7 ms·

Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

286 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

dylan604 1y ago
How is someone writing an article about Android source code node nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don’t buy it
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Right? It could be an attempt at humor, but it could also be someone who is naive of culture before 2003. I lost some respect for the author at that point...
  - snapcaster 1y ago
    This is so american/age centric please reconsider dispensing respect based on who watched the same TV shows as you growing up
- Agentlien 1y ago
  While I found it surprising at first I don't think it should be. Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Probably because it was dormant for a long time. And then when it was brought back, it was brought back by people who have no clue what made Star Trek good so it has largely sucked.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites that didn't make sense contextually because series set in the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was trying for a very different approach to exploring the cannon and had its own story to tell. And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis). In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**… none of this is particularly shocking. What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are both well-written and thoughtful — but again, very different shows. SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other one is fine). LD is very very silly, but it works for me — not as a canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to "yes, and…" the show's existing cannon in ways that mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified). * Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take, or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans universe ** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if Nemesis was even or odd
      - bigstrat2003 1y ago
        I think that while each show was different, all the Star Trek shows from TOS to VOY had a certain feel to them that made them feel consistent. Yes TOS was more swashbuckling and DS9 was more interested in continuity and shades of grey, but they all were similar in that they were thoughtful shows where teams of competent professionals solved problems in the context of a generally positive vision for humanity, all while trying to offer moral dilemmas for the viewer to wrestle with. But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution. It is a very damning statement that the best (and for a while, only) modern show to live up to Star Trek is The Orville, which isn't even a Star Trek show! But say what you will about him, Seth MacFarlane gets Star Trek and he loves it (unlike Alex Kurtzman, may he never get another TV series). So he made something which (comedy tone aside) could easily be a successor to the Star Trek shows of old. The only exception to the dismal trend is SNW, at least the first season. I haven't gotten around to watching more yet, but that show was what CBS should've been making all along instead of the garbage that was DIS and PIC. Suddenly we are explorers in the positive future, we are competent professionals again... it's actually a worthy Star Trek for once. I would say I think that some of the casting choices aren't always great (their Kirk is... not suited to the role), and I would enjoy if they could move further away from the action show tropes and have more thoughtful writing (though not preachy please, I'll take dumb action over the writers preaching to me). That is why I said Star Trek has largely sucked, because SNW is an exception. But in general I have felt like the current creative staff doesn't understand Star Trek at all and can't make a good show to save their lives.
        ben_w 1y ago
        > But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution. I've not noticed a difference in the preaching, TBH, but otherwise yes. And also that PIC took many interesting side characters from TNG, and used them as redshirts. Maddox, Hugh, Icheb, Shelby… and both Picard and Data in season 1 — and worse for both. Data because Data was (a) brought back the wrong way (should've been him in B4's body properly and not the simulation), and (b) that version of him wasn't given an appropriate reason for seeking his own death, and they really could've done it quite easily by writing that Data to have a plot point of ~ "I don't want my friends to die, I will choose death again to save them". Picard because it was such a missed opportunity, not only to give Patrick Stewart the same makeup that Brent Spiner had had for all those years, but also because Q said he still had a synthetic body in season 2 and yet they had him getting a "neural stabiliser" for "his brain".
  - justsomehnguy 1y ago
    > Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be. Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything, Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people outside of the USA learnt about it. Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Trek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...
    - riffraff 1y ago
      Are you sure? I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot. [0] https://stic.it/ https://stic.it/
      - justsomehnguy 1y ago
        > , and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot. Everybody, Gates and Slashdot in one sentence.
        account42 1y ago
        There is a reason it was called the slashdot effect, because it was the biggest source of traffic for many sites it linked.
        justsomehnguy 1y ago
        sigh Yes, a bunch of nerds (10k?, 20k?) worldwide forced someone's PC used as a server to crash. Their views surely represent the views of a country with ~~50M population, right?
    - lynx97 1y ago
      > Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe. Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.
- kretaceous 1y ago
  They are in their early 20s and not American¹. Why is that so hard to grasp? 1: https://voxelmanip.se/about/ https://voxelmanip.se/about/
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
    - eCa 1y ago
      > the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.
