Obligatory Spaceballs reference about combing the desert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYge6ehH9fo

I probably shouldn't mention how much seawater I accidentally swallow whenever I'm in the ocean swimming.

Maybe you missed the following, important part:

"These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes"

Full of nourishing copepods!

When I saw this idea all I could think of was the ASP.NET "postback" form data and URL data! I'm glad to not have to deal with that anymore.

I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.

I longed for Flash but I learned DHTML instead. I bet many young readers haven't heard of that "technology".

I've been running Arch Linux for about 2 years two high-powered desktop machines (home and work). I run `sudo pacman -Syu` every day and I've only had one video driver update (nvidia) that broke me. I had to login from the CLI (which I'm using all the time anyway) to rollback and pin the version.

It's been an incredibly smooth experience.

That said, the one thing that I still haven't migrated over to fully is Linux on a laptop. I'm macOS on an Apple MacBook Pro 14" (powered by Apple's M1 Pro).

Just bought the 12-pack version. I love Julia's website.

Lab grown? That's beyond impossible.

Good pun, I appreciated it.

Whenever these tales arise, I can't help but read them. I know that they're not particularly relevant to anything I do or even have done. Even so, it's like watching an archeological dig.

My favorite quote from the article:

> Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.

Bill Gates was a programmer and used to run Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg was a programmer and still runs Meta/Facebook. Larry Ellison was a programmer and still runs Oracle.

Maybe you're just pointing out that if you're running a company (beyond a certain size) you are probably spending all your time running the company and therefore aren't really a programmer any more. But isn't it obvious that Spolsky doesn't mean "person whose main activity is writing software" but "person who knows how to write software and has done a substantial amount of that"? Gates, Zuckerberg and Ellison are all programmers in that sense.

Is Google/Alphabet a software company? Sundar does not know how to program.

I don't understand this criticism. Sundar has technical background and great product vision. How many other people have been involved in so successful projects that define the industry like Chrome and Android?

Indeed, Google has hired a lot of people with business background lately to operate large parts of it's business. We should, though, acknowledge that Google operates in many now mature markets where innovation plays secondary role to focusing on existing customer needs.

He seems lost as well though.

I'd say that it also holds true for Apple. It's primarily a hardware company, so have a hardware guy run it.

I have a co-worker who was in charge of the build system at WordPerfect back in the early 90's. He worked on the the UNIX edition and he managed the whole workflow using a series of Makefiles linked across various shared drives.

I'm pretty good at shell scripts but this guy is a master at his craft. Give him any problem and within a few minute he's got a series of piped statements through awk and a few other well-known tools.