Huge agree. I think I've nuked vendor/ a handful of times in 8 years of doing PHP while I've lost track of the number of times I've deleted node_modules/ this year alone.

And he recently said that he's effectively retired.

> Generally people in power will surround themselves with yes-men.

It's probably a CEO thing too - you have some vision for the company so you're going to hire people that enable that vision, not people that will question your every move.

It’s not a CEO thing - just like Jerk employees exist, jerk CEOs exist too

Yeah this should have been a quiet word from HR to not say stuff like that.

Still too far

Oh yeah... I remember Windows behaving weirdly when I tried to copy some files with long names into a deeper directory tree. And it was just weird behaviour - no useful error message.

Windows in particular supports at the API level paths tens of thousands of characters long, much longer than Linux. The problem is applications need to explicitly support such paths using the long path syntax, otherwise they're limited to 255 characters.

Yeah I thought there was some way of doing it, but weirdly it was explorer.exe that was behaving in odd ways.

I remember someone telling me that S3 used to be similarly abused - people were creating empty files and using S3 like a key-value store somehow, so AWS just jacked up the price of S3 head-object API call to push people back to DynamoDB or whatever.

Agreed - I've never followed YouTube that closely but apparently there was a time where everyone thought that YouTube favoured videos that were around 10 minutes in length... so everyone padded their short videos to 10 minutes.

It wasn't about favoring them. Videos needed to be 10 minutes long to get mid-roll ads.

Apparently there was a purge of extremist content and another purge of AI slop? I wasn't aware of any major publicised purges, though I do remember Google saying a few years ago that they'd be deleting inactive Google accounts (with the exception of accounts with public Youtube videos I think).

I thought Microsoft made a number of improvements to git to allow it work with all of their internal repos.

My brother often pokes fun and says my job is slash colon asterisk - he's never done any programming to know that a lot of what happens today is mostly English words.