In terms of Mars

• Client wants a robot to go to Mars
• Project is budgeted and sold to send a Mars Rover
• Work starts and after successful test the robot is shown to customer. Customer states he wants to send a Mechwarriors in a drop ship, not a little Pathfinder.
• Panic, change requests, money being discussed, rockets are being strapped together with duct tape and the rover is bolted on an old Asimo that is being rebuilt into the smallest Mechwarrior ever the day before launch
• Mech Asimo lands successfully, stumbles and falls on a rock after three steps
• Customer disappointed

They’re real. I also encounted one.

“It’s already in the demo you guys just did so why do you need weeks to make it?”

We’re in trouble when it learns to debug.

Now start adding the “Well yes, but if” demands until the system inevitably breaks.

a few months later

Why are insurance companies just stopping with insuring houses and businesses? Without insurance, no loans, no economic activity!

Let’s study this. Aaand it’s defunded. Looks like it’ll remain a mystery, sir.

A quarter of STEM workers are immigrants. With the crusade against immigrants they have a good reason to take their work somewhere else. It’s a good way to reduce the competitive edge of a country.

But it’s pretty fun when the customer says your program does it wrong and you pull out that old Excel, plug in the data and their Excel does exactly the same as your program. It makes the discussion about billable hours a lot easier.

Dump to an Excel sheet and ask them to make a formula for “active”. A client that can’t use Excel deserves to be teased and be charged extra.

https://youtu.be/M1D2zTJhIss

That’s the one for me, from Spider-Man no way home. Keep adding more stuff to a complex working until reality itself breaks.

It’s said climate scientists did not publish the worst case scenarios because it would be seen as too alarmist. These were basically civilization-ending.

Even SQL was originally called SEQUEL, Structured English QUEry Language. They got sued for the name and changed it to SQL. It was also pitched to retrieve data with plain language.

It’s very common. Every few years there is some no-code platform claiming no developers are needed anymore in any sector, not just web dev. Invariably these only work if you stay on the narrow path and of course the customer asks something outside of the easy path after the first demo so a lot of work by devs are needed to make of happen.

AI is just one more like that, but with hype on steroids.

That’s how he runs. It’s like those people “summoning spirits” doing a cold reading, but in a much larger scale.

“I sense you are bothered by roads, airplanes, children, jobs”

“Yes, jobs. How did you know?”

“And it’s all the fault of trees, donkeys, cars, doctors, immigrants.”

“I really hate immigrants.”

“so we’ll build a bicycle, sidewalk, front door, barbed wire, a wall”

“Oh yes, we need a wall to keep them out. This guy is really telling it like it is.”

When asked later why he suggested a bicycle, this is vehemently denied even when recordings are shown.

Not really. Trump just adjusts his story when he notices it’s not well received. He even started to promote getting vaccinated to keep his base from dieing, noticed the pushback and changed his message to anti-vax again.

The only surprise is how blatant it is now. Politicians and businesses used to at least pretend there was a separation but Trump tossed even that thin veil in the garbage bin.

Trickle down is more lying by omission. Wealth trickles down, but at the same time flows up through various means so it’s a net negative for the poor, thus concentrating wealth on the hands of the few.

Once any site is big enough, marketing, trolls, influencers and propagandists move in too. Then it comes down to moderation to keep toxicity down.

It’s a pretty classic recipe by now.

Make voters scared and angry by identifying lots of issues (cost of living, security) that are affecting their lives. Shift anger and blame to external group (China, migrants, LGBTQ+). Propose easy and quick solutions that only vaguely work on a surface level (deportation, tariffs, government efficiency) but voters are too angry to think critically by now, take it at face value and vote for false solutions.

Next step once elected is to start dismantle media scrutiny to control the narrative, capture democratic institutions so everything becomes biased against your politician opponents and start to change laws governing elections to consolidate your power.

It’s happening in other places too. Countering this seems hard for other parties. So far it seems to be waiting until the mess being made with the quick and easy solution becomes too big and the other side comes in to clean it up, then getting blamed not everything is fixed and the cycle repeats.

I guess we’ll just have to call it Hong Gary then.