The amazing thing is not people forgetting about Trump’s shaving nick, it’s them forgetting about the dude who was actually killed.

As a programmer who used to fix accessibility problems with iOS apps, I’d like to say that one good thing about apps vs. websites is that apps are generally much better than websites for people with vision problems. But they aren’t! At least the ones I was fixing sure weren’t.

I used to work for a very large cable company. All of our apps were championed by VPs who had strong personal connections to InfoSys, who got most of the contract work to create and maintain them. Almost nobody actually used the apps - the developers used various tricks to enormously inflate the apparent numbers of users. So essentially they were a mechanism for one large corporation to siphon millions of dollars from another large corporation. My life became a lot happier when I finally realized this and stopped giving a shit about anything.

I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I’ve avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of “only voted one star because you can’t vote zero stars”.

There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from 2018 1998

Many of these apps could just be menus.

I’ve done a ton of biking in my area over the last 15 years, and it’s been depressing seeing how much former farmland and unused wild area is getting gobbled up by the fucking McMansions and “high 700s” McTownhouses. The townhouses are especially sad - like, you’re out in the middle of fucking nowhere (no town in sight) and yet you’re jammed in with neighbors on both walls?

When I say “I’m not interested in politics”, what I mean is “I can’t bear to listen to another right-wing crank regurgitating the latest bullshit he’s read on Infowars”. Sometimes it means “I can’t bear to listen to my 100% white sister-in-law castigate me for not using the term ‘LatinX’”.

As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn’t want to verify that what I’d done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I’d already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.

It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.

A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can’t use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don’t really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it’s a general problem.

YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO USES CAPSLOCK!

I just gave it a listen today on my bike ride. It’s pretty good - not what I expected but not surprising, either. I’d characterize it as Kate Bush meets Dead Can Dance meets early ‘70s King Crimson, and since I like all three of those acts I like Gibbons’ album as well. I was surprised to see that it’s her first solo album.

“Baby’s Got a Temper” is also a banger, but it’s a bit of a tough sell when you’re singing about how great Rohypnol is.

Charlie, poison, voodoo people and of course Keith’s firestarter.

First Prodigy song I ever heard was “Their Law” and that’s still their peak IMHO.

I think if you’re the son of a gibbon, it doesn’t much matter whether you’re a bastard or not.

I wouldn’t mind being Beth Gibbons’ bastard son.

Harambe!

History is written by the whiners.

Fun fact: the “D” in “D-Day” stands for “day”.

I wish people would make fun of Visual Basic more but nowadays it’s like it never even existed. As somebody that started in VB I feel left out.

It was brown M&Ms. Only a psychopath would say no green M&Ms.