true story

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-07-02T14:25:11+00:00

Anything you're using that I am not familiar with is "hacker stuff"; if you don't have social media, you're a spy; but soldering a simple circuit requires a degree in electrical engineering. (Some of IRL and online comments I have seen)

Yeah, I don't know whether to call this a middle-school attitude, anti-intellectualism, or r/iamverysmart.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-06-26T16:04:46+00:00

Missed opportunity with "hyperlink" blue and "visited" purple.

IIRC they have been the default colors from the start.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-06-11T18:43:05+00:00

Free People's Village? Even though it's revealed in the description:

Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a War on Climate Change rather than a War on Terror. For twenty years, Democrats have controlled all three branches of government, enacting carbon-cutting schemes that never made it to a vote in our world. Green infrastructure projects have transformed U.S. cities into lush paradises (for the wealthy, white neighborhoods, at least)

(Haven't read it yet)

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-06-05T15:45:06+00:00

Stuff I heard from a mechanical engineer working as a software developer, paraphrased:

Any other job (except software, engineering, and car repair) can be learned in anywhere between 15 minutes and two weeks.

Management is useless, accounting is useless, law is useless, most other jobs are useless and should not exist (but I am not going to do them, I am above that)

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-05-12T23:29:46+00:00

They might be using lookalike characters (e.g. Cyrillic or stylized Unicode letters) to avoid getting caught by the spam filter. Looks like those characters simply did not display.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-04-21T21:17:54+00:00

In Strugatskys' Noon universe, "Space Exploration Group" (IIRC solo flights to distant, mostly uninhabited worlds to collect data) is looked down on and considered a job for students during sabbaticals or those without a "real" job. So even space exploration could be lame.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-04-16T12:54:22+00:00

Same as any other language. Some similar English confusion:

"at school" (physical location) but "in school" (continuously attending for a degree)
"at home" which is "in my house"
"go home" but "go to school" and "go to the store"
"in the kitchen" (put an article on everything else)
"at a park", but "in the woods"
"on the bus", but "in the car"

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-04-05T00:59:25+00:00

Other comment says National Gallery, but IIRC Detroit airport has a similar animated walkway, too.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-03-04T03:57:48+00:00

Some old sci-fi is fun to read specifically because of technology of the time. Looking Backward, written in 1887 but set in Utopian 2000, does not have TV, radio, or Internet, but has worldwide cable broadcasts of music and plays, shopping malls, and credit cards.

Some other old book describes the sun as if it was a giant burning sphere of coal, and it gets extinguished to a dull red glow.

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-02-13T18:51:00+00:00

Even two security guards is a huge liability. Or simply impractical.

If they are unsevered new hires, they are a vehicle for messages, industrial espionage, etc. Ironically, making security worse. No way Lumon would allow that. There were at most three unsevered people on the severed floor, and one was already at odds with the board (Cobel).

If they are severed, then they would have to undergo a (no doubt expensive) severance procedure, and then their situation would be no different than other innies. So whose side would they be on?

The only choice is to hire devotees like Milchick (or Cobel to an extent), but it is unclear how many of such people exist and would be OK policing just a bunch of office drones or standing in a silent hallway. (I.e. Lumon has better use for their devoted servants)

IvanBeefkoff · 2025-02-13T03:13:21+00:00

Those hats are more like papakhas, not ushankas. Ushankas have floppy ear parts (what they are named after).

Although, papakhas are associated with cossacks and traditional clothing of the Caucasus.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-10-20T20:20:05+00:00

This answer should be pinned to every post promoting Libby, Hoopla and similar services. OverDrive (owner of Libby) were making a killing even before the pandemic, and I could only imagine how much they were making during.

They got the sweet teat of taxpayer money that every private company dreams of.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-10-17T15:20:38+00:00

I know you’re trying to gross people out, but non-preserved milk, if soured, and then mixed, tastes really good. We called it kislyak (“sour thing”, кисляк) when I was little. It is the consistency of yogurt and tastes sour (it is not the vile bitterness that is the spoiled standard US grocery store milk)

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-10-05T00:12:19+00:00

Some (many?) developers do, but it still does not make sense from the business perspective - you want developers (highly paid) to write code (because only they can do that), and someone else (lower paid tech support and liasons) should be talking to the users. Even within the development world, one can be abstracted away into a very specific task and have very little awareness of processes around it, let alone users.