      - ROllerozxa 1y ago
        Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know everything and understand "all" the references. Things that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary wildly between location and year ranges, and in the recent decades with the Internet there are just so many subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but which lack a lot of overlap. I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it was really popular (and have all sorts of other blind spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for people my age), but I've definitively heard about it. And I know some other references to it like Spock and the Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me until now. Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could pretty easily tell it was a reference to something fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor thing that Android might have supported in the 00s, tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences. Like Android still has functionality in the API for supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some really early Android phones. So if that had been among the list as "there's this joke input device called a 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad example as I assume you can connect input devices over USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by Android).
- la_oveja 1y ago
  im 30 yo and i didnt know what a tricoder was
  - kallistisoft 1y ago
    I'm sorry... please take this adorable tribble as a consolation!
    - bigfishrunning 1y ago
      sounds like trouble
  - DustinEgg 1y ago
    [dead]
- CobrastanJorji 1y ago
  My fellow old person, Deep Space Nine came out 32 years ago. It's not something the nerds of today need to know. All these great sources of nerd allusions will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  - account42 1y ago
    You are aware that there a number of contemporary star trek movies and tv-series (as much as I wish they wouldn't exist), right? Besides, real nerds very much are into older media and not just current pop culture. Which is why things like trek (and blade runner for that matter) end up getting sequels - because there is an audience for it.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Nerds gatekeeping nerds. Truly old internet moment.
- u5wbxrc3 1y ago
  Not every interest comes with age. I am interesed in some antique stuff that's way older than me.
- filoleg 1y ago
  Not every nerdy person is into Star Trek? Star Wars is imo way more mainstream than Star Trek these days (especially with Disney pumping it), but even then there are tons of people in their 20s working in tech who haven’t seen it and have no interest in it. I don’t think there was more than one person on my previous Android team who would’ve gotten the Tricoder reference, and I was the youngest person there (29 years old at the time; learned about Tricoder literally just from this thread myself). If you picked a random person working on Android source code and asked me to guess whether they know about Tricoder (without knowing any additional info about them), I would have decisively guessed “no”.
  - rs186 1y ago
    About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish. But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe, and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care about it enough to ever go into that world.
    - filoleg 1y ago
      Yeah, pretty much the same for me. Plus, Star Wars universe just felt way more interesting and fascinating to me than Star Trek as a kid. Star Wars felt like knights and wizards and jet fighter pilots and heroic adventures in space, Star Trek felt like “adults doing boring adult things… but in space”. Not trying to dismiss ST, clearly it has a lot of appeal to tons of people, but it had zero appeal to me as a child. It also helped that SW universe had some of my favorite games at that time, like SW:Demolition (vehicle combat genre, similar to Twisted Metal), Jedi Knight series, Knights of The Old Republic, etc.
      - l72 1y ago
        I think it depends on if you lean more towards fantasy or sci-fi. Star Wars is space fantasy. Star Trek is science fiction. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they appeal to different personalities. I personally struggle to get in to fantasy, whether that is Star Wars, DnD, or fantasy video games. I’d much prefer to have a court room debate about ethics in the future. The Star Wars vs Star Trek debate has always confused me as you are comparing two totally different genres.
- rs186 1y ago
  Star Wars and Star Trek mean very little to people outside "Western" countries. If you go to China, most people won't understand a thing about Star Wars, including computer nerds/science fiction fans. And they live their life just fine. Don't assume certain things that happened during a certain period are universal to everybody.
  - ThrowawayR2 1y ago
    China I would expect not to know about Western cultural phenomena. But Star Trek references made it into Japanese animation like the Daicon IV opening (1983) and Dirty Pair (1985?) and quite a few others. It was a globally popular series.
TrianguloY 1y ago
If you want to test the isUserAGoat and isUserAMonkey on you own device, I published this small app that does just that: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy.isUserAMonkey https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy... Maybe I can add these other easter eggs...
- mixermachine 1y ago
  On my device with Android 15 I can't install your app. Google enforces a minimum compielSdk now. Maybe you can upgrade it in your build :)?
