When your IDE glitches and nothing works when you know it should work-“What do you meant it’s an error? WTF ARE YOU SMOKING IDE?” *restarts IDE* “Ohh well would you look at that, everything works, I fucking love my job!”
When the while loop keeps crashing everything and you can’t figure out how to make it not infinite, and you’re like- “alright, it’s time to contain the beast”
(Reviewing a problem with a group of peers before a Java test) Me: —and you know what a constructor is, right? Three of four peers: *blink, exhausted* Fourth peer: No, we weren’t taught anything. Me: *incoherent squeaking* *erases stuff on white board to make room for a new wave of illegible handwriting*
Professor: “You have to do the first part of exam on paper. No, you cannot use anything else and you’ll get a completely new problem that you’ve never seen before that’s essentially a mix of everything we’ve done for the whole semester. And during the class we can only show you the examples we know and have done for years previously. HF!”
What the documentation said: “This software is compatible with Windows OS.”
What the documentation meant: “You can theoretically compile this on Windows, as long as you download a Linux-like command prompt, download an executable to handle Linux-specific decompression algorithms, change the line endings on every file, and manage to install several other dependencies that do not have Windows compatible versions.”
Programmer, who wrote the rest of their program in with Windows OS specific code, not realizing this: *endless crying*
For reasons I don’t feel like getting into, I’m currently working on a Windows 7 laptop, and today I was charmed to see that it provided me this classic list of images to choose from for a User icon.
yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had a short training article on recognizing computer-generated faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly cycled right back to IF YE MEET A MAN ON THE ROAD, COUNT HIS FINGERS LEST YE DEAL UNKNOWING WITH A FAE
Furthermore,the Fae are bad at counting so you can detect their glamours by numbering their teeth. It’s a perfectly sensible fantasy trope - and yet, I can’t recall reading any stories where that happened in fiction before, you know, it happened in real life.
“I chose an android because the android to me represents ‘the other’ in our society,” she said in 2010. “I can connect to the other, because it has so many parallels to my own life – just by being a female, African-American artist in today’s music industry. … Whether you’re called weird or different, all those things we do to make people uncomfortable with themselves, I’ve always tried to break out of those boundaries.”
Dirty Computer opens with an ominous voiceover spoken by Monáe, who coldly informs us of the bleak reality we’re about to enter. “They started calling us Computers,” she intones. “People began vanishing – and the Cleaning began. You were dirty if you looked different. You were dirty if you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty if you showed any form of opposition at all.”
“Napier’s bones are a manually-operated calculating device created by John Napier of Merchiston, Scotland for calculation of products and quotients of numbers. The method was based on Arab mathematics and the lattice multiplication used by Matrakci Nasuh in the Umdet-ul Hisab and Fibonacci’s work in his Liber Abaci. The technique was also called Rabdology. Napier published his version in 1617 in Rabdology, printed in Edinburgh, Scotland, dedicated to his patron Alexander Seton.” (Wikipedia).
Book review: REALLY thorough explanation of the history and inner workings of the Antikythera mechanism! For anyone who needs a refresher, the Antikythera mechanism is “an ancient Greek analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance … retrieved from the sea in 1901 … among wreckage retrieved from a wreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera” [Wikipedia]. I’m a real ancient tech buff, and it was too detailed even for me, so I just flipped through like a magazine, perusing the graphics and reading the parts that caught my eye. Cool stuff! Highly recommend for academic research or just to add to your computer science and/or history libraries.
You’re talking about the small amounts of silver in solder, right? Would that completely get rid of their image or just make it look weird? And what about film cameras? Was there silver in film?
YES FILM IS DEVELOPED USING SILVER HALIDE
TIME FOR AN OBJECT LESSON IN ARCANE MATERIAL SCIENCE, MORE COMMONLY KNOWN AS ALCHEMY
SIMPLY PUT SILVER HAS NATURAL PROPERTIES THAT FUCK WITH CURSES
IMAGINE A CURSE AS A CAREFUL PATTERN MADE OF IRON OBJECTS AND IMAGINE SILVER AS A MAGNET
THE CURSE COULD BE MADE OUT OF BALL BEARINGS AND BE TOTALLY DESTROYED BY CONTACT WITH SILVER
OR IT COULD BE A HEAVY METAL CHAIN THAT UPON INTRODUCTION OF A MAGNET IS ONLY SLIGHTLY TUGGED OUT OF PLACE BUT NEVER BROKEN
VAMPIRES ARE THE RESULT OF AN ANCIENT BLOODLINE CURSE SO TAKING A PICTURE OF ONE IS SORT OF LIKE TRYING TO PAINT A PICTURE OF A VAMPIRE BY THROWING METAL DARTS AT A DARTBOARD BUT YOUR DARTBOARD IS A POWERFUL ELECTROMAGNET MEANT TO DEFLECT DARTS
MODERN ELECTRONICS ARE MUCH MORE ACCURATE AND SO THE EFFECTS OF THE CURSE/SILVER REACTION CAUSE DISTORTED IMAGES OFTEN ATTRIBUTED TO MALFUNCTION
From Wikipedia: “In electronics, a vacuum tube, an electron tube, or valve (British usage) or, colloquially, a tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied.”
