The answer is: binary, sometimes with electrical switches.

As late as the very early 1980’s, the PDP-11 could be started by entering a small bootstrap program into memory, using the machine’s front panel:

You toggle the switches to make the binary pattern you want at a specific location in RAM, then hit another button to store it. Repeat until the bootstrap is in RAM, and then press start to run the program from that first address. Said start address is always some hardwired starting location.

And that’s a LATE example. Earlier (programmable) systems had other mechanisms for hard-wired or manual input like this. Go back far enough and you have systems that are so fixed-function in nature that it’s just wired to do one specific job.

Every time.

I have left this as an exercise for the reader.

Fixed:

I really don’t understand why.

Anti-Microsoft ideologues, mostly. Giving MS any quarter is antithetical to their chosen axe to grind. Pay them no mind.

But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.

Wow. I didn’t realize this until you pointed it out. Thanks. TIL.

This is such a hilariously bad take. I like how “I can’t use Win32 on Linux” morphed into “re-write the whole app in Javascript just so I can use Electron.”

Meanwhile, Wine and QT are like: “am I a joke to you?”

I’ll add that (IMO) a lot of applications are becoming increasingly malicious, although less-so in the desktop space. I’m happy that devs like this are forced to quasi-sandbox their crap into a browser. Actually, if anyone knows how to crack into an Electron app in order to restore local plugins, user-scripts, and sandbox security controls, let me know. Or just liberate the guts into a local web app instead so I can use a real browser? This trend could be very useful for local security if those features become available.

Same here. At first, I thought I was going to get a better Discord experience with the dedicated ‘app’. Nope. Another web app crammed into Electron, multiplying the overall browser footprint on my system. It now happily lives on in a normal browser tab where my ad blockers and user-scripts claw back local control of things.

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.

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.

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.