“Comedic” is a better title for this than “Tragic”.

I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

When I read that shit as a kid, I thought Asimov’s laws of robotics were like natural laws, so that it was just naturally impossible for robots to behave otherwise. That never made any sense to me so I thought Asimov was just full of shit.

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker

I want my AI to sound like a Speak & Spell.

Excuse me? Comcast belongs on that list.

Stalin’s regime was really reactionary

Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin’s regime is “despotism”.

I live in a place that suddenly became a fucking healthcare desert because of this shit. The local hospital network was bought by vulture capitalists who sold the real estate to themselves and then leased it back to the hospitals, racked up enormous debt almost entirely due to obscene bonuses they paid themselves, then declared bankruptcy. The hospitals are all closed now but the vulture capitalists have their cash and still own the real estate. I recently had to spend two days in the ER of a far-away hospital that has been swamped with the overflow, with my mom in a bed in the hallway for the entire fucking time. Muigi Langione is the thing to do.