It sounds like your healing will never be done until that eternal sleep takes you. My condolences.
Keep an eye on that brain injury. Here’s hoping you missed a bullet with that as well. AIUI, severe shocks like that prematurely age the brain by 20-50 years, making it look like Swiss cheese towards the end. But judging from the quality of your prose (which is excellent), it seems that you aren’t very far down that path just yet. Good luck.
We’ve decarbonised a decent chunk of the world’s energy profile
Unfortunately, things like AI continue to fuel our hunger for power, preventing fossil fuels from being phased out… and as such, CO2 production continues to accelerate uncontrollably.
Yes, atmospheric CO2 production continues to accelerate. It hasn’t even begun to slow down, much less reach a steady state or reverse.
And this is excluding the feedback loops (arctic permafrost, methyl hydrates, etc.) that are now beginning to cook off in nature.
We are still solidly on the “business as usual” path towards civilizational collapse by some point in the 2050s, and functional extinction by some point between 2100 and 2200.
Wow. There is A LOT to unpack, there.
I’d go with the one you are most comfortable in addressing.
every bit of business logic was implemented in Stored Procedures and Triggers on a MSSQL database.
Provided the SP’s are managed in a CVS and pushed to the DB via migrations (similar to Entity Framework), this is simply laborious to the devs. Provided the business rules are simple to express in SQL, this can actually be more performant than doing it in code (although it rarely ever is that simple).
There were no frontend code either on the server, users have some ActiveX controls installed locally that accessed the DB.
This is the actual WTF for me.
Considering the aims of Project 2025, this may end up being illegal within the next four years.
Best to pass this info on to any pre-menopausal women that you know of out there. Having tubes tied still allows eggs to be harvested, it just prevents the sperm from reaching said egg outside of a test tube.
For some reason I cannot fathom for the life of me.
Tell me you are not a man without saying you are not a man.
Any male of our species that has passed through the 12-18yo stage of life will at least understand that humour, even if they have matured beyond it.
I roll my own eyes at shit like that, and would never employ it myself. But I can’t roll my eyes without even a tiny 12yo grin, even though it’s been four decades since I was that age.
He was a rabid trumper
Their “alternative facts”, which are entirely fact-free, are the new “truth”.
Thunderbird is acquiring Exchange features.
They haven’t turned them on just yet owing to a little last-minute work, but your ability to sync calendars and address books with an ActiveSync/Exchange-compatible eMail server is coming soon.
Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.
Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.
Not the person you replied to, but…
What would it take Mozilla to do, to break your trust?
To move out of the least-worst option position.
Right now it’s in that position. It’s always been in that position, and IMO it has never not been in that position.
And for the record, I am not talking about Mozilla specifically, but the browser ecosystem for that rendering engine that includes any forks and derivatives… because things like Chrome’s maliciously flawed and user-hostile Manifest v3 also cascade down into forks and alternatives that are based off of it, and so contaminate many other normally-good alternatives.
I was there, during the first advertising push of the mid/late 90s, where visiting the wrong website - or even the right one on the wrong day - spawned “uncloseable” pop-ups and pop-unders… uncloseable because as soon as you tried to dismiss the window, that action triggered a half-dozen more to spawn.
Eventually, the weight of all the browser windows would cause not only the browser to grind to a halt, but even the computer as a whole (single-thread CPUs & minimal RAM, nat), such that your only possible recovery path was to conduct a hard restart of the entire system, your unsaved work be damned.
I feel for those businesses whose only possible funding strategy is via ads, but that well was lethally poisoned for me decades ago. I jumped onto the world’s first adblocker the moment it became available for Phoenix (now Firefox), and I have never looked back. The only way I will ever stop using adblocking is to stop using the Internet entirely.
8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.
If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.
Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.
I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.
VW really dropped the ball on software
Why bother with software, then? Late-80s and 90s Type III Jettas can be absolutely bulletproof if you find them in not-bagged and well cared for condition.
Depends on when it was produced.
My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.
My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.
Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.
Depends on when it was produced.
My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.
Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.
Antibiotics.
Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.
Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.
In most western countries any unintentional mistake made by the employee is considered a cost of doing business… after all, if such a mistake is doable, there is a problem in the business processes that needs correction.
Now don’t get me wrong, many shady business owners will still try to pin things on employees and take it out of their pay. But that is illegal here.
Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.
Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.