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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

    In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.


  • I don’t see anything unprofessional there. Just naughty words. But, the naughty words are somewhere where they warn you that the code below doesn’t behave as expected, or complain because there isn’t a better way to do something. That seems like the best time to use strong language.

    Cleaning it up is a great idea in theory, but in practice almost everybody has higher priority things to be doing. Leaving a comment in the code for why something is ugly is the best thing you can do when you don’t clean something up, so that someone coming along after you doesn’t struggle with it. We have no idea how many “naughty” comments are no longer there because the issues they addressed were cleaned up.


  • Most of the places I’ve worked I’d have been told to get rid of the cursing before checking something in. But, my own personal codebase has tons of this sort of thing.

    But, aside from the cursing, these actually look like excellent comments. Comments should warn you when the code isn’t what you might expect. These are excellent from that point of view. If this is what a random sampling of the comments in the codebase looks like, it is probably a very well commented codebase.