Everyone should read Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ just for the glimpse of Fundamental Attribution Error that managers and wanna-be-managers absolutely wallow in. This is accidentally such a fantastic illustration of the idea that if you're poor, you can't do anything right, and if you're rich, you can't do anything wrong.

I liked it better when we as a society solved every problem using lasers. Need to measure some distance or temperature or about any kind of science? Lasers. Make streets and hung photos and building frame square? Lasers. Defending against enemy vessels? Lasers. Surgery? Lasers. Printing? Lasers. Video game controllers? Lasers. Make your Sears Portrait Studio look awesome? That's right, fucking lasers.

But think of all of the jobs the data centers are going to create, like "oil war soldier"! /sarcastic

Debian system. Investigating a high network activity notification for a system that should be idle. Type 'netstat'. Doesn't have 'netstat'. Install the package. Check for open ports. I know, I'm not a real, modern SRE/security admin. Check to see if anyone had logged in recently. Type 'last' as root. Doesn't have a 'last' command. Search for "debian last package". Obviously no usable results. I hate Linux. Hundreds of megabytes of junk and they try to shave the little utilities that are actually useful.

"DWIM: /dwim/

[acronym, ‘Do What I Mean’]

1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.

2. n. obs. The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function that attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors. See hairy.

3. Occasionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, esp. when one senses one might be tripping over legalisms (see legalese).

4. Of a person, someone whose directions are incomprehensible and vague, but who nevertheless has the expectation that you will solve the problem using the specific method he/she has in mind.

Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.

In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.

The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete *$ twice.

DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about DWIMC (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see Right Thing."

LLM "AI" is DWIM.

Oh heck I just realized that the people who created VisualSourceSafe are the people who own GitHub.
If you never had to deal with VisualSourceSafe, you're lucky. It was baaaaad.

Quoting one person I used to know with apologies to them...
I LOVE YOU ALL WITH A GREAT HUGE LOVE

Things basically never happen:
FAX takes longer than a minute to display a page.
FAX runs out of memory or can't connect to some third party while trying to display a page.
FAX sends private information back to the person sending the page without your permission.
FAX doesn't render correctly on your machine.
The Web people have played us for absolute fools.

I removed all authentication mechanisms from gmail except password, recovery question/answer challenges, and authenticator so it would stop demanding phone verification constantly. Logged in with password and authenticator. It's refusing to let me move non-spam out of the spam folder (that I expected to forward to my real email and did not) unless I "prove I am me". To do that, it wants to use the phone number I removed as validation previously. And it remembers the number and is showing it to me and demanding I use my previous, now removed, verification method. Fucking psycho shit.

Sociology still just really not pulling its punches.