Hey, kudos for finding multiple anti-patterns all in one place like that. I didn’t even think about “underpowered desktop as company server” as another pattern, but here we are.

Sorry you didn’t get the contract, but that sounds like a blessing in disguise to be honest.

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The amount of work I have completed with Tampermonkey in situations like this should have made that same IT department quite anxious.

I mean, it’s a pretty good illustration of a deadlock. Most traffic intersections, especially 4-way stops are basically mutexes anyway.

Jamming a circle though… that’s like deadlocking a ring buffer message queue with threaded consumers. Or something. It’s just a spectacular way to break stuff any way you slice it.

That environment was wild though. At the time, you basically needed to be an electrical engineer and/or a licensed HAM operator, just to have your head wrapped around how it all worked. Familiarity with the very electronics of the thing, even modifying the hardware directly when needed, was crucial to operating that old tech.

Fellow tech-trash-disposal-engineer here. I’ve made a killing on replacing corporate anti-patterns. My career features such hits and old-time classics like:

• email as workflow
• email as version control
• email as project management
• email as literally anything other than email
• excel as an relational database
• excel as project management
• help, our wiki is out of control
• U-drive as a multi-user collaboration solution
• The CEO’s nephew wrote this 8 years ago and we can’t get rid of it

In all of these cases, there were always better answers that maybe just cost a little bit more. AI will absolutely cause some players to train-wreck their business, all to save a buck, and we’ll all be there to help clean up. Count on it.

Unsolicited advice warning: Depending on how handy you are, you may want to consider grabbing a few wear parts or the most commonly replaced bits before inventory completely dries up. I used to have a newer (but still old) dryer and thought the heating element was failing - a replacement part was actually kind of hard to source. Anyway, that would give the ol’ beast a good shot at another decade or two.

I recall reading in Consumer Reports many years ago that most refrigerators were discarded not because they stopped working, but because of cosmetic damage. Broken plastic door shelves, dents, rust, out of style, etc. The compressors were still fine.

Yup. The enshitification kicks in super hard after a technology is mostly “solved”. Refrigerator compressors and insulated boxes are both very much optimized as much as they’re going to get. The only way to eke more cash out of making a product like that is to cut corners on other bits, or get people to buy a subscription somehow.

I keep racking my brain on this one. Unless it’s doing advanced things like automatically tracking fridge inventory and helping build shopping lists, there’s literally no point. Analog controls work fine, even for fancier fridges with integrated ice makers.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

This also goes for some NAS appliances and the in-dash console of newer cars. Underpowered ARM implementations are the scourge of this decade.

And just like that, the e-machine continues to fulfill its intended purpose: browse the internet like it’s 1998. It’s never obsolete, but you do need a time machine to take full advantage of it.

Also: Dunning-Kruger

every bug in linux can be fixed with sudo rm -rf /*

To be fair, that does remove the bugs from the system. It just so happens to also remove the system from the system.

Exactly.

To put it another way, trusting AI this completely (even with so-called “agentic” solutions) is like blindly following life advice on Quora. You might get a few wins, but it’s eventually going to screw everything up.

This sentence has made me violently ill. Please take it back.

This has to be one of the worst ways to reinvent a filesystem that I’ve ever heard. At the very least, storing static data in an relational database at this scale should be a slappable offense.

https://youtu.be/1WDW8XKEGgU?t=45

Honest.

The only episode of Survivor I have watched was the season 1 finale. From what I understand, that might still be a peak moment in the show’s history. I get the hype around things like that, but I can’t fathom sitting down for everything that leads up to it.

I love that the fox example is probably the very bottom of the “not even remotely related to news, yet true” barrel.

“Consumers are playing fewer games, playing them for longer, and as a result, outside of a few notable exceptions, many new games are struggling to stand out and achieve the sales they may once have had, whilst the market is more volatile and the potential for any specific title less predictable as a result,”

Really, this is about buying fewer Ubisoft games.

Edit: also someone is trying to get out ahead of the next quarterly report, especially since we’re in x-mas buying season right now.