  - itsTyrion 1y ago
    If you check the app description, there's a GitHub link, which in turn has an f-droid link you can use. But you're not missing out since `isUserAGoat()` will return false on Android >=11 anyway and `isUserAMonkey()` will return true if and only if you're using the monkey test suite.
- ROllerozxa 1y ago
  That would be quite fun, especially if you would have some thing that checks the DISALLOW_FUN policy. While doing a quick search on GitHub while reading the blog post to see if any Android apps with available source code were using it, all that came up were repositories containing code for the system Settings app locking away the version easter egg based on it. You might become the first third-party to use it!
londons_explore 1y ago
Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10 years? Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code ratio is dropping rapidly.
- aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  Good, I hate ‘funny’ code. Just get to the point, I’m not here for someone’s notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years ago.
  - girvo 1y ago
    Ah I see you're one of those who would enable `UserManager.DISALLOW_FUN`! I personally quite enjoy a bit of whimsy in code. What we do (mostly) isn't that serious (modulo those, including me once upon a time, who work on literal life and death software)
    - jrockway 1y ago
      I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the classic example; turned off because schools threatened to not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.
      - joshstrange 1y ago
        That’s quite different from what we’re talking about though. That’s adding games or fun into your product whereas in this specific sub-thread we’re talking about naming code concepts (functions, classes, variables, enums, etc) funny things.
        notpushkin 1y ago
        When you’re building an API, it is your product.
lawgimenez 1y ago
How isUserAMonkey API came about: https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA...
- znpy 1y ago
  "image not available"
  - riffraff 1y ago
    that's because you're not a monkey
- rompic 1y ago
  To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions. https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA... "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven devices to more than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."
- fredoralive 1y ago
  Interestingly, the original Mac had a similar MonkeyLives flag: https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html
  - ROllerozxa 1y ago
    I assume that's the "The Monkey" testing tool for the original Mac that's mentioned in the footnotes in the Androids book. Supposedly goes back to the infinite monkey theorem that makes monkeys act as a metaphor for randomness, and it was also mentioned that one of the developers of Android had used the same kind of monkey testing for WebTV and Palm OS.
agildehaus 1y ago
Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()" and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions. https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_SystemInfo.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...
- yomimiva 1y ago
  For the curious minds: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroot/os/system_info.cpp#L215 https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroo...
  - tomn 1y ago
    looking around a bit, it's used as an example in the documentation: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/7d07c4bc739dbf90159a5c02e48b9118c47ebbcd/docs/develop/kernel/system_calls.rst https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/7d07c4bc739dbf90159a5c02... This is actually a great reason to keep it around; it's as simple as possible, and nothing uses it so it's easy to find the relevant bits of code.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
    Makes sense: is_computer_on() int32 is_computer_on(); Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.
- throw74848484 1y ago
  I know it is trying to be funny. But those states are quite normal in modern computer with advanced power management. OS should handle wakeups from deep sleep, or state where temperature of motherboard is 200 celsius.
  - mordae 1y ago
    Unlikely. Nothing is specced beyond 140 Celsius and many parts not beyond 80.
gyomu 1y ago
Is there anything similar in the public iOS API?
theletterf 1y ago
This means jokes and humour in technical documentation. While it's often frowned upon, I love a bit of humour in docs. I wrote about this here: https://passo.uno/experiment-humour-documentation/ https://passo.uno/experiment-humour-documentation/
Aransentin 1y ago
For X11, from the top of my head: The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is called "party_like_its_1989": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/dix/globals.c#L111 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di... The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.txt https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...
bertil 1y ago
The `<blink>` tag was an official part of early HTML standard, until teenagers showed up online and sanity prevailed. I suspect this could have been there to maintain compatibility with older webpages.
- fredoralive 1y ago
  This blink is in a specific UI XML dialect, not HTML.
