My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there’s no physical eject button. It Just Works!

Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!

As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn’t want to verify that what I’d done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I’d already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.

It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.

A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can’t use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don’t really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it’s a general problem.

YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO USES CAPSLOCK!

there would be nothing to prevent the 99% from rightfully rising up against the 1%

Except for the other 1% who are trained and equipped to violently suppress the 98%. And if for whatever reason they fail to do the job, the killer robots will do it instead.

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I’m a school bus driver, and one of my weirder experiences is listening to a middle-school boy ripping on some middle-school girl for having “only” ten thousand followers.

He’s been killing the same ratty mouse toy with a broken wand for years.

My cat kills actual mice, then eats the front half of them and leaves the back half on my pillow next to my head while I’m asleep. I’m totally used to this now, but when she first started doing it I would wake up and scream like the movie mogul in The Godfather who finds his favorite horse’s head in his bed.

She is at least nice enough to lick the back half clean first.

c-suite

CEO, CTO, CFO etc. In a '90s Internet startup like the company I worked for, the “C” really stood for “clueless”.

giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases

Over-normalization is a database thing - a simple example of normalization would be a “People” table where instead of having the “Salutation” field just contain text like Mr, Mrs. etc., you have a separate “Salutations” table with all the possibilities listed and keyed with an ID (usually just a sequential number), and then the “People” table stores a Salutation ID for each entry instead of the actual text. It’s a valid and standard thing to do with database design, but it can be taken to extremes where absolutely every possible trivial thing that can be normalized is, producing an overcomplicated mess that is extremely difficult to work with programmatically.

Printing out this over-normalized mess of a database on multiple sheets of paper which are then taped to the wall is utterly useless.

How is a database a trick?

The printout is the trick - it fools the bosses into thinking you’re doing something amazing and productive when you’re really just fucking around. It only works on the technically incompetent, of which there was no shortage in '90s Internet startups (or today).

Yeah, BeOS was awesome. I remember a coworker showing it to me in 1996 - he also taught me how to wow the c-suite with giant printouts of insanely over-normalized databases, a parlor trick that has served me well over the years.

As I recall, Gasse was offered something like $440 million for BeOS by Apple and he turned them down. Not sure it would have made any difference in anything by this point, but at least Objective-C wouldn’t have been littered with classes with the “NS” prefix.

Is BeOS still floating around?

They have the close, minimize and full screen buttons in the upper left corner instead of the upper right.

/s just in case.

They get taken over by sales & marketing types

Like Steve Jobs lol.

Faith in humanity: restored. Breathed’s humanity, anyways.

Bloom County was so good. I can only hope that Berkeley Breathed hasn’t become a rightwing crackpot cunt like so many of the other cartoonists from his era. I’m genuinely afraid to look it up.

I didn’t know either lol. I’ve also never heard of Lloyd Austin. For that matter, I’m not sure who was secretary of defense during Facts of Life’s run - “Casper Weinberger” comes to mind for some reason.

OK. Now who’s the secretary of defense?

This will be an incredibly dated reference, but back in the '80s there was a comic who would ask the crowd who the black girl in The Facts of Life (TV show) was and there’d be a chorus of people yelling “Tudy! Tudy! Tudy!” Then he’d ask who the secretary of defense was.