The above photo is of “later thermionic vacuum tubes, mostly miniature style, some with top cap anode connections for higher voltages.”
Eine Zusammenstellung von Elektronenröhren.
Von links nach rechts: 5676 (Mini-Triode) EAA91 (Doppel-Diode) 1T4 / DF91 (Batterieröhren-Pentode) ECC82 (Doppel-Triode) ECF80 (Triode und Pentode in einer Röhre) EZ80 (Doppel-Netzgleichrichterdiode) Wahrscheinlich DY86 (Hochspannungsdiode) EY88 (Leistungsdiode)
2SH27L in einem unpassenden Sockel (Russische Pentode)
Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak’s Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to create relays (“similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors”) that can do computational work according to simple programs; it’s installed at the Angewandte Innovation Lab in Vienna.
PSA to anyone who’s thinking about adopting devs. I’ve noticed a huge rise in popularity of devs lately and there are some tips yall NEED to know:
For starters, if you notice your devs start making a lot of random, unnecessary, aggravating UX changes to your website: such as palette changes, button rearrangement, sometimes just deleting entire features. This is a sign your dev does not have enough enrichment in their enclosure. Theywillresort to these self-destructive behaviors if they are not properly cared for!! This is a serious problem that not many website owners seem to acknowledge. Your devs are living beings, and though you think it might be cute to have them program your website, you need to be responsible for them. Without proper stimulation and enrichment and guidance in their environment they willstart ordering posts by popularity, instead of in chronological order.
Devsneedreliable project management in their lives, I cannot stress this enough. Engineers cannotreason out good aesthetic design like most people can! Their brains are logic-driven and they wear the same three outfits in rotation every day, they do not understand UI design. “Well my family had a dev growing up and they designed our wesbite just fine.” I’m tired of hearing excuses like this. It just gives other people a pass to mistreat their devs. Don’t do this.
Furthermore, devs needat least two full-sized monitors, a well-maintained team git repo, and a fully stocked snack bowl. Devs are grazers who eat chips and pretzels while actively doing their work. You can’t expect devs to abide by certain meal times. (Their natural habitat is in soggy basements with mothers providing doritos and snacks, so they need similar care in your home). Also, the old wives’ tale about devs needing rubber ducks in their environment is actually just a myth – any inanimate object to yell at will do just fine.
Pleasespread this. So so so many people are trying to run websites without the slightest idea how to keep a happy, healthy dev. It breaks my heart to see mishandled devs, who shouldbe great additions to any website, instead end up turning on high-contrast mode permanently, removing pictures of sand dunes and babies with a broken p0rn detecting AI, and sometimes just deleting entire users, features, and posts accidentally. This is not cute. Do not get a dev if you cannot care for them properly. This has been a PSA.
Also, please, please don’t house your devs with marketers!! This stresses out the dev and will also exacerbate any existing behavioral problems, or even add new ones as the marketer attempts to gain dominance! Even if they don’t share an enclosure, any sort of contact, even supervised, can cause issues if the marketer is particularly aggressive. I know that this is promoted as the normal standard of care and even “cute” by major companies, but this is terrible husbandry. Devs are often blamed for destructive behavior that they’re bullied into by the marketers they are sharing too-close quarters in.
(To be frank, I think marketers as a breed were a mistake- the traditional salesperson breed they were developed from is a much healthier example of the species, though still not an appropriate cubiclemate for a dev. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t think marketers deserve good homes, with experienced owners who can set strong boundaries, but I do think breeding of them should end. Sorry not sorry if I’m stepping on anyone’s toes)
Speaking of cubicles, I know they’re not ideal housing, but they are far superior for housing multiple devs than the trendy “open office” habitats.
