Programmer Humor

The moral of the story is to always just write the damn SQL and stop fucking around with ORM and frameworks and all of it. 😅

Circa 2005 I created a mobile app (for the honest-to-god-that's-what-MS-named-it "WinCE" OS that later became Windows Mobile) that allowed workers to survey power line networks in the field and indicate all the trees that needed to be trimmed or removed. The app used a local SqlCE database and the workers would upload their recorded data at the end of the day back in their hotel rooms using Remote Data Access, an MS technology which allowed SqlCE databases to "sync" with a master Sql Server database.

It almost always worked flawlessly (100% during development, natch), except for once in a while when synced data would somehow end up in a weirdly corrupted, mangled state on the central server. Like, records that were lacking a primary key value (!), something that is basically impossible to achieve. I opened a ticket with MS support and we went back and forth on this for a few weeks until they basically said "yeah that's fucked" and recommended that I modify my app to sync the same data multiple times to ensure it made it to the server correctly.

I actually had substantial faith in MS products up to that point (facepalm).

It's tf2 and a coconut instead of a banana, but yes, game doesn't run without it.

Apparently TF2 added a "community-generated" map last week that was not only broken itself, it broke other maps too, causing game crashes.

The issue was a model of a row boat that was added to the official game in 2009. cp_premuda was added to the official game in July, 2026. But Premuda is a lot older than that, and it references a version of the row boat model that is older than what was added to the game in 2009.

Yes, one of those. Even came with a warning

I like how, as someone else put it, all these AI responses exhibit sociopathic tendencies which reflect the elite caste that is pushing for them.

The idol statue reflects the woodcarver who made it.

Or the architectural problem, because your precursor was an idiot.

I had a coworker on one project that took input as short integer values between 0 and 32767. The values conceptually represented min and max values between 0.0 and 1.0, so one day he changed all the parameters to Float, like in hundreds of places. Since the application then wouldn't compile, he wrapped all the calls via search-and-replace so that the integer parameters were cast to Float and then clamped between 0.0 and 1.0.

Viola! the application then compiled. Unfortunately, this application controlled a baseball-throwing machine capable of 125 mph and he decided to test his new version (for the very first time) on an actual baseball field with Little Leaguers on it. The machine's first throw was supposed to be a soft ground ball to the shortstop, but was instead a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above the kid's head. This lead to the only time in my programming career when I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight (between the client and my manager).