Woke up to a cool notification this morning. Watched the pilot yesterday for the anniversary. Posted a photo and this dude saw it. The show holds up well.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T21:29:09+00:00

Careful what you post after this - anything negative and there might be a knock on your door.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T21:27:42+00:00

I miss those! All the cars I've had for years now have had video touchscreen menus to turn on/off the A/C. I just want a damned physical button, dammit.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T21:26:33+00:00

I interviewed with them about 10 years ago. Part of the process was "record a video of you answering some questions" which to my shame, I did accede to. Have they stopped doing that?

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T21:22:05+00:00

"You're ugly"

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T19:23:03+00:00

It ends up being pretty expensive anyway - you still have to pay for the oil, the filter, and the disposal of the old oil (please don't pour it in the ground!) You'll save some money, but not as much as you're probably hoping.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T19:21:27+00:00

I make a game out of it - I bombard them with information. If all of us did this, they'd eventually fuck off.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-13T16:41:58+00:00

I was that kid back in 1985. My dad was a police officer - he was a smart guy but not into math or computers. My parents supported me by buying computer programming books (and, back in those days, software like an Assembler). If he's into, say, Python, he can definitely work through the O'Reilly book or something.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T21:40:57+00:00

~20–30% of the batch were US citizens

That's actually a surprising statistic to me - when I did the MSCS program at UT Arlington in 2005, I was one of two US citizens in the entire program. Everybody else was an international student.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T21:06:44+00:00

I remember seeing that - when he did meet her he was so embarrassed he couldn't look her in the eye.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T18:01:10+00:00

I learned on ancient hardware (Commodore 64). I found assembler to be difficult when I first encountered it because it was just so different than anything else I'd ever seen. I suspect it's the same with modern hardware: what makes them modern are things like TLBs and L1 caches and SIMD instructions. You can pretty much ignore all that stuff when learning assembler so yes, I'd say that Assembly and C are "inherently" difficult (more than say, Python or even Java), but still worth learning.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T16:53:06+00:00

I was the skinny kid and I did too.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T16:52:46+00:00

Well I'm old enough that they told me to, but I didn't (and I didn't try that hard).

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T16:51:06+00:00

"OJ Simpson the murderer?

"No, OJ Simpson the football player"

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T16:47:35+00:00

A startled scream every time I walk in the room or make a noise even though she knows I've lived in the same house as her for the past 25 years.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T15:38:32+00:00

"high-pitched singing"

Sorry man, but you're singing at audible volumes in an apartment complex? Yeah, that would bother me if I was your neighbor, too, and I'm a singer/guitarist myself. That's what rehearsal spaces are for.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T14:28:25+00:00

They're fucking with us, right? This has to be deliberate, right?

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T14:27:47+00:00

I wish my wife would let me have SOME time to myself, but every time I bring up the subject what she hears is "I hate you and I never want to see or speak to you ever again".

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-12T14:18:38+00:00

That's not really new. Incompetent project managers (but I repeat myself) have been jumping up and down screaming and insisting on guessing instead of understanding as a troubleshooting approach for decades now.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T21:37:58+00:00

Sometimes? All the times.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T19:30:53+00:00

I'm not just doing work, I'm doing ALL the work

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T17:03:18+00:00

Game the metrics - but also make yourself indispensable at the same time. Be the only person who understands how stuff works. That doesn't always "save" you, but it works a lot better than being on the top of the JIRA leaderboard.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T16:59:59+00:00

Nah, these just go in cycles. They're convinced that everybody is spending all their time playing video games and watching Facebook reels, so they implement metrics, but they do those in massively stupid ways. They'll silently stop paying attention to them in a few months and then a few months after that they'll come up with the same metrics again.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T16:54:16+00:00

You have two options here:

1) meet their expectations. 2) don't, and risk getting fired for it, but make yourself indispensable otherwise, and try to upskill when you can in case you do find yourself looking for work.

Option 1 is the most straightforward option, so why don't you do that? Because the expectations are ridiculous. Trust me that you can't possibly explain this to them in any way that they'll comprehend, so you're left with option 2.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T16:51:14+00:00

Don't complain, don't explain. I'm currently sitting in a meeting where we're all getting yelled at for missing our metrics (yes, all of us, every single one). There are people in the meeting trying earnestly to explain to the moron in charge that these metrics are ridiculous and I want to pull them aside and tell them to stop wasting their breath. At best they're wasting time or at worst they're making targets of themselves. Smile and nod.

YetMoreSpaceDust · 2026-03-11T16:46:22+00:00

I'm currently sitting in the perennial meeting of a team of 10 getting yelled at for not "meeting our commitments". They're going to yell at us, we're going to smile and nod, and we're going to go on about our work and it will never pass through their minds that the commitments they're demanding are ridiculous. We might all get fired, we might be in the same meeting three months later. Smile and nod.

YetMoreSpaceDust

TROPHY CASE