Typewriters were pretty cheap but not very many people owned one. Colleges had typewriter labs sometimes, but it was more common to hand-write your papers and then have a professional typist type them up. I went to college in the '80s and we had labs with a bunch of word processors we could use, but I had borrowed my dad's portable electric typewriter and I mostly used that. During my junior year the G type slug broke off of its typebar, so for the rest of my college career I had to hand-write the Gs on all my papers.

I used to write small games in BASIC on paper and then go over to my friend's house and type them into his VIC-20 to play them (these things had an optional tape drive for saving programs but his parents were too cheap to pay for that). It really taught me to code carefully and get everything right the first time around. In the early '90s I visited India and saw software companies that had ten programmers and one PC and they were also coding with pencil and paper. I assumed that this meant Indian programmers were going to be fantastic once they each got their own computers, but I was wrong about this -- they're just as shitty as everybody else.

My joke comment was based on love! I actually started my professional career with VB (3 no less) and it was an excellent language for what it was good for, mainly building good UIs. Sure, it could be -- and was -- used to create unearthly horrors, but that's true of every language and platform.

Fuck you Jobu ... I do it myself!

It's business ... it's business time.

Don't cry, babe -- at least I didn't say Visual Basic.

I'm all into tokenmaxxing except that means more money for AI companies.

My dad died last fall and when I called the funeral home we had chosen to come collect the body, the answering service I got was AI. It had a weird accent that wasn't from anywhere on this planet, strange background noises also not from this planet, and when it read back my dad's name for confirmation, it said "Bob common name Smith common name?" Like, what in the actual fuck. I should have just hung up and called a different funeral home but I was too shocked by what I was interacting with.

For good measure, their funeral director (who just happened to have the same last name as a character from The Sopranos) kept cracking jokes during our meeting with him, completely ghosted me for a week, and then finally delivered the urn with my father's ashes in it at 8 PM the night before his interment ceremony. Naturally enough, he left it on my porch and split before I could talk to him.

It is so much fun living in the future.

I'm perpetually surprised that the hot chick on Gutfeld! is a brunette.

I am actually chickenless and male and I hate life. My name is a Kids in the Hall reference.

We had a zoom meeting with my elderly mother's investment adviser recently and expressed our concern about the AI bubble. He of course said he didn't think it was a bubble; his main argument was "these CEOs are smart people and they're legally obligated to preserve the financial health of their companies so they wouldn't be going in for anything that had the potential to be a bubble". Conveniently ignoring all the other bubbles in history when the CEOs were "smart people".

Wow, this is a tough one. I can't decide whether young Spencer Pratt from The Hills had a more punchable face than current Spencer Pratt.