  - ninjaoxygen 1y ago
    True, it has never been in an HTML standard, however it was definitely a documented part of early HTML. The blink element was in Netscape Navigator's HTML dialect in 1993/94, when early HTML was still just hitting IETF RFCs / DRAFTs, you can find blink in the Netscape HTML developer documentation from just after that era, DevEdge. It was never in NCSA Mosaic, the other big GUI browser of the era. Later on in the process of being standardized, when it was more W3C than IETF albeit still mainly the same people, Netscape agreed to drop blink from the proposals if Microsoft dropped marquee, so in that sense yes, it was never in a standardized version of HTML, but many tags in active use at the time were never in a standards doc. See here https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html for some history from w3c, who went on to become the formal custodians of HTML after the IETF days. Edit: here's the earliest Netscape Developer Docs I can see on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/19961115043739/http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/htmlguid/tags1.htm#1005356 https://web.archive.org/web/19961115043739/http://developer....
    - account42 1y ago
      Blink shows that the webs often touted absolute backwards compatibility can be broken for really petty reasons. At least these days you can easily bring back the fun: blink { animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite; } @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }
- ROllerozxa 1y ago
uncircle 1y ago
public static final String DISALLOW_FUN The default value is false. [...] Type: Boolean [...] Constant Value: "no_fun" Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManager.html#DISALLOW_FUN https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag... --- How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?
- objclxt 1y ago
  > How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android? You are misreading the documentation, it's a key/value API. `DISALLOW_FUN` is the string key you pass to `setUserRestriction`, which takes a boolean value.
  - uncircle 1y ago
    That makes more sense. Thanks.
    - izacus 1y ago
      Also this is an enterprise policy constant, so it gets sent (and configured) as string/string dictionary via REST API from MDM backend. That's mostly because the constants can be of mixed types (e.g. "MAX_PASSWORD_CHARS" : "1", "DISALLOW_NETWORK_SWITCHING: "true" - example, constants not actual).
- stevepotter 1y ago
  Someone else pointed out the reason for the datatype. A more subtle problem is the use of double negatives. Boolean APIs like "disable" will throw off users of your API.
yoko888 1y ago
[flagged]
- aucisson_masque 1y ago
  Exactly what I thought, this help reminding that there are (were) actual humans behind any random piece of code or api I use.
- account42 1y ago
  Makes you wonder if there are little easter eggs in e.g. missile control firmware.
  - Neywiny 1y ago
    Haven't written that but have done stuff similar in customer (which is public). I've had code shipped without me knowing. That certainly had such things left in. I've also had code shipped with plenty of reviews to take out all Easter eggs, debug menus, etc.
coxley 1y ago
For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke. In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time. [^1]: It was a big company so this statement could only be true in the circles I had access to.
- otras 1y ago
  I remember seeing this in React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED, and I've always enjoyed similar lighthearted and unwieldingly-long names. Unfortunately I see it too has fallen victim to defunnification: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789 https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    Fun names are OK, but only if they don't introduce ambiguity. In this case the change wasn't so much anti-fun as anti-ambiguity.
    - otras 1y ago
      That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification as a side effect, if you will.
      - serial_dev 1y ago
        That variable name is still confusing.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    Could have added a futurama reference to it __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED_______OUT_OF_A_CANNON___INTO_THE_SUN
eej71 1y ago
On OpenVMS, DCL (the shell and main scripting language of choice) had this as an exit code. $ exit 2928 %SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels
rfrey 1y ago
I want to make replying to this thread a requirement for anybody I'm interviewing to hire. Also for anybody interviewing me. Truly a "2 kinds of people in this world" moment.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Why? Googlers adding jokes to APIs is about as funny as dad jokes at Christmas dinner.
  - rfrey 1y ago
    So I know which of the 2 kinds of people in the world they are.
khernandezrt 1y ago
The Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System: link isn't working :(
- ROllerozxa 1y ago
  oops, no idea why the link I put there didn't work. Just corrected it, ended up linking to the page about the book on Chet Haase's website instead: https://www.chethaase.com/androids https://www.chethaase.com/androids
butz 1y ago
Looks like they finally set DISALLOW_FUN to true by default in latest Android release.
lelandfe 1y ago
> a hidden column in the Chrome task manager that shows how many goats a browser process has teleported Was very dissatisfied to find this no longer works. Here's an old post with a screenshot: https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=articles.goats_teleported https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=ar... From 234 columns to 16, what a purge.
