it was still lightyears beyond Blackberry. RIM was going around offering cash bonuses to developers to write apps for them (my company was offered $30,000 by them) but it still wasn’t even close to being worth it.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026
OK, electric planes are fucked then. No wonder they’re resorting to “$5 of electricity” clickbait bullshit.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026
Well, feel free to correct me on my math here, I’m no battery expert. Google says a 100 kWh battery typically weighs between 1000 and 1500 pounds. Since we’d need 6618 kWh for the hypothetical trip from Cleveland to NYC, that means we’d need 67 x 100 kWh batteries which would weigh between 67,000 and 100,000 pounds. Google also says the typical fuel load for a 737 is around 50,000 pounds, so the relative overage from batteries (since obviously you wouldn’t need to carry any fuel) would be 17,000 to 50,000 pounds. This would roughly give you a passenger capacity range between 120 and nobody. Even worse if you consider the need to have some reserves of power for unexpected circumstances. There’s also the problem mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the batteries don’t become lighter as they’re discharged, so your landing weight is the same as your takeoff weight.
So yeah, battery weight is the core problem. But if battery weight comes down by “just” 50% (and I have no idea if that’s on the horizon or not) then electric aviation becomes quite viable.
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on Young people increasingly don't trust AI - or the billionaires that keep telling us we should all love AI, survey finds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026
My dad died last fall and when I called the funeral home to arrange for his body to be picked up, their answering service was fucking AI. However angry you think that might make you feel, it’s worse than that.
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on Young people increasingly don't trust AI - or the billionaires that keep telling us we should all love AI, survey finds in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026
I’m a retired programmer and I always regretted not getting into AI (like, developing it rather than making use of it) because I think I could have made significant contributions. Now I’m glad I never did because I’ll never have to deal with the guilt of having made Terminator a reality.
I’ll just have to deal with Terminator is all. :(
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 16 Aug 2026
Microwave beams from satellites. What could go wrong?
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
Actually dragging (or wheeling in) a wire or having a wire car supplying the plane with electricity during takeoff would work too.
After doing more of the math, I realized that the energetic cost of takeoff is quite a small fraction of the overall cost. So the only real benefit of the catapult would be to reduce the size and weight of the propulsive machinery on the plane. So externally providing just the electricity wouldn’t be much of a benefit.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
I didn’t say which type of catapult. I don’t need ICE showing up at my door.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
I used to drive a '76 Rabbit that got 40 mpg (and with a carburetor no less). Unfortunately, it had no chance of passing an emissions inspection and not much chance of surviving even a low-speed collision.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
You can rethink the engineering with electric motors.
One of the other limitations is that you’re stuck with propellers if you’re using electric motors, so your top speed is going to be significantly slower than jets. Unless you do the Tu-95 thing with contra-rotating props whose tips exceed the speed of sound, and then you have monstrous noise problems.
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on First test flight of largest all-electric aircraft used just $5 of electricity in c/technology@lemmy.world · 15 Aug 2026
This seemed intuitively wrong to me (like, way too low a cost), but: 25,000 pounds moving 100 mph is equal to 11,331,007 J of kinetic energy. Since 3.6 million J equals 1 kWh and 1 kWh on average costs $0.17, that means you could accelerate 25,000 pounds to reasonable bare minimum flying speed for about fifty cents (not considering efficiency of the machinery). My mind still can’t process this, but math is math.
On the other hand, looking at it from a potential energy perspective it’s a bit more expensive. 25,000 pounds at a cruising altitude of 10,000 ft. (still quite low from an airliner perspective) is about 339 million J, 94 kWh or about $16 – the cost of lunch at MacDonald’s.
Since a plane requires the most thrust at takeoff, you could use ground-based catapults to get the plane to takeoff speed (or faster even) and then you could carry smaller batteries and propelling machinery. For extra fun, you could have landing planes snag a wire and use their momentum to accelerate a plane taking off.
To save even more weight, since you’re going airport-to-airport you could leave off the landing gear and just have the planes come down on a bouncy trampoline-like surface. If you think that’s batshit crazy, the British actually experimented with this idea for their aircraft carriers in the 1950s.
Edit: to make these numbers more realistic I’m going to assume something like a 737, which can weigh something like 150,000 pounds fully loaded (this includes fuel but you’d need batteries instead for an electric plane). Getting this to a 150 mph takeoff speed would take about 100 million J (getting it then to a cruising speed of 500 mph would be another 233 million J, but that’s pretty minor compared to the other costs). Climbing this plane to 30,000 ft would take 6.1 billion J. Resisting a drag force of 5000 pounds (about what a 737 experiences at cruising speed at 30,000 ft) for 500 miles (the distance from Cleveland to New York City) would need 17.6 billion J. Assuming landing is free (fuck TANSTAAFL) that means a typical trip needs 23.8 billion J or 6618 kWh or $1125. Assuming a real-world efficiency of 25% means the actual cost would be $4500 (which is in the ballpark of what jet fuel costs). Assuming 200 passengers, that’s $22.50 per person. Not exactly “$5 of electricity” but surprisingly small.
Feel free to check my math, my brain hurts.
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on Everyone's asking, 'Who's Json?', but nobody's asking, 'How's Json?' in c/programmer_humor@programming.dev · 12 Aug 2026
Drax the Destroyed.
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on To just start dancing in c/lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026
The laudanum helped.
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on To just start dancing in c/lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026
Imagine being so starved for intellectual stimulation that you’d stand and watch a seven-hour Presidential debate. I might possibly be able to do that today, but I would have eaten my own eyeballs by hour three.
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on Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026
in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone
Blackberry was the smartphone in the first half of the '00s. And circa 2005 even Windows Mobile smartphones were gaining some traction (by “smartphone” I mean devices that are essentially handheld computers that can run apps and do a lot more than just calls and texting). They both got swamped by the iPhone because RIM and Microsoft were short-sighted idiots who failed to see the potential market and saw no need to improve their devices much, until it was too late. The iPhone wasn’t the first, it was the best (at the time at least).
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on Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026
I think one of the main reasons Blackberry was swiftly killed off by the iPhone was that their devices had tiny non-touch screens that used 16-bit color, and RIM were unwilling to move on from that until it was far too late. The other reason is that the Blackberry app development environment was orders of magnitude more atrocious than anything else I worked with in my 25-year career. The development environment for iPhones was the second-worst but still massively better than Blackberry; even if RIM had moved to upgrade their devices, they never could have gotten anyone to develop apps for them.
In my 25 year career as a programmer, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the software that I worked on never actually got used by anyone. It’s incredibly depressing to think about. And that’s not even counting the fact that I probably spent more than 50% of my time doing non-programming tasks like attending meetings and such shit.