The collective man-hours this would have saved people, if we had it back in 1999, would be staggering.

people love over engineering the fuck out of technology

Exhibit A: 2.85 Million packages, as of mid-2023

Rust is still in the locker room having an argument with their coach (borrow checker).

War boys from Fury Road?

This describes how most people have it deployed, yes.

It gets real fun when you have custom Java plugins, Groovy script, BASH script, Windows runners, and Linux runners, all in play at the same time. Much of which is held together with hopes, dreams, and unicorn farts, willed into existence by wizards that haven’t worked there in over seven years. If upper management could even comprehend the level of deferred maintenance and haphazard software hackery that birthed this electronic Gordian knot, this unholy union of decrepit software and company policy, they wouldn’t sleep. Ever.

It really should be “parlay.txt”.

Or more subtly, when the command uses BSD (nowadays Go) style single-dash args, so it wants -help and not --help.

That’s $400k worth of house and $500k worth of windows. Lotta big custom glass in there.

FROM Software: Fuck that, we’re doing fog-walls.

It’s outstanding at bridging the gap between “I need to mash these two concepts/technologies together” and “the answer is spread across six different StackOverflow threads.” Hunting that stuff down using Google has been a delicate operation even at the best of times in the last 25 years, but it always took a lot of time. With an LLM and each such query, I’ve saved hours, maybe even whole workdays. Fact-checking an AI takes far less effort.

The Trade Federation greatly appreciates useful imports.

Until the next day when they had the realisation that MSDN windows API docs are garbage, tried the supposedly not-working flag and it actually did work.

This now leaves us with an uncomfortable question: is the real bug in the docs, or the API implementation? If it’s the latter, it’s at risk of being patched out since the behavior doesn’t match the docs.

Edit: did a grammar.

It’s worse if you have ever worked in food service. “App” is short for “appetizer”.

::cries in very specific form of confusion::

It’s all good man. If that came across as a sharp criticism of this work, I apologize. Usually, folks stir up debate on these things without any of it directed at the author. My text doesn’t convey this sentiment at all, so I left it open for interpretation. Rest assured, I got a good chuckle from this meme and simply want to express a personal opinion on what I would have done differently (had I not been too lazy to make a meme myself). I’ll go clean up my comment to help make all this clear to others. Thanks for understanding.

ASM is much closer to true neutral. There are no high-level language rules/laws, no other man-made constructs on top of the silicon. We are speaking the language of machines, forever moving bytes between registers and addresses. Nothing more.

Edit: to be clear, the meme is great as-is. But I’m left wondering if this observation would also fit the format?

The dominant approach at the time were Expert Systems. This used a lot of carefully crafted data and manually curated facts that the inference engine can use. It also fit in a MUCH smaller footprint compared to conventional neural networks. But you also don’t get real language processing, reasoning beyond the target problem domain, and stuff like that - it’s laser focused and built on very small amounts of data. Much of the research from back then centers on using Lisp and Prolog of all things, so BASIC isn’t a big stretch.

I’ve seen matrixed organizations (re)build themselves to Agile (multi-disciplinary) ad-hoc teams, where there are clearly some such teams that wildly outperform the others. Basically you just hope and pray you’re plugged into one of the good ones. Meanwhile none of the lower-tier managers have any real control over workflow, workload, or what anyone is actually doing.

Don’t feel stupid. It’s bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There’s literally too much for any one person to know, and it’s been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.

Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don’t know. Most people in this industry understand and don’t judge.

As for the ^ thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990’s. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it’s kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.

That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.

They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.