suzzer99

I helped develop a web app used by major drug companies in 2001 that's still in use as far as I can tell. Marvel at the Dreamweaver-enabled design: https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon...

On the show Pioneer House, the drudgery and physical toll of hand-washing clothes was the #1 complaint.

Did he ever share the raw source?

They really missed out on a chance to go with 'negatrons' instead of antiprotons.

Even the biggest bands only have 5% of their songs be huge hits. For any creative endeavor you're going to have some whiffs. The ratio of whiffs to hits probably depends on the nature of the medium.

One of the best episodes of Mythbusters when they recreated this.

You might love this if you haven't seen it. Youtuber wanders into what he thought was an abandoned game and ends up having an amazing time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XjRNNkAKRM

Yeah it's super fast for search, which is the other big reason I'm still on it. The pain in the ass part is when you want to integrate some package that doesn't play nice right off the bat.

I'm still on SublimeText, which is old, and a pain in the ass, but at least is not being actively enshittified.

I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points.

It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?

I assume because the market for crappy customer service isn't big enough to justify current AI company valuations.

You just invented Skynet.

It's repetitive and controlled if you don't care about the outcome, which monopoly companies don't.

In the case of the North Sentinelese, this incident in 1880 might have something to do with their hostility to the outside world.

> After several days, six Sentinelese—an elderly couple and four children—were taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the operation wrote that the entire group "sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents".

Telling codex how to program a feature is a much different, much easier type of thinking than back in the olden days of a year ago, when I had to get everything to work myself. I can't imagine that's going to be great for my long-term brain health.

Well supposedly it was caused by a landslide blocking the river for a few minutes, then the dam burst all at once.

I feel like I've easily seen more than that get swept away in videos.

I wonder if the river went dry first, like the water receding off into the horizon before a tsunami?

I clicked an ad for a quote on a shower door, followed the prompts, and gave my # to what seemed like a single company. The phone calls haven't stopped since.

The Aztecs had the same mythical reverence for the Toltecs.

At a few companies I've worked at, they squelch this kind of bug/security breach reporting by immediately making it the discoverer's job to fix the problem and champion it through the system to production, taking on all responsibility if something breaks of course. You only have to go through that once to get the message.

We had a guy making $60k leave for a job making $110k. This is in LA. So it was close!

Doesn't that support my argument? They leave because they can make more money elsewhere.

This is standard because after a year of experience, a fresh junior dev is worth roughly twice as much on the open market. Most companies won't give a 100% raise because it would upset the apple cart with other employees wanting similar raises. So the junior dev has to move on to get paid what they're worth.

The problem with CSS is it's a) all broad and no depth and b) constantly adding major new paradigms. If you don't get up to speed and stay there, you lose it.

Pre-AI I'd say I've gotten over the hump 3 times with CSS, only to lose it again by the next time I had to use it in volume.

> like centering a div

We'll of course you're gonna be frustrated if you start with the hardest problem in HTML :/

> it enables the already productive to be proportionally more productive

I finally got a real feature to develop and started using Codex a couple weeks ago. Before that, I was just using ChatGPT for small things. For the most part, I was doing a lot of monkey-patching and deep troubleshooting that I didn't think Codex would be good at.

I was wrong. I had no idea how smart these tools are.

I now realize, as the tech lead on a large project with me, 2 front-end developers, a full-stack-ish developer, a tester, two product people, and a PM - that I could do this entire project more efficiently with just me and the tester.

I'm doing SQL for the first time in 20 years, which would have slowed me down in the past, but not now. It used to take me an hour to program a new feature and two hours to get it to look right, if I had to do the CSS myself. Now I can do that w/o anyone's help. Writing tests used to take as long as writing the code. Maybe it still does, but that's an hour instead of a day. And it's so much less painful. There's no satisfaction of the aha moment when writing tests. It's just a slog.

We're a very small shop that usually only has 1-2 devs on a project. So we're not set up to do big projects, we aren't doing agile, and it's just a mess. We waste probably 80% of our effort just communicating.

The product team was needed/useful in the beginning to define the broad scope of the project and lay down the UI/UX patterns. But now it's like pulling teeth to get them interested in our internal client's ever-evolving wishlist. I can handle that, and always come to the product team with very specific asks when I need UI design help. Just give me the tester, who's so thorough it's annoying, to catch the weird edge cases I hadn't thought of.

I'm not saying I'm God's gift at any of these things, just that I'm reasonably competent at them. It's kind of terrifying what a seasoned full-stack dev with a decent feel for UX and the ability to manage stakeholders can do with this.

It depends on how you define compromise. Is it a compromise to consider things like screen size, load wait times, or the average expected user's attention span? If so, then design is a big juggling act of compromise.

If not, and compromise is just stuff like "add yet another floating ad footer to make the c-suite happy," then absolutely it should be the last tool.

The mouse-driven EMACS I used in the 90s had a text swap feature that was so elegant - highlight one word, double-click another word, and boom - they swap places.