paxys 1y ago
I miss the era of easter eggs in tech products. Kinda went away with the corporatization of everything.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  And also a focus on security. Security people don't want to find anything unexpected in the code they run, and easter eggs are by nature unexpected, sometimes even well hidden. I remember at some point, a contractor for a big company added an undocumented easter egg to the code they delivered, it was fairly innocuous, something like playing music when a special key combination is entered, and yet, it was treated like a security breach, as if it was a backdoor. I don't know if people got fired for it, but it is very possible. This is a public API, so at least, it is documented, but even then I am sure that some very unfun security auditor will only see this as an increased attack surface. Security may be necessary, but damn, it sucks! (not just for easter eggs)
  - spcebar 1y ago
    Oh man. Early in my career I was working a job I didn't like and doing work that was by necessity incredibly hacky and tedious—not an interesting challenge, just a grinding one. It involved overwriting template files that weren't supposed to be overwritten and essentially writing multiple versions of the same code in multiple places because the system was so kludgey. This project stretched on and on with brutally painstaking iteration, long hours, fires happening with other clients, etc, etc, long story short, I sort of lost my mind and left an Easter egg comment in the code in a state of minor madness. Years after I had left the job, I got a message from a former coworker that said "Do you know anything about MOOL?" I said I didn't know anything about something called MOOL, and he said, the client had found a long diatribe about a bovine god named MOOL in an obscure template file deep in the codebase, and I said, "ah, yeah, that was probably me." The head of IT for the former client had found the code and gotten in touch with my coworker and said, "I assume this isn't a security breach, but I also don't know what the hell it is." He thankfully had a sense of humor about it, and it ended up being a nice opportunity to catch up. Pretty much the best possible outcome. Now adays I would never do that, after experiencing real security breaches and dealing with that nightmare. But it was fun knowing A. My ancient horrible code was still in production and B. The comment I had left, which I'd forgotten about, and probably assumed no one would ever read, had been found like a flag in the moon or at least a time capsule.
neuroelectron 1y ago
This is why I refuse to use android
tetromino_ 1y ago
My favorite funny function in the Android source is android.os.Handler.runWithScissors() [1] - but (unfortunately) it is not part of the public API. [1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/android16-release/core/java/android/os/Handler.java#564 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
- ROllerozxa 1y ago
  > @hide This method is prone to abuse and should probably not be in the API. If we ever do make it part of the API, we might want to rename it to something less funny like runUnsafe(). :D
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  I was looking for this in TFA. Sad it wasn't included, as it's one of my favorites.
  - ycombinatrix 1y ago
    Why would this be in a Disney Star Wars movie?
    - felurx 1y ago
      TFA = The Friendly Article (or with the other word that begins with f) It's used as a shorthand for "the article we're talking about"
b0a04gl 1y ago
these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review. nobody’s laughing then funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones. maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if it’s still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on
- rkagerer 1y ago
  "Our developers have a sense of humor. Next question."
pugworthy 1y ago
Love the Lost (TV show) reference as well as the value of the constant. There is an additional Lost reference in https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards Also https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/autofill/CustomDescription https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/auto...

286 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

How is someone writing an article about Android source code node nerdy enough to know what a Tricoder is? I don’t buy it

readthenotes1 1y ago
Right? It could be an attempt at humor, but it could also be someone who is naive of culture before 2003. I lost some respect for the author at that point...
