I did my first programming on a mainframe with punch cards, then migrated to a TI-59. At some point I was typing little games into my friend's VIC-20, and then I got to take my first real programming class in 9th grade using an Apple IIe. I'm not autistic at all, just nerdy as fuck.

I still have the TI-59, buried in a box somewhere.

I've told this story before, but fortunately nobody reads anything I write. I used to work for Comcast, at their HQ in Philly, as a contractor writing mobile apps. One day my boss (from my contracting company) came by my cubicle and said we were going to meet with Time Warner Cable to discuss writing some apps for them. I started to put my coat on but my boss stopped me. We then rode the elevator up to the 16th floor of the Comcast Center where TWC had a suite of offices. This was shortly before the attempted merger between the two companies; I remain surprised that the FCC put the kibosh on it, since the two companies were already effectively merged. I guess sometimes the bribes just aren't big enough.

"Nazi" isn't a gender.

I was in the middle of my Calculus III class when I took the GRE. For some reason I blanked on the formula for the area of a circle so I derived it during the test.

I went to India in the early '90s and happened to see a small software shop that had five programmers and one PC. The programmers wrote all their code with pencil and paper and the secretary typed it all into the computer. I want to say that this explains a lot about the quality of offshore code, but it probably doesn't.

I myself just caught the tail end of the punch card era. It was actually kinda fun to sit at home with just a stack of cards and create working (hopefully, you wouldn't know for days) code.

I thought you wrote "Scranton". I was like "what the fuck does The Office have to do with all this?"

What's a "book"?

"All in" really is a great phrase to use for AI. People forget that going all in in poker often means you lose everything.

I was a programmer for 25 years starting in the mid-90s. I've had numerous coworkers end up working at Microsoft. I'll admit I was jealous of their insane salaries, but I have to say they were all some combination of terrible programming ability and utter apathy towards their job. The only thing that surprises me is that it took fucking AI for things to get this bad.

I will say that I did have some professional interactions with older MS programmers, the generation that was working for them in the '80s and '90s. These people were genuinely competent, but by the time I interacted with them they were all multi-millionaires and had fallen solidly into the "utter apathy" category.

couldn’t even be bothered to build in the same style?

Typical wealthy American's house, unfortunately.

Big brains let AI do the TESTING and QA as well.

The problem with getting a court jester today is that Peter Dinklage would make sure nobody got the job but him.