So, how does Abdaal watch anime and TV productively you might ask? Well, the fact that his listens to audio books on 3.5x speed should give you an idea.

[…] normally what I do is, I’ll just speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed-speed up until it gets to an interesting point, and I’ll speed it as fast as I can so I can still keep up with it.

And because he obviously can’t hear what’s being said when watching at 3.5x speed anymore, he’s speed-reading subtitles.

Lol, great, at that point you can just as well read the plot synopsis on a wiki or something. Or ask ChatGPT to tell you what it was about… aaand I just rediscovered the main thesis of this essay, nice

I see calling like Raegan’s margin in 1984 “decisive”

Also, not that it’s the point but I have to note that technically most election victories are decisive, in the sense that they resolve the winner with little to no ambiguity (which is usually the case, even when the margin is narrow). In that sense, the only way Trump’s victory is not decisive is if you contest the legitimacy of the whole election.

This is such pedantry that you might as well say “the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines decisive as…”

Also it isn’t? 50.2% to 48.1% of votes is not decisive in any sensible meaning of the word?

If you account for the turnout (around 60%) it means 30% voted for Trump and 28.9% for Harris, so “none of those” won decisively with 40%!

My mom will never grok LibreOffice.

I tried to switch her for a long time but I gave up when she called me one day to complain that her coworker can’t open a file she saved. Apparently the coworker in question was too, emm, talented to open an .odf

There are things that are outside of human reach. I can’t even put into words the strife that MSFT caused in my house when they switched Internet Explorer to Edge and thus “broke” her computer.

We should harness this and power ChatGPT with it

Audibly rolling my eyes

Always has been.

Ok but how detailed can we get then

Слава Україні. The world has failed you.

I hope at least CPT does not have daylight’s savings

What is controversial about Kolmogorov.

“Very well, we shall resume in an hour” will never not crack me up

But it was written about Microsoft specifically. What’s your point?

White people are late sometimes too…?

almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis

Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?

Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?

If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it

I always suspected that I wasn’t a REAL MAN™, but I didn’t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like “well this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better way” was one of the first symptoms.

referring to Colored People’s Time

to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?

I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.

The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn’t get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya’s stupid book (thankfully).

One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about “Growth Mindset”, or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to “apply Growth Mindset and move forward”. I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just “happened to us” and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.

I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.

Maybe if we funded them better they’d be able to tackle larger projects.