Quite unrelated to the main topic, but shouldn't it be Croydon, London? I have never heard anyone called it London Croydon before. Generally addresses/places go from most specific to least and given Croydon is an area of London it should go first.
Addresses are one thing, but the inverse has its own logic. In terms of (mental) planning you want to know that you need to go to the UK then London then Croydon, otherwise there's an element of "where's that?" as you read left to right.
Yes, I noticed that too -- why "London Croydon" rather than "Croydon, London" ?
Date in Europe: 30/03/2026
Date in China: 2026/03/30
Then you have Little Endian and you have Big Endian.
TL;DR: Some humans like to talk about the specific and then the general and others vice versa.
But here is really why I think the author referred to it as "London, Croydon"
"London, Croydon" communicates "Hey we had this C++ standards meeting in London, one of the coolest cities in the world. (Be jealous!). We were helping add more complexity to the most complex language in the world in the lovely environment of London, England. Croydon is a piece of irrelevant detail... meeting was in London, remember that !
"Croydon, London" communicates "Hey we had this C++ standards meeting in gritty Croydon... it was in London so I guess it was OK ?? Sorry our budgets could not put us up in Westminister, London"
Generously - specifying Croydon does help travellers figure out where they need to be more specifically than just London. I'd like to hope if they met in New York City it'd say e.g. "New York - Riverdale" or something rather than leaving you to guess where in the city exactly.
Most things "in" London aren't in the centre unless they're tourist destinations or they're extremely old. The most surprising thing I ran into right in the centre was the International Maritime Organisation's headquarters, which is right on the Thames because historically that makes sense in a way that arguably it already didn't when that was built, and certainly not today.
I agree, but its tricky as many people seem to not read it and I have seen AI documentation that is so verbose and dense that its almost as useless as not having it. Its a fine line but so long as the AI documentation is reviewed and reasonable then I see no issue.
Most VSCode extensions are pure slop, to the point where you’re almost certainly better off using any other option for tools where available.
And I don’t mean slop in the new “AI slop” sense of the word, but more “ostensibly supposed to do something specialized but in practice not particularly effective, well documented, or useful”. The entire extension ecosystem is hot garbage.
Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate that to every language we need to support? Do we scale the UI to work for the different length words?
I dont think that is any better at all. If anything I think its solidly worse.
Ideally, the translation needs to happen before the UI design. I've seen a lot of UI designs come straight from the designer with a beautiful pixel-perfect depiction of controls, but assuming English. So the "MENU" button was designed deliberately such that exactly four latin characters fit inside of it horizontally. Or assuming people's names fit in one line of text, or addresses have a certain number of lines and so on. Then when you get around to translating everything, the design has to go back to the drawing board.
> Great if you are an English speaker. Do we then translate that to every language we need to support?
Yes.
If the page isn't in the target language of the person using it, what difference does it make whether or not it says "menu" in English? If the user wouldn't be able to understand the contents of the menu, is it markedly better that they access those options via a hamburger icon vs an inscrutable bit of text?
Getting it in paint form wasn't the issue. But the issue with that is many of the originals have changed colour over the year, so getting a match is hard. Plus the plastic is brittle so if you want to replace things you need to print it and its easier if you dont need to then paint it.
Im dyslexic and I tend to use the pointer to follow what I am reading to help me. The cat was annoying as hell. I just had to hide the element in the DOM before i could read more than a few lines. Infuriating design choice to make it follow the pointer.
For me it was 50/50. 50% it was a joke. 50% the guy was "one of those a-holes". They exist so it's hard to tell.
They aren't always American as some other commenters have pointed out. Was on a tour bus from Paris to Giverny and some Italian guy thought it was okay to watch his sport events out loud the entire way. Had a similar experience on a long distance train in Germany and another in a train in Japan (western person, not American). It's crazy to me people don't get how annoying it is. I'm sure they'd be annoying if I pulled out something louder but it apparently never occurs to them.
I did not read it as a joke. Granted,I'm not American and English is not my first language.
In a way it made me think "wow, it had to be an American who doesn't care about others than him and is rude and self centered"
Which is stupid a stupid generalization I know. And also goes to show the ambiguity of written language. And how strong our preconceptions can impact our judgement (as it did mine initially).
The dry sarcastic humor of the author made it very obvious to me that this was satire. I have a very similar sense of humor, at least partly. And I'm a native American English speaker.
Giveaways:
>I logged in to my JetStreamers Diamond Altitude account and started clicking.
Satire! It's not called that, but it's a similar marketing wankery version.
>This clickable rascal would allow me to access the entire internet through my airmiles account. This would be slow. It would be unbelievably stupid. But it would work.
"It would be unbelievably stupid but I'm going to do it anyway!"
>Several co-workers were asking me to review their PRs because my feedback was “two weeks late” and “blocking a critical deployment.” But my ideas are important too so I put on my headphones and smashed on some focus tunes.
Even this was a sarcastic/satirical leadup.
>I’d forgotten to charge my headphones so Limp Bizkit started playing out of my laptop speakers. Fortunately no one else on the plane seemed to mind so we all rocked out together.
Limp Bizkit is a very famous (or infamous) band that gets notoroiusly mocked. The odds of even a single person rocking out with that playing out of laptop speakers is tiny. Two people? Everyone on the plane? 0.0% chance.
I don't know why I put so much effort into explaining this.
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