Well it’s an art film. The purpose of art is to evoke emotions, to inspire dialogue. Yours is one possible interpretation. Ultimately, who’s to say it’s not valid?

One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire”, which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.

I thought it’d be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer’s work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

Someone remarked that in film photography, every 10 years, Kodak used to get the brilliant idea that 35mm film is just too complicated for Your Average Consumer, and invented a new “easy to load” cartridge based film format. 126 Instamatic in the 1960s, 110 Pocket Instamatic in the 1970s, Disc Film in the 1980s and the APS in the 1990s. …Meanwhile, Your Average Consumer didn’t give much damn, and while these formats saw some use, most people preferred 35mm.

Same goes with image formats. Apple and Google and Microsoft try to make “better” file formats happen, and I’m sure they have their advantages, but people will stick with JPEG, thanks.

Yeah, I took one course where we used MongoDB. I was like “still unconvinced, but I’ll keep this in mind if I run into situations not covered by PostgreSQL.” …I’ve not run into situations not covered by PostgreSQL. Everything will be covered by PostgreSQL.

Aaagh! Getting some random old person flashbacks.

Kids. I r-remember a day… You won’t believe this… I got a 404 error page… It was otherwise a normal 404 page with a normal message on it, but it had a giant ad on it… like “while you’re here, how about you buy this stuff”… It was hell… You’ve got no idea how lucky you kids are with uBlock…

Just do your best plumber / car mechanic impression. “Gee, this codebase is really messed up, looks like I need to basically replace everything.”

(“That can’t be true, that’s what every other programmer I showed this to said. Are you all lying?” “No, we’re not lying, this really is a screwed up codebase.”)

Last time Clock was interesting was in the Windows 3.0 days. Windows 11 clock is just beyond meh.

Since Windows these days can’t be arsed to have an analog clock with second hand (which is what I need for properly setting clocks on all of the devices that don’t have internet access), I just made one myself one day.

Original definition: using AI to create a small bespoke kinda-crap-but-it-works apps or games for personal use. It’s a shitty proto but it’s interesting.

(My reaction: ooo not my jam but that sounds neat I guess)

Modern definition: it’s a multi-quadrispillion dollar industry and it’s the future according to some very important board members.

(My reaction: …capitalism ruins fucking everything)

Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had… variable success.

The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it’s the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)

Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You’d imagine it’d work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you’re really into screwing things in place.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as wheel, is in fact, GNU/Wheel, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus wheel.

It used double- and even triple-pointers to data structures

(old song, to the tune of My Favourite Things)

🎶 “Pointers to pointers to pointers to strings,
this code does some rather unusual things…!” 🎶

Legends say that if you put your source code file in Grok, it’ll print out the code and it’ll land on Elon’s desk.

Elon will browse through it and pretend to understand it, then tweet out insults and emojis and says you’re fired. Even though you were never employed by him anyway.

Yet another unrealistic music video. It’s a relatively short song and Eclipse will not start fast enough.

Can someone still developing tell me what I should use for the backend today?

I recommend checking out Python (Django) and Ruby (Ruby on Rails) if you want nice and easy modern Web frameworks that also aren’t that weird if you have PHP experience.

Also I can never understand GIT as a single developer. The fuck is that? I’ve tried everything to understand.

Versioning your code with Git makes it much easier to experiment with new ideas. Cocked up a file? Pull it from the previous version. Create new branches for experiments, merge them in if they work, toss them if they don’t, or keep them around just in case, without them ever getting in your way in the “real” version.

And if you keep the code in a server (GitHub etc), that gives you a backup location and makes it easier to work on code on multiple systems.

Reminds me of how in some old Unix system, /bin/true was a shell script.

…well, if it needs to just be a program that returns 0, that’s a reasonable thing to do. An empty shell script returns 0.

Of course, since this was an old proprietary Unix system, the shell script had a giant header comment that said this is proprietary information and if you disclose this the lawyers will come at ya like a ton of bricks. …never mind that this was a program that literally does nothing.

“Cubist”, or as the old-timers call it, “the Management insisted that this thing must work on MSIE 6, and we didn’t have the budget to make it work on anything else”

…It’s okay. I’ve programmed in far far worse languages. …It’s got its advantages. It’s got it’s problems. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Edit: If you need a serious answer: Much like BASIC, it’s a language often used in teaching programming. In that sense, I guess it’s much better than BASIC. You can, like, actually use it on real world applications. If you’re using BASIC for real world applications in this day and age something has gone really wrong.

If using plain CSS, usually it’s enough to set width appropriately, and margin-left and margin-right to auto.

If using a Modern Frontend/CSS Framework, then may God have mercy on your poor soul.

(Seriously I just started a new project with TailwindCSS and I’m so confused. But not entirely desperate yet.)

I dunno, most of my experience from Docker comes from docker compose, and it’s “put this thing in a file and edit it and then run docker compose up -d”.

So if anything, it’s best illustrated with the old meme of a dog typing on a computer going “I have no idea what I’m doing”.

I was about to doodle something like this, but looks like folks are beating me to it. Great that debates sometimes lead to results.