It wasn’t (and still isn’t) a decent gig as a young professor, especially not in a field where you can’t bring in much grant money. Making even decent money in academia requires decades of seniority, and the really big bucks requires popular fame (a la Stephen Jay Gould) or enormous research grants that your institution gets to take 30% or 40% of.

I was in grad school in the '90s and went out drinking six nights a week (Monday nights were for studying, as best I can recall). Like 5pm to 3am drinking plus a bunch of weed at somebody’s house or apartment afterwards. These days I would literally commit murder to not have to do something like that even one night.

You must be fun at parties

This meme is even more annoying than SpaceX employees being ordered to cheer.

Not to mention that Musk himself contributed nothing to SpaceX’s technical achievements. All he did was insist that the audio of their launches and recoveries include employees cheering maniacally - easily the most annoying aspect of SpaceX.

Tomo pomo (“see you tomorrow, postmodernist”).

All I need to be featured on a crime show is otherwise intelligent, educated people who type “u” in place of “you”. The only thing that can make someone seem dumber is a backwards baseball cap.

Don’t forget about Redmond! Some of the biggest programming fuckups I’ve ever met in my life ended up working for Microsoft, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

I used to work for a west coast tech giant. The UI designers always laid screens out on paper (literally paper printouts with a crude mockup of a mobile phone on it) and reacted with outright personal hostility to my suggestion that their designs be tried out on focus groups before being put into production. “Users don’t know what they want” was something I heard many times. The UX people always supported them, while doing - so far as I could tell - nothing whatsoever themselves.

Our apps got tons of one-star reviews, usually with comments like “I gave this app one star because you can’t give an app zero stars”.

I don’t think they’re Sackett Board as they’re much thicker and heavier than 1/4" and they’re not layered in any way. They are preformed plaster and they have sort of tongue-and-groove edges like modern ceiling tiles so that two edges are supported by neighboring panels so as they’re installed they only have to be nailed off on two edges. Installation must have been a two-man job, at least on the ceiling. The houses in my neighborhood were built as temporary housing for shipyard workers and were certainly never meant to last 80+ years, and yet here they all still are - only two of the original 320 are gone and they were torn down intentionally to make room for a baseball diamond. I watch these house inspector videos on Youtube and just laugh my ass off at what pieces of utter shit modern houses are.

The hat wasn’t a slouch hat unless that term is broader than I think. It was green waxed canvas with a small front brim and little ear flaps with ties. It even had a tag with the contract number and year on it, which confirmed when the house was built. I was going to wear it but it had a bunch of little moth- or other-critter- holes in it and I stupidly threw it away.

I recently bought a house that was built in 1942 and I’ve been renovating it. I tore down one of the interior walls and reused the studs (which incidentally were completely straight and free of knots, unlike any modern 2x4 I’ve ever seen) to build a new wall. When I put the wall in place it didn’t quite fit and when I measured I realized it was 1/2" too tall. I don’t normally make measurement errors of that magnitude and it took me a while to figure out that the studs I was reusing were not 3.5"x1.5" like modern 2x4s but were actually 3.75"x1.75" (so the base plate and head plate being thicker than I thought was producing the problem). Apparently the transition from real 2x4 to BS 2x4 dimensions was gradual, who knew.

One other weird thing was how the interior walls and ceilings were covered. I’ve worked on a lot of 19th century houses with lathe and plaster and of course I’ve worked with modern sheet rock. This 1942 house was in a transitional phase that used 16"x16" blocks of 1" thick rough plaster that were nailed to the studs, and then finish plasterers came in and put a smooth plaster coat over these rough blocks. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and removing these rough plaster blocks was a monstrous bitch - each one weighs as much as a solid rock of those dimensions and I have no idea how a few nails were holding them up on the ceiling joists.

Also found a hat in the attic from 1942. I like to imagine some young worker wondering for the rest of his life where he put his favorite hat.

expressly designed to carry on regardless

I’m surprised they didn’t borrow On Error Resume Next from Visual Basic. Which was wrongly considered to be the worst thing in Visual Basic - when the real worst thing was On Error Resume. On Error Resume Next at least moved on to the next line of code when an error occurred; On Error Resume just executed the error-generating line again … and again … and again … and again …

That is absolutely (n > 1) * ("ba" + 0/0 + "a")

Always Infosys

Better to use Ubereats or Grubhub and double the cost of your food while ensuring you eat it at room temperature an hour after you order it.

I thought you were going to say something about naked kickboxing and I was preparing my hardiest “duh”.

I feel more like I’m dancing when I run or cycle in time to music, and that makes it seem more like fun than exercise. Same rationale as when I got high as a kite before/during my runs/rides. When I quit smoking weed, I was very worried that I was also going to quit exercising but that turned out not to be the case, fortunately.

I played naked frisbee on the front lawn of my college once. I thought it would be effortless but in fact it’s extremely painful to have your nuts bouncing around unsupported like that. But I kept at it until the Dean of Students came up to me and asked me to put my clothes back on because it was prospective weekend and there were a bunch of high school students with their parents standing off to one side. I thought I was accurately representing what the college was all about but he thought otherwise.

I felt bad years later when I found out the Dean’s brother had been murdered in Mississippi during the civil rights era (they even made a Hollywood movie about this incident). He must have felt great knowing his brother had been killed fighting for black people, and he was busy making stupid white boys put their pants back on.

Downvoted for complaining about complaining about downvotes.

caused irreparable harm to the company as the whole product has to be redone from the ground up

Lol this is most projects for most companies I’ve worked for, long before AI came on the scene. Somehow these multi-year multi-million dollar disasters were never fatal.