I meant to say commits and not merges, and yes he removed the comments before committing. It made no difference in long run because every new release broke all the accessibility stuff anyway. It’s amazing how little developers can be made to care about blind people - almost as little as managers. The only reason my company cared at all was they were facing million-dollar-a-month fines from the FCC.
I spent a year making my company’s iOS apps accessible (meaning usable for the blind and people with vision disabilities). I had to do a lot of weird shit either because of bugs in Apple’s VoiceOver technology or because of the strange way in which our code base was broken up into modules (some of which I did not have access to) and I would always put in comments explaining why I was doing what I was doing. The guy doing code review and merges would always just remove my comments (without any other changes) because he felt that not only were comments unnecessary but also they were a “code smell” indicating professional incompetence. I feel sorry for whoever had to deal with that stuff at a later point.
I’ve never had a manager that was even aware of the comments vs. no comments issue. If I ever had, I would have just told them that a lack of comments makes the original coder harder to replace.
lazy programmers
I don’t think they’re lazy, I think they’re not good writers. Not being able to write well is very common among programmers (not having to communicate with written language is one reason a lot of people go into coding) and in my experience the Venn diagrams for “not a good writer” and “thinks comments are unnecessary” overlap perfectly.
Why the kitana was a super-sword.
Kinda random, but: the first device capable of measuring the size of an object to a one millionth of an inch resolution was built in the 1840s. So this would have been old technology when Abe got his fax.
I frequently drive between Philadelphia and the DC area on I-95, and it’s like Bizarro Earth as far as lanes go: the slowest cars are always in the left-most lanes with people passing on the right at 25 mph or more over the limit. My favorite is people who get on the express lanes (which you pay extra to use) and then go 10 mph under the limit.
Don’t worry, they will figure out that without humans releasing gasses they have no purpose, so they will cull most of the human population but keep just enough to justify their existence to manage it.
Unfortunately this statement also applies to the 1%. And the “just enough” will get smaller and smaller as AI and automation replace humans.
This is why people voting for the Green party candidate (I’m not even going to bother looking up his name) piss me off so much. The core of the republican strategy is disenfranchisement and voting Green is literally self-disenfranchisement. You’re doing the Republicans’ work for them.
The Art of the Squeal
Ha ha “asks”.
I actually grew up next to the Cuyahoga in the '70s, and it’s mind-boggling how disgusting that river was. Used tires and rusted steel chemical barrels everywhere, and the surface covered with a sheen of oil or who knows what the fuck it was. The concept of a beautiful rivers edge was laughable back then, as the river was lined with various plants and factories with big drainage pipes jutting out over the water discharging … stuff. And this was about 30 miles from the part that actually caught fire (which was in Cleveland). I really don’t understand why that river wasn’t just on fire all the time.
My parents founded an organization that cleaned the river up (at least the part of it in our town) and turned it into a beautiful park and walking trail. I’m so proud of them for that, but sadly these victories are never permanent.
When I say “I’m not interested in politics”, what I mean is “I can’t bear to listen to another right-wing crank regurgitating the latest bullshit he’s read on Infowars”. Sometimes it means “I can’t bear to listen to my 100% white sister-in-law castigate me for not using the term ‘LatinX’”.
My ancient macbook has a cd drive, but it stopped recognizing the drive years ago and of course there’s no physical eject button. It Just Works!
Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!
I like how everyone bitches about gas station sushi, but the hotdogs being kept bacterial-paradise-warm on rollers until the end of time are A-OK.
As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn’t want to verify that what I’d done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I’d already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.
It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.
A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can’t use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don’t really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it’s a general problem.
YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO USES CAPSLOCK!
Don’t forget about being able to build overpasses too low for buses to fit.
I do like the thought of Moses rolling in his grave over the fact that they eventually started building lower buses.