We can consume it, but we can’t digest it.

Bill Nye for sure. He’s smart and kind, and just generally awesome. We got to watch him in class a handful of times, and it was always fun.

I live in California, and I’ve been on SDG&E, PG&E, and SoCal Edison, and they all work the same as what you’re describing, with multiple different pricing schemes depending on usage and hours. Wherever you live in California, you usually only have one company to choose from, but I’ve never had only one plan to choose from. Maybe you lived in a very niche part of California, but that’s definitely not how it works in San Diego County, Riverside County, Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, or Alameda County.

As far as solar, that’s the same everywhere. My dad is on SDG&E, and he sells his solar back to the grid when he doesn’t use full capacity.

In my thirty six years in California, I’ve experienced a handful of blackouts. The last one was in 2012. How often does Texas have blackouts? I remember most of the state going dark just a few years ago. And now again. It may not be all of the state, but it’s enough that it’s newsworthy.

I would still say that interferes with a critical user story.

You can make a more basic stripped down tax code that’s still fair. What I’d like to see is instead of a stepped progressive tax rate, tax each dollar based on a function that approaches 100% somewhere around a million dollars. So maybe you can get another dollar by taking the next million, then one more by taking ten million, then the next one by taking a hundred million.

It might turn into dumb skynet though. Like a version of skynet that does malicious things, but not because it’s trying to hurt people, just because it’s really stupid and we put it in charge of things.

Known issues that don’t interfere with the critical user stories are usually not prioritized. They should be disclosed, and even better if workarounds are published, but fixing them usually isn’t in the budget.

Solution: install a doggy door with weak enough magnets to let the air flow.

I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.

Apple Reminders does that.

“My app idea is that you can see where your girlfriend is at all times.”

“So you’re telling me you want me to build an illegal stalking system? Have you really thought this through?”

(Based on an actual conversation.)

^ This. So much this. I’m a software engineer, and people will ask me IT questions about software I have no clue how to use.

Eh, you probably do, you just don’t want to spend three hours wading through mountains of malware for free.

Not if I’m Jeff Bezos.

That’s generally not what they’re really concerned about. “I don’t want teachers teaching my children to be gay” is just code for, “I don’t want teachers teaching my children that it’s ok to be gay.”

Well with generative AI, now we can, but that’s just cause the computer is making shit up.

The pizza place doesn’t pay for the vehicle’s maintenance, usually.

Most online services would struggle to provide their service to their users if all of their servers were air gapped.

I feel like most people know that rocket science is hard.

I literally once got an email from another engineer using our internal tool at the big tech company I used to work for which said something like, “the page isn’t working. Please help. Attached screenshot of error.” The attached screenshot showed the error message, “Your authentication token has expired. Please refresh the page.”

I emailed him back, “oh yeah, that happens when your authentication token expires. Try refreshing the page.”

He emailed me back, “that worked, thanks!”

(For anyone wondering, no, we can’t refresh the page for the user, because they might have unsaved data on it.)