Indeed:

* Short opening hours

* checking the membership card at the entrance

* cell phone salesmen inside

* item locations change randomly

* items randomly disappear for weeks at a time, as if Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of restocking

* waiting at the exit for someone to check your receipt

* for a while, they'd check your receipt at the self-checkout and then check it again at the exit

* 1970s level IT, inaccurate inventory information

Microsoft used to give a cash bonus for patents; I imagine Costco has a bonus program for new ideas to make the shopping experience worse. Some ideas:

* throw lit firecrackers into the crowd

* pour oil on the floor so people slip

* complete darkness inside the store

* every 10th person at the checkout has their credit card cut into pieces

The loose fit of the regular AirPods and the wired EarPods never made any sense to me.

Then Microsoft had the episode where some of their Surface hardware would not reliably stay in sleep mode and cooked itself while being transported in a bag. At the time, Microsoft tried to excuse this by claiming that "a fundamental Computer Science problem" needed to be solved to fix this issue. Strange how other manufacturers could do this without overcoming unsolvable problems in frontier CS research.

While I'm usually a die-hard Microsoft fanboi, I have concluded that their Surface line is terrible.

This will benefit Kokanee Salmon, a kind of salmon that spends all its life in fresh water and does not migrate to salt water like most salmon.

In Lewis Creek, they currently have access to only 1/2 mile of the creek, but in 2021 there were about 1000 of them returning (from Lake Sammamish) to spawn.

Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment.

You haven't replaced anything, you've just added another level of hassle for everyone.

The successful manned moon landings so far:

1. United States of America

2. United States of America

3. United States of America

4. United States of America

5. United States of America

6. United States of America

Now we're watching a riveting race for 7th place.

I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.

And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.

Imagine if engineers were ranked based on their AWS spend. People allocate VMs and fill databases with terabytes of random bits, to get to the top of the AWS leaderboard. If you don't do this, you're ranked at the bottom, and good luck at the next review cycle. Who could have expected that this is not the road to success?

Congratulations, now your website is a shitty experience for your users. Well done.

I wonder if there was ever an epic Monster sugarwater vs Monster Cable showndown.

So I think it was not a big problem for .Net because it gave you enough control over GC, and because people tested their code before putting it in production.