Mary Branscombe

Office in that era was delivering releases on time like they ran on clockwork. Windows was… *not*

I mean, I’m pretty sure the White House knows exactly what that looks like because they’re doing it themselves

It’s only a theory but it was the right era and apart from Jim Allchin having cancer but refusing to hand the team over to someone else, something has to explain why they got suddenly so terrible at estimating timelines

The reason why modern phones don’t have audio jacks or storage slots is so there are fewer holes in the case for the vapor deposition waterproofing process to have to deal with

I do want to make sure we're being clear about this:

The Bluesky team maintains the same review, red-teaming, and QA processes that we always have. AI coding tools have been proving useful, but haven't changed the fundamental practices of good engineering. Human review and direction remain key.

I’m remembering the last time there was a gas panic in the US and people were filling plastic bags with gas and taking them home and that was *before* Covid did a number on cognitive functioning for a bunch of people. What dangers will current gas prices bring?

I watched diesel here in East TN change from $5.05 to $5.15 in real time today.

lol, gas is already at $5.39 for the cheapest stuff in HB, lifted truck bros about to have an existential crisis next week

Went off to the pharmacy to update our superpowers (superpower of not getting covid at conferences) so we’ll be spending the weekend sacked out

The Proton CEO IIRC came out as a Trump fan so that’s in my threat model

@why.bsky.team if it's any consolation it looks like you and Donald Knuth can be terrible programmers together: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...

LLMs have immense liberatory potential, under an economic system where the benefits accrue to all. We don't live under that economic system. But these tools do serve to level the playing field in some respects, and the system will not be abolished by a movement determined to forego their use.

Thanks for your response; I find it very reasonable. As far as software engineering goes, there are a lot of negative externalities downstream of increased AI use, but when used responsibly, today's models IME output code of good to excellent quality and at a speed no human can keep up with.

@davecl.bsky.social I bet you know someone who knows someone

The guardian is doing a shitty performative take on research that doesn’t really say that.

Exclusive: Politico founder plots new Washington newspaper war A damaged Washington Post could face a big new challenger.

As Christopher Buckley fans should remember, one of the two D.C. newspapers in Thank You For Smoking was the Washington Sun, so I think this needs to happen. And then it would only be fitting for the Washington Times to live out Buckley's joke in that novel and rename itself the Washington Moon.

My personal theory for what went wrong with Longhorn is that the team prototyped the new interface in Flash, showed it to execs and lost the fight when said execs signed off a schedule based on thinking that was functional code not a Flash demo

There are tools that change wireframes to look like they’re scribbled on paper with ballpoint. Bill may even have worked on some of them

bill buxton wrote an entire book to address the problem that on a computer, less polished looks more polished, and so stakeholders will assume that what you're showing them is much farther along than it actually is so you have to spend effort making it look sketchy

www.amazon.com/dp/0123740371

It’s looking increasingly likely that Kristi Noem and Lewandowski funneled almost 200 million in government money to a company that is run by her friend and that nobody can give an address for.

Oh, and it was 8 days old when it was awarded the contract.

Perry: This St. Patrick’s Day, don’t forget Irish music’s anti-fascist roots Dropkick Murphys, the iconic Irish American punk band, are headlining a free block party March 6 near where Alex Pretti was killed by immigration agents, contributing columnist David M. Perry writes.

NEW “We’re celebrating a tradition that is at its core about resisting occupation and maintaining community in the face of horrors. You can’t keep politics out of Irish music. No one should try, for two reasons. First, it’s ahistorical. Second, Minnesotans are ready for a big anti-fascist party.”

I'm losing the ability to contrive law school exam hypotheticals that are more absurd than the actual news

What a *timely* revival

Also ❤️ @officialmelbrooks.bsky.social

We do, since electric lights don’t help much when it gets dark in Scotland at 2pm in the afternoon unless you give the winter a bit of help

🤣😇

Now I’m thinking of a cute little triffid in lederhosen

And they were like Mary, how did you get our internal design document, this is almost exactly what I’m building!

So if a large company teaches everyone to use the timezone pickers in Outlook meetings, they only have to deal with the human bit of noticing the reminder!

And because I’d been around ‘softies long enough, I wrote it up as a proper feature proposal with all the usual sections, and I sent it in regularly as feedback. One day someone connected me to the junior developer who was working on the feature and I sent them my usual proposal

So I started sending in feedback about how an Outlook meeting which is connected to an Exchange server that automatically defaults to UTC but displays in local TZ could fix that for users by setting all meetings in UTC but letting you pick the timezone offset to apply for each end of the meeting

So I like to tell the story about how I pretty much designed the timezone pickers for classic Outlook meetings (I was in London planning a flight from Florida to Seattle and in tears because I couldn’t figure out math across three timezones to know when I would arrive and when I did house was empty