The 1842 retreat from Kabul was the retreat of the British and East India Company forces from Kabul during the First Anglo-Afghan War. An uprising in Kabul forced the then-commander, Major-General William Elphinstone, to fall back to the British garrison at Jalalabad. As the army and its numerous dependents and camp followers began their march, it came under attack from Afghan tribesmen. Many in the column died of exposure, frostbite or starvation, or were killed during the fighting.

In total the British army lost 4,500 troops, along with about 12,000 civilians: the latter comprising both the families of Indian and British soldiers, plus workmen, servants and other Indian camp followers.

Out of more than 16,000 people from the column commanded by Elphinstone, only one European (Assistant Surgeon William Brydon) and a few Indian sepoys reached Jalalabad. Over one hundred British prisoners and civilian hostages were later released.

Here's one example (and this is just one example). My workplace makes heavy use of linters and static analyzers. The CI is configured so that if the linter outputs any errors or warnings, the pipelines fail. Often that occurs because an empty code block or type definition contains a space, and the linter really wants to see '{}' instead of '{ }'. I simply cannot imagine the consequences to humanity at large if this excess whitespace ever made it to production. The kicker here is that the default VS Code autofmt wants that singular space to be there, and inserts them itself, and the default Angular linter thinks they really do not belong. I'm not sure which of these two organizations (Microsoft and Google) are right, as both normally emit good practice the way Moses emits commandments, and they are now in direct contradiction with one another.

I have approached colleagues about the idea of maybe turning off some or all of these rules, and was promptly told that I should have my editor configured to run the linter and apply its fixes whenever I save, and given instructions on how to do so. This is a Good Argument, in that it solves my problem effortlessly, but I just can't resign myself to do it, and still find myself embarrassingly pushing commits to apply linter recommendations after opening merge requests. To put it as simply as I can, I have identified The Problem. Please address it. I do not care if your solution is easy and low impact. It does not solve The Problem, it just sticks a layer of paint over it. It's also not just the failing builds that piss me off, it's also that the linter is garbage and overly opinionated and actively makes our code look worse by (for instance) removing line breaks in lengthy call chains or array literals making them longer than 100 characters. Motherfucker I broke that up for a reason.

As far as dysfunction and cargo cult nonsense goes, I have seen a hundred times worse in my time. This is a complete non-issue. But fuck me, I can't do it. I can't be slippery like that anymore. I just can't tolerate all this fucking process that never touches the fundamental problem of engineering nondiscipline. I can't jump on the latest fads that promise to solve every factoring problem and just make code bases wordier and ten times more opaque. I don't want copilot to be fucking turned on by default. It sucks and will always sucks no matter how many teraflops you throw at the LLM and how strongly you believe that AGI is among us. I just want to choke a bitch. I want to punch some poindexters in the face and break their +1.50 glasses.

Maybe I should quit software development? Should I flip burgers? Become an Agile coach? Go fight for the YPG?

Still kind of a dumb idea but hey. It's a crazy unexpected turn from our neolib government after years of every sort of expert advising against it and them threatening to go through with it anyway. Carbrain chuds are obviously mad and it's glorious.

Dirty anglo source

:train-shining: :crab-party: :train-shining: :crab-party:

Search engines are basically 90% blogspam promotion machines at this point, and the blogspam churning engine is going to become completely autonomous. The tools we're relied on for nearly three decades now are going to become a big virtual tug of war between machine-learning-guided SEO systems and machine-learning-guided ad revenue systems.

Every single anonymous interaction is going to be suspect. The next dogwhistling fucking cryptonazi groyper you run into is probably not even going to be a human being. Machine learning is probably going to elect the next US president. Eventually the medium will become so polluted that we will have to go back to doing everything in person.

Thank you for reading my doompost