People here have such a weird and uninformed view of what stock buybacks are. A stock buyback is literally saying “of every possible investment opportunity we have analyzed, we believe our capital will yield the best returns buying into our own company”.

As of posting this story has 6 comments on a site made for nerds - historically those specific to the software development realm. Maybe I’ll urge them to include more references to Trump in their rules/results to generate interest from the crowd here next year.

I love this contest and reading through the entries every year. Without even planning to I get caught up in an entire day reading the entry source, remarks, and even the rules. They are often a true combination of wit, humor, and ingenuity. Kudos to the submitter here - best abuse of the rules/guidelines is a favourite category and I just fucking love it. This is truly a story for nerds yet such a shame it is basically ignored and not discussed on this site anymore. Not to be part of the shit brigade here, I’m going to spend my Sunday evening reading these entries and will post something back I find amusing.

I do truly believe this describes most illegal immigrants in the US, and most of them are good people. I say this as a non-American, but I also totally fail to see how this justifies what is clearly and knowingly breaking the law. If I either surreptitiously crossed the US border, or went through a normal crossing and overstayed my stated length, I would fully expect them to throw my ass out when they found me (and I would NOT be surprised when they came looking for me either). It is totally true the US has great opportunity and comparative wealth for all of these immigrants, but to deny the US has an illegal immigration problem is naive. Also - processing people through normal border crossings is how you do background checks to keep the small percentage of actual criminals out. Any criminal record at all will lead you to being rejected at the US border for entry (I know this as I have friends who've spent thousands to get pardons just for a trip to Vegas). That sounds like great motivation to not check in at the border to me.

Two retarded comments, one solidly voted up and the other down. Shame on you mods and readers for turning this into a political shit house.

I have agreed with his theories to one point - we need to let go of quantum mechanics to move further in physics now. Yes, the math and experimentation works, but those are the golden rules we have come so far to be now up against. The thought expand conjectures of QM have been ridiculous since they were first realized with Schroedingers Cat there is absolute zero chance a pink elephant appears in your living room the next moment. Things exist in a specific time, place, and momentum. I feel this is the great paradox of Einstein yet to be discovered- he advanced our knowledge so much yet held us back and equal amount.

Any executive who refers to their staff as “headcount” in a town hall type meeting is a ridiculously bad leader. That is talk for your boardroom and lead accountants, but you have to be brain dead as leader of a major company to use such phrasing. And call me racist here all you want, but anyone like me with over 20 years experience in global IT will tell you - never put Indians in charge or anything or you reap what you sow.

Can’t believe I’m going to defend this idiocy buuuut of the crypto bros want to gamble their imaginary coins on random future outcomes, what makes this a crime that is worthy of taking up limited white-collar crime investigative resources? Unless there is evidence and accusations of outright fraud, this seems to be the exact stupidity thing people in a free country would be allowed to do. Prove me wrong without spitting on your keyboard.

Problem is, too many code monkeys believe CS is being able to "code" HTML.

I've seen advanced LLMs generate good code down to rare control system architectures now - I've seen your opinion a thousand times before in IT. It's protectionism and a refusal to believe you will soon need to find another niche.

"It went from complete absurdity to surprisingly capable...". Your post reads like someone in denial of the fact their profession will soon be automated away, like so many others in the past. So you think tech will stop at "surprisingly capable" eh? Get on the bandwagon vs. being left behind in the dust.

I graduated from comp sci over 20 years ago, and have had a lifelong career/interest in programming. Of note, my specialty in university was compilers and computer language design.

Thing is, all computer languages exist for one reason: to translate what we want to do, and can describe in English (or other human language), into a language a computer can understand. The sole reason for compilers is to take our high level languages (eg. C, Java), and progressively rewrite them until you have specific language a CPU can interpret (machine code). Over 20 years ago, the holy grail was "imagine if we could just talk to a computer and describe what we wanted it to do vs. the tedious and mundane process of breaking it down to it's language?".

Many looked at the subsequent study of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as impossible, but we simply hadn't invented the raw CPU power (200MHz machines at the time) and statistical understanding of language yet.

My point is, we are nearly there. Deny all you want, it's the same as denying climate change. Soon enough, translating human language to what a computer can do will be a trivial problem. I'm all for it, as a major step forward in our technological advancement. Prepare for it however you must.

Right. We've invented nanoscale architectures which can meaningfully mimic human intelligence, but we won't be able to figure out a way to keep crops a few degrees cooler? Right. Faced with a real problem like starvation, you have to be an idiot to think humanity won't be able to devise a solution.

In before the dumbass who says the poorest few millions will die - we already get that from freezing temperatures. Life in this cold, dark universe is hard but we've made it ~4 billions years in already. The only retards are those screaming end of the world.

"In this case I believe the hottest temperature will be in the limit of approaching zero kelvin from below i.e. just below 0K. It literally cannot get hotter than that."

Nerdiest answer ever. I love it. ./ is baaaaaaaaack!

The worst part of this is there was a recent Canadian election and Carney ran on an “elbows up” platform to stand up to Trump, which happened right at the peak of Canadian anger over his actions. Since winning, he has done nothing but acquiesce and fold to every demand of Trump. I know I’m generalizing here, but Canadian Liberal party voters are among the dumbest people I know. They’ve supported a complete failure of a government through four elections (granted 3 minorities in a row), but they act just like an abused girlfriend who can’t make the right choice. The Liberals make some small change and say “it’ll be different this time” and continue to lie and abuse again and again and again. I’m not saying the other parties may be better, but the point of elections is to throw incumbents out so they make true change. I can’t do the math on their voters.

“micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more” - So more of what made the internet shitty in the first place, yay!! The one thing I don’t mind would perhaps be micropayments or subscriptions to the news sites I really enjoy, but the fuck I would do that through google, who I can promise now is going to take the biggest cut forwhat exactly?