How Does It Keep Happening

Someone updated that drowning counter with count++ instead of ++count and now zero people have drowned wearing lifejackets. Technically correct is the best kind of correct, right? The sign maker probably tested it once, saw it worked, shipped it to production, and went home early. Meanwhile, the lifejacket stat is sitting there at zero like "not my problem." Fun fact: The difference between i++ and ++i has caused more bugs than anyone wants to admit. Post-increment returns the value THEN increments it, while pre-increment does it the other way around. It's the programming equivalent of putting your shoes on before your socks—technically you did both things, just in the wrong order.

The AUDACITY of this parent teaching their baby that arrays start at 1! I cannot even BEGIN to express my horror! 😱 The poor innocent child utters "A-a-a" and this monster celebrates it as "first word" - only to DISCARD THE CHILD when they learn the truth?! Listen, sweetie, in this household we start counting from 0 or we don't count at all! Zero-indexing isn't just a preference, it's a LIFESTYLE CHOICE! The dumpster is honestly too good for such blasphemy!

Sure, your 1000 lines of C++ run 100x faster than my 10 lines of Python. But while you were writing those thousand lines, I finished the project, had lunch, refactored twice, and still had time to scroll through Reddit. That torch of performance might look impressive, but the real caveman move is spending three weeks micro-optimizing what could've been done in an afternoon. Speed isn't just about execution time—it's about developer time too.

The circle of life, but make it tech. Strong men build C, which gives us the good times of memory management and segfaults. Those good times spawn Python, which spawns AI hype, which spawns "vibe coding" (presumably where you just ask ChatGPT to do everything). Vibe coding produces weak men who can't center a div without an AI assistant. Weak men bring bad times—production outages, npm install taking 47 minutes, that sort of thing. Bad times forge strong men again, and the cycle continues. It's the tech industry's version of that ancient philosophical cycle, except instead of empires rising and falling, it's programming languages and developer competence. We went from manually allocating memory to asking an LLM "how do I reverse a string" and somehow both eras think they're the pinnacle of engineering.

Romance is cute and all, but have you ever spent 96 hours straight hunting down a missing semicolon? That compiler error keeping you up at night, chugging energy drinks while your bloodshot eyes scan 2,000 lines of code for the fifth time. And then—at hour 97—you find it hiding between two perfectly innocent statements. The sweet relief is better than any relationship could ever be. Until the next syntax error shows up tomorrow.

The top panel shows the Rust experience: find a library on crates.io, run one command, import it, and you're done. The stick figure even has their arms outstretched in celebration. Meanwhile, C++ is depicted as the ninth circle of dependency hell. Finding libraries across random websites, manually downloading tar files, and engaging in ritual combat with CMake until your build inevitably fails. The stick figures are literally hanging themselves in despair. And this is why some of us drink heavily before attempting to add external libraries to C++ projects.