I love scapegoating individual developers as much as the next guy, but if you take a look at the Win32 API, you'll find loads of fun "features" such as:

- Every single function that takes a string has two implementations: one that ends with the letter A (and takes its strings as ASCII) and one that ends with the letter W (and takes its strings as UCS-16). And then it has a preprocessor-define (with no suffix) that gets expanded to either one implementation or the other, based on your compiler settings.

- windows.h defines preprocessor-tokens for min() and max(), which means any C++ program that ever calls std::min() or std::max() will error out with a very strange compile-time error, if it included windows.h first; the work-around is to define NOMINMAX first to prevent windows.h from polluting the namespace.

- Modern windows is perfectly capable of arbitrary-length file-paths, but ships by default with a 260-character filepath limit anyway, "to preserve backwards compatibility with older software that expects that limitation to be enforced". To get correct behavior you have to hand-modify your registry; otherwise you find out about this limitation when you go to unzip a .zip file and the unzip mysteriously fails even though the .zip file is valid.

These are all defects that other OS's simply don't suffer from, either because the other OS's were designed correctly from the beginning, or because the people in charge of the other OS's long ago took the hit (in short-term breakage) and fixed the problems rather than letting them linger forever to preserve backwards compatibility.

All Windows developers (good and bad) have to deal with these issues, probably forever, and every line of code they add to work around these problems has to be supported and debugged and tested as well, hence the damage compounds.

Before Trump, it was a cultural norm that a President of the United States was expected to follow ethical and moral guidelines as well as laws; not only because anything less would be dishonorable and a disservice to his country, but also because otherwise he would pay a steep political price for his unethical behavior. Trump's most significant political innovation has taken the form of figuring out how to convince a plurality of the American public that the only real standard for Presidential behavior is "whatever you can get away with".

A poem;-
-------------
I once loved a clanker.
And you might think I'm sick.
But I loved my robot lover.
And its hydraulic jackhammer dick.
It could clean the carpets
And it could heal my soul.
Now all thats left is metal shards
Embedded in my hole.

Not written by AI.

There have been a few musicians that have been trying to redirect the kids away from cassette tape nostalgia to CD nostalgia. The reason is simple, in 2026 its cheaper to burn a CD than it is to manufacture a cassette tape. And CDs are vastly superior (the relative virtues of Vinyl and CD are a little more complicated, though on pure technicalities, CD still wins).

The thing with CDs is a DIY home musician can do the whole manufacturing chain at home. You buy one of those cheap laser screen printer engravers for about $1K. You pick up a CD bulk duplicator second hand off ebay for maybe $200. $100 will buy you more blank CDs than you'll ever sell. You bulk duplicate your album using the CD burner. You screen print the art onto the CDs. Get those cardboard CD sleeves and screen print the art (If you want better detail, grab a colour laser printer from Brother for about $500.)

Oh and that laser engraver screen printer setup will also make you the band shirts, just remember to grab one of those cheap chinese flash dryers to properly cure the ink on the shirt. Too many DIY shirt makers dont realise this.

Then you set up your bandcamp store, and maybe set up a merch desk at your gigs. Last gig I played we sold over $1K of merch.

Buy CDs. Play CDs. CDs are good. Especially CDs from local pub bands. Tapes are trash and sound like trash. VInyl is great but too expensive for a small band to produce at anything resembling a profit.

Eh... theres still a sting in the tail. I suspect these sorts of fines are more about "We want you to fix this" rather than "We want you to bleed for doing this". The thing is, $14 mil aint a drop of piss in the oceans of HPs money supply, but what IS important is that its a court order, and disobeying the court order can turn this from "insignificant financial mosquito bite" to "Oh shit, theres an interpol arrest warrant out for the CEO on criminal contempt charges".

Rule number #1 and #2 of any interaction with the law;- Do not anger the Judge. The second rule is "See rule #1"

Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.

Apple's macOS. Apple contributes code and employs some FreeBSD developers.

Its a little more complex. Apple does derive some of FreeBSDs userland and some services. However its a myth that the kernel is a modified FreeBS. Its a modified Mach microkernel, XNU (technically actually a hybrid, like most real world microkernels, that has a small amount of non core kernel in ring zero for performance reasons, that has some services that have FreeBSD derived code in it, namely the network stack, process model and IOKit.

Chinas single timezone is bonkers. If your in Beijing its great, but in those back end industrial cities, you've got the sun rising at 10am and setting at midnight. That would *massively* fuck with your sleep cycle and I half suspect that western regions probably got some of the highest rates of melatonin prescription..... and sleep disorders.... on the planet.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.

Its space. When it comes to radiation, an X-Ray machine is by far the least of their worries. Astronauts come back from space missions utterly glowing with radiation.

Admittedly the cancer rate amongst astronauts isnt THAT much higher (just under 1/3 of astronaut deaths compared to just over 1/5th of the general population), but this is also a cohort that have mostly been non smoking tea-totaller health conscious non-junk-eating people so its definitely a thing.

Like yeah, over exposure to medical X-Rays is totally a risk factor, but astronauts go into space knowing that space is actively trying to radiate them, freeze them, burn them, pop their lungs, boil their blood and suffocate them. Its a soldiers gambit really.

Grandmas stupid baby photo collection create more positive utility for humans than a petabyte of stupid slop images of crayfish aranged into a jesus face ever will.

Im more wondering if we're gonna start seeing clankers ordering "Victorias secret vacuum cleaners" catalogues getting orders in the mail leading to claude-bots in raincoats atendending seedy industrial machinery video screenings at 2am in the bad part of town.

"grease me daddy."

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?

Honestly, IBM would do well to just stick to their course. This AI thing is due for a pretty severe market adjustment to bring some rationality back into the tech decision makingl, We're already seeing a lot of companies shitting the bed over token costs and realiseing they laying off the entire tech staff would just cost them more. And this flows on.

Or this is wishful thinking on the part of myself, a 50yo whos been feeling a lot less secure about my future job prospects lately if I dont stop rejecting any and every offer to go into management..