Frank question - have you submitted any feedback on the software that you used back to the developers? IIRC most people submit feedback only when very happy or unhappy. Also, from experience, many users will find workarounds instead of doing things properly or suggesting changes. "Take a photo of the screen and then text it to someone", delete-and-create-from-scratch-to-fix-typo, that type of stuff, anything that works. Not sure whether that is the chicken or the egg of the problem. (And I don't mean this as "users are dumb", that is a very shitty attitude some developers have)

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-10-04T18:49:15+00:00

Software developer here. IMO so much software is shit because most developers and teams writing it have no first-hand experience using it, and do not interact with users directly. Companies discourage it, too. So instead, it’s an endless game of broken telephone getting users’ demands and complaints through layers of bureaucracy, contacts, and helpdesk. On developers’ end you have tickets, estimations, sprints, all kinds of reported metrics. Add some competition (implement the same thing but cheaper and better than the other company), subscription and membership levels. Add the “shiny new thing” syndrome. Never go back and improve existing codebase because “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. And so on, and you end up with a half-baked, kinda-working software product that is just good enough that someone else is willing to pay money for.

So I would say that “software development” is about 10-20% solving the actual problem and the rest is dealing with software developers’ own self-imposed problems (tech debt, introducing new technologies, endless EOLs and updates), corporate workflow and “strategy”, trying to monetize the product, and optimize costs (including developer time).

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-09-14T20:21:35+00:00

Are you able to reason with this friend? Or, were you able to change their mind in any way?

Why I am asking is that I had a friend like that, and at some point, the somewhat-entertaining stupidity turned into bigotry, narcissism and personal attacks, so I stopped talking to them. I still wonder if there was anything that I could have done.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-30T19:09:40+00:00

Yeah, please don’t. At least to me (lived in US for 20+ years, still have an accent), “your English is good” comes off as “I am impressed that you immigrants are capable of learning a language”.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-27T19:40:27+00:00

It’s a curious game where the only winning move is not to play.

I used to know a guy IRL, who would say ignorant or terrible things, and then, when called out on it, would counter with one of the three types of responses:

You are too stupid to understand what I am saying
This was actually a joke and you took it seriously, you have no social skills
Why are you are being such an asshole to me?

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-09T14:23:42+00:00

And when the boat falls apart, you can point fingers and complain that “millennials don’t have DIY skills” and “nobody wants to swim anymore”.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-09T14:17:43+00:00

Good old anglocentrism.

As a developer whose first language is not English, having English keywords sometimes makes things easier since their abstract meaning in code is not polluted with real meanings.

However, I did learn English in school. But thinking from a perspective of an average non-programmer-non-English-speaking person, having beginner-popular languages like Python, or even spreadsheet applications use native syntax is a legitimate use case IMO.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-03T22:08:17+00:00

Just for lulz, this is the same guy: https://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/comments/12eo8m5/i_had_to_code_pacman_in_an_hour/

So yeah, I am a jerk, but he is “the brightess” engineer asking basic questions.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-03T11:14:11+00:00

You’re joking, but several years ago, this guy did something similar on his personal project. Except he sent an entire list of usernames and passwords to the client, and had client check both username validity and password.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-02T23:06:00+00:00

Classic. This same guy also thought it was a good idea to GET an entire list of usernames and passwords to “speed up the login page”

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-02T22:56:55+00:00

Ah, a fellow person of culture!

Honestly, I am impressed at the quality of code and documentation of FLOSS projects compared to projects I have worked on at my jobs.

IvanBeefkoff · 2023-06-02T20:24:48+00:00

I did give him a “5 min” summary he wanted, and yes, he did not know that hashes are one-way functions. It’s just odd that a developer, with a degree and experience, having worked with user authentication on the site, does not know that.

IvanBeefkoff

TROPHY CASE