the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population

My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.

So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?

They don’t even have a duty to know what the law is.

My gym has no equipment that requires spotting lol. If you need a spot for the Smith machine, you’re doing it wrong.

I see this shit at my gym very rarely, but it’s because they offer free summer memberships to teenagers and some of them don’t know how to act in the adult world. So it’s an asshole teenager thing rather than a gym thing.

I feel like that’s the same underlying issue: The requirements are not understood upfront.

Actually on most of these failed projects the requirements of the original customer were pretty clear. But the developers tried to go far beyond those original requirements. It is fair to say that the future requirements were not well understood.

the alternative is building a prototype, which you’re allowed to throw away afterwards

Lol I’ve done many prototypes. The problem is that management sees them and says “oh, so we’re finished with the project already? Yay!”

I witnessed a huge number of failed projects in my 25-year career. The cause was almost always the same: inexperienced developers trying to create a reusable product that could be applied to imagined future scenarios, leading to a vastly overcomplicated mess that couldn’t even satisfy the needs of the original client. Made no difference what the language or framework was or what development methodology was utilized.

And the proud owner of a Mustang with a 28% APR loan.

I used to work for a company that contracted out programmers to a defense contractor (Northrup Grumman). It honestly never even occurred to me to redact out the stuff I worked on when I put it in my resume. Nobody said anything about that when I left the company, even though I’d gotten a security clearance to work at NG in the first place. I wonder if your “redacted” person just did it themselves to create a sense of mystery.

I used to be a mobile app developer but I literally retired because my company went to an open floor plan arrangement with no offices at all (let alone doors for them) or even cubicles. You didn’t even have your own desk, you just sat at any empty desk when you came in in the morning. The uselessness of the back-to-the-office movement is obvious enough when compared to working from home, but it’s really even worse than useless when you can’t get a quiet, undisturbed environment to do your work in.

A 420 calorie drop from a 52-pound weight loss implies a resting metabolic requirement for body fat tissue of about 8 calories per pound, which I think is a serious overestimate but I’m not sure. I’ve seen some sources claim 2 calories per pound for fat and 6 calories per pound for muscle, but other sources have claimed significantly higher amounts.

It doesn’t much matter how accurate your calorie estimates are. If you estimate that your daily caloric requirement is 2500 and you’re eating 2000 calories a day, then you should be losing about one pound a week (1 pound of fat = 3500 calories). If you find instead that your weight is remaining constant, then either your caloric requirement estimate or your caloric intake estimate is wrong (or both are). In either case, your only option is to eat even less, per your measurements.

1 pound of body fat = 3500 calories, so if your normal caloric requirement is 2500 calories a day and you instead eat 2000 calories a day, you will lose one pound a week. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but if you keep that up for one year you can lose 52 pounds - which is a lot.

British coins really seem absurdly overly-beefy for the monetary value they represent. I think it’s a way of saving up metal for the next time the Germans need sorting out.

I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.

Everybody remembers “a man, a plan, a canal: Panama” but nobody remembers “Taft: fat”.

I had a coworker who did exactly this back in the '90s. He was an expert in a really obscure programming/database platform/language from the 1970s (called “Cyborg”) that only had a few people left that knew anything about it. It took literally hours to compile even the tiniest code changes so his job mostly involved sitting around doing nothing waiting for the compiler to finish. He managed to eventually get a WFH situation (with dialup lol) that paid him $300 an hour, then went out and got two other similar WFH jobs that paid the same since his actual work load was just a few minutes per day for each. $900 an hour in the 1990s.

they are stronger than real sugar

This is only true on a per-weight basis - which is why they use a lot less of it to obtain the same degree of sweetness.

they make your intestines absorb more sugar since the sugar receptors get clogged trying to absorb the artificial stuff

This is an amazing chunk of nonsense you should actually be congratulated for.

That second one probably doesn’t affect you very much though

Because it’s nonsense.

Round about 2005 I was at a Hooter’s with some friends and I noticed that their hottest wing sauce was named “911”. As a joke, when our waitress brought out our food I pointed to that on the menu and said that I was offended that Hooter’s would think to name a wing sauce after the attack on the Twin Towers, which I referred to as our “sacred tragedy”. I figured she would just laugh it off but instead she got wide-eyed and said “oh no no no no no” and ran off to bring over her manager. The guy came over to our table and apologized profusely, saying that it was named after 911 the emergency call number and not 9/11 the terrorist attack. He comped our entire meal (over $100) and gave me four $50 Hooter’s gift certificates as well. At this point I was afraid to say I’d just been kidding so I rolled with it. I still have those gift certificates somewhere - I didn’t avoid using them out of guilt, Hooter’s is just terrible food.