I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks

I use one because I write apps for iOS and you can only do that on a Macbook. It doesn’t make me a fanboi.

Wow thanks, never heard of this before. I was getting all set to buy a new Macbook so I could install the latest versions of Xcode and keep developing iOS apps. Looks like I can keep on abusing my 12yo Macbook instead.

I never once had a manager who even pretended to be a coder, and I’ve worked for a wide variety of companies ranging in size from a few people to tens of thousands. The only technical manager I’ve ever witnessed was myself when I managed teams of developers (and that only happened by accident when I wasn’t really paying attention). Even then I was less of a technical manager and more of a lead developer who also took on management functions because there was nobody else around to do it.

It certainly seems like a manager with actual technical skills would make the best manager of a team of developers, as long as they also have the people skills to do it. And didn’t harbor the desire to fire everybody and just do everything themselves - like I did.

or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

My best manager was a former dentist who quit the profession after just two months because he couldn’t stand the idea of sticking his hands in peoples’ mouths all day long. I don’t think he had anything resembling formal qualifications for management.

I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges

In thirty years as a programmer, I never had a manager who was capable of jumping into any technical challenges at all. For me, the best managers were the ones who kept out of my way and insulated me from their managers.

But at the same time nothing is really expected of you - by the people above or below you. And you make more money than the people doing the actual work.

I grew up in Ohio in the 1970s (which was admittedly a rough decade as far as cold weather was concerned). Generally, the first snowfall was some time in September and at some point in October the ground would be completely covered in snow and you wouldn’t see grass again until April. The snow wasn’t completely gone until May. So essentially it was six months of Winter, three months of Summer and a month and a half each for Spring and Fall. It is certainly not anything like that any more.

Is it an increase? The article @macattack cited does not give any data on how much the IRS collected from high-income earners before this additional push supposedly funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. The article does mention that Republicans in congress recently rescinded more than $20 billion in additional IRS funding, which does suggest that the net benefit was far less than $1.3 billion and might even have been negative. It seems like the kind of breathless article the impact of which relies on people not well understanding the difference between a billion and a trillion.

Fine, revenues are $4.9 trillion. My point is that $1.9 billion is literally a drop in the bucket - hardly an example of the IRS “going after rich people”.

FWIW the US federal budget for 2024 is going to be about $6.8 trillion dollars. So that $1.3 billion is about 0.019% of the total budget. I’d call that a slap on the wrist for the billionaire class except that you can actually feel a slap on the wrist.

“Get rid of those ugly strain reliefs on the plugs!”
“Uh, we don’t make hardware.”
“I don’t care, get rid of them!”

For me, working from home meant eating endangered species for lunch seven days a week instead of just two. Checkmate, liberals.

if the code changes and the comment isn’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous.

People always cite this as a reason comments are bad. In 30+ years as a developer I have seen (and participated in) a lot of failed software projects, but not once has a mismatch between comments and code been the actual cause of the failure. Moreover, the same logic could be applied to the names of methods and variables (“if the code changes and the method and variable names aren’t updated accordingly, it can be ambiguous”) but nobody ever suggests getting rid of that. At the end of the day, comments are useful for imparting information about the code to future developers (or yourself) that is too complicated to be adequately communicated by a method name.

I used to work for a software company that was a beneficiary of a $12 million a year political pork grant from the state of Louisiana that was officially intended for improving industrial and manufacturing capability in Louisiana. Somehow, my company was managing to spend this money in Mississippi, and giving it to a national defense contractor that wasn’t exactly in desperate need of (more) government handouts. That’s how fucking corrupt Mississippi is: they even suck in the corruption from their corrupt neighbors, while making sure that not a penny of that shit goes towards improving a state that I would describe as third-world if it wouldn’t be so insulting to the third world.

I always claimed in job interviews to be good at debugging, but there are no certifications for debugging and there’s really no way for an interviewer to verify such a claim. So even though it is an incredibly important skill, companies just do not look for it. There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

One thing I always liked about the various flavors of BASIC was that nobody ever pushed that shit as a religion.

I wonder when the black-and-white striped shirt first came into existence in France. My guess would be the 1840s because of the spread of power loom technology.

My solution to burglars is being poor.

I can’t even remember the last time I saw a gas range or oven that didn’t have pizoelectric starters. My cousin has a stove from the 1930s, that was probably it.

Maybe he meant he could fix the oven. Which he could … by moving.

Dude/Dudette, it was just a gag comment. Not only am I not really dismissing a massive body of work just because it uses quantization, as someone who’s spent more than half his life writing software synthesis applications, I’ve literally made a career out of quantization.

That being said, music that is not quantized definitely has a more natural feel to it, although putting that “feel” into sequencing software is surprisingly difficult.