Antibiotics. Some countries limit access via doctor's prescription (this has eroded somewhat with the rise of the internet), not using them as cattle feed additives, etc.

Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.

Then you have to stop using search engines.

If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).

I definitely remember Creepy, Battle and Space.

> If my school's library had had Machine Code for Beginners, my career might have been very different. (I'm actually a bit annoyed; I didn't know that existed).

It's actually very good. I remember reading it at age 11 or so, and coming away knowing much more low-level stuff about computers than even the 18yo in the final year of school who were literally studying the stuff.

Things like "each instruction is a number", and registers like the PC, overflow, etc.

I went through a period (and a forest of pages) trying to write an entire game in machine code alone (with a small basic shim to load it).

It's a very approachable book.

Same with me. As a 12yr old I failed learning Z80 on my spectrum with the one book I could find. I had a bunch of other Usborne BASIC books, but their machine code book(s) would've been the link I needed to bridge the gap to where I could understand other material.

Heh. Which if y'all borrowed the Tufte book?

It's ok, I can wait...

There was a great story about a helicopter a couple of years ago and the author was basically hounded out of the SFF community. These days, for anything that's written it seems like there's a specially tailored mob waiting to pounce on it. Very hard to go pearl fishing in your own psyche in that environment - best to get a sensitivity reader instead, I wouldn't want to dip my toe in such toxic waters.

Jesus, dude. There are managers reading this.

What do you think they do all day?

The larger pattern is not unique to writing code. Think of it next time a reorg comes, or some random thing gets "improved" in the name of "efficiency" only management seems to see.

Take them out of the loop.

Unless they are not human.

They became obsolete when they stopped clearing obstacles, stopped masking politics, and started acting as a proxy for JIRA.

But it's just they way it has always been done, so they get paid to meddle.

I am not managed by anyone:p

>_<

I see what you did there. Nice.

Matrix franchise is well known for not trying to pack in too much complexity /s

> Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google.

A guess: because you type queries in the URL bar, and they're the default search engine in your web browser?

(I'm convinced that these days, this is 90% of Google's advantage)

Image search is so hyper-optimised for shopping it's useless.

A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default.

Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.

Someone round here said Yandex shows you what you searched for, while Google shows you what it thinks you should have searched for.