- snapcaster 1y ago
  This is so american/age centric please reconsider dispensing respect based on who watched the same TV shows as you growing up
Agentlien 1y ago
While I found it surprising at first I don't think it should be. Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Probably because it was dormant for a long time. And then when it was brought back, it was brought back by people who have no clue what made Star Trek good so it has largely sucked.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    With the benefit of hindsight, I'd say that impression is more because every series is very different. TOS and TAS may have been similar to TNG seasons 1 and 2, but TNG got more thoughtful as it went on; DS9 was a very different show to both TOS and TNG, with long-term continuity and changes (beyond casting) that stuck, and far more shades of grey and where outright evil came with a smile and a charismatic speech rather than being a puddle of psychic oil; VOY had almost no continuity, making it the polar opposite of DS9, but most of the characters were interesting enough for a space soap opera; ENT was derided by many when it came out, because all the main plot arcs made no sense and they kept introducing old fan favourites that didn't make sense contextually because series set in the show's future had yet to meet the Borg, the Ferengi, etc. And while I've never seen Prodigy, I'm aware that was trying for a very different approach to exploring the cannon and had its own story to tell. And famously, only the even-numbered films are any good (which doesn't mean all even films are good, e.g. Nemesis). In this light: DIS throwing away an interesting premise and then going nuts; PIC being three seasons of "why did the scriptwriters put the Borg everywhere, when the main story is androids vs. Romulans, Q, and warcrimes(*?) against changelings leading to changeling terrorism?"; and the very much more pew-pew-lasers action films of Kelvin**… none of this is particularly shocking. What's nice (for people like me) is that SNW and LD are both well-written and thoughtful — but again, very different shows. SNW feels like it is trying to be the best of TOS, TNG, and DS9, even if it does have a bit of fan service with insufficiently justified presence of Kirk (James, the other one is fine). LD is very very silly, but it works for me — not as a canonical set of events (Mariner is even less suitable a personality for a ship officer than is Burnham, and in the same way I can head-cannon all Q episodes as "Q is actually Barclay on the holodeck having a power fantasy", most of the main four cast feel to me like students LARPing trek on a holodeck), but rather I like it because the tries to "yes, and…" the show's existing cannon in ways that mostly work and the characters are fundamentally decent to each other 95% of the time (and when not, justified). * Perhaps "crimes against humanity" would be a closer take, or whatever the term should be in a not-just-humans universe ** and Section 31 whose critical response is so low that I forgot it existed rather than watch it, and only remembered the existence of when looking at Wikipedia to check if Nemesis was even or odd
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      I think that while each show was different, all the Star Trek shows from TOS to VOY had a certain feel to them that made them feel consistent. Yes TOS was more swashbuckling and DS9 was more interested in continuity and shades of grey, but they all were similar in that they were thoughtful shows where teams of competent professionals solved problems in the context of a generally positive vision for humanity, all while trying to offer moral dilemmas for the viewer to wrestle with. But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution. It is a very damning statement that the best (and for a while, only) modern show to live up to Star Trek is The Orville, which isn't even a Star Trek show! But say what you will about him, Seth MacFarlane gets Star Trek and he loves it (unlike Alex Kurtzman, may he never get another TV series). So he made something which (comedy tone aside) could easily be a successor to the Star Trek shows of old. The only exception to the dismal trend is SNW, at least the first season. I haven't gotten around to watching more yet, but that show was what CBS should've been making all along instead of the garbage that was DIS and PIC. Suddenly we are explorers in the positive future, we are competent professionals again... it's actually a worthy Star Trek for once. I would say I think that some of the casting choices aren't always great (their Kirk is... not suited to the role), and I would enjoy if they could move further away from the action show tropes and have more thoughtful writing (though not preachy please, I'll take dumb action over the writers preaching to me). That is why I said Star Trek has largely sucked, because SNW is an exception. But in general I have felt like the current creative staff doesn't understand Star Trek at all and can't make a good show to save their lives.
      - ben_w 1y ago
        > But modern Star Trek is by and large nothing like that. The Abrams movies I'm ok with, because to be honest the old Trek movies had plenty of "it's just a fun action movie" too. But DIS and PIC both seem to positively revel in a pessimistic vision of the future where everyone sucks. Where we once got stories where the writers were smart enough to let viewers draw their own conclusions and apply them to real life (mostly, there were preachy episodes too), the modern shows are a blatant soapbox for the writers to preach to us about their views on the world. Where we once had teams of competent professionals using their skills to solve problems, now we have characters who act like children and only know how to apply "hit it real hard" as a solution. I've not noticed a difference in the preaching, TBH, but otherwise yes. And also that PIC took many interesting side characters from TNG, and used them as redshirts. Maddox, Hugh, Icheb, Shelby… and both Picard and Data in season 1 — and worse for both. Data because Data was (a) brought back the wrong way (should've been him in B4's body properly and not the simulation), and (b) that version of him wasn't given an appropriate reason for seeking his own death, and they really could've done it quite easily by writing that Data to have a plot point of ~ "I don't want my friends to die, I will choose death again to save them". Picard because it was such a missed opportunity, not only to give Patrick Stewart the same makeup that Brent Spiner had had for all those years, but also because Q said he still had a synthetic body in season 2 and yet they had him getting a "neural stabiliser" for "his brain".
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
  > Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be. Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything, Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people outside of the USA learnt about it. Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Trek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...
  - riffraff 1y ago
    Are you sure? I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot. [0] https://stic.it/ https://stic.it/
    - justsomehnguy 1y ago
      > , and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot. Everybody, Gates and Slashdot in one sentence.
      - account42 1y ago
        There is a reason it was called the slashdot effect, because it was the biggest source of traffic for many sites it linked.
        justsomehnguy 1y ago
        sigh Yes, a bunch of nerds (10k?, 20k?) worldwide forced someone's PC used as a server to crash. Their views surely represent the views of a country with ~~50M population, right?
  - lynx97 1y ago
    > Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe. Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.
kretaceous 1y ago
They are in their early 20s and not American¹. Why is that so hard to grasp? 1: https://voxelmanip.se/about/ https://voxelmanip.se/about/
- dylan604 1y ago
  Funny, when I was in my 20s and not British, I knew what a Dalek was because it was just part of the zeitgeist. Tricoders are frequently mentioned as one of the life imitating art type of things that modern tech is striving to take from sci-fi to IRL. I had never even seen an episode of Dr Who, but I was familiar with it because of all the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into. Ironically, I did know what someone wearing an H on their forehead meant from watching Red Dwarf, but that’s a tangent. It just seems like a strange Venn diagram where source code android and Star Trek tricoder do not intersect would be a very odd diagram
  - eCa 1y ago
    > the other sci-fi/nerdy stuff I was into I guess that’s your answer. People have different interests and as such there’s a virtually unlimited number of culture combinations that people can be into. And people can have white spots in places that are surprising to others, there’s only so much time.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head there, you and the author are simply from different cultural zeitgeists. I also remember Star Trek and Dr Who being a big deal, but I was entirely too young to care. And I continue not to care, since I don't watch live action shows much. Never seen an episode of Friends or Game of Thrones either for example. Just a starkly different generation and subculture.
    - ROllerozxa 1y ago
      Indeed. There is such an immense amount of media that is produced from decade to decade that nobody can ever know everything and understand "all" the references. Things that may seem like "things everyone know about" vary wildly between location and year ranges, and in the recent decades with the Internet there are just so many subcultures that all could be classified as "nerdy" but which lack a lot of overlap. I suppose I'm too young to have watched Star Trek when it was really popular (and have all sorts of other blind spots when it comes to TV shows and other media even for people my age), but I've definitively heard about it. And I know some other references to it like Spock and the Vulcan salute, but the Tricorder had completely missed me until now. Also, with something like GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I I could pretty easily tell it was a reference to something fictional (in that case Star Wars) since there is obviously no celestial body with that name. But with the Tricorder I was looking to actually make sure it's not some kind of actually real but vestigial hardware sensor thing that Android might have supported in the 00s, tangentially related to the Tricorder that was on Star Trek. I have certainly witnessed stranger coincidences. Like Android still has functionality in the API for supporting trackballs, which I know used to be on some really early Android phones. So if that had been among the list as "there's this joke input device called a 'trackball' in the API, implying there are phones with a big physical ball you can roll around to move a cursor on the screen", that would be quite silly. Because it was a real and used thing in the past, even though nowadays it's more of a legacy feature (though might be a bad example as I assume you can connect input devices over USB or Bluetooth that may be treated as a trackball by Android).
la_oveja 1y ago
im 30 yo and i didnt know what a tricoder was
- kallistisoft 1y ago
  I'm sorry... please take this adorable tribble as a consolation!
  - bigfishrunning 1y ago
    sounds like trouble
- DustinEgg 1y ago
  [dead]
CobrastanJorji 1y ago
My fellow old person, Deep Space Nine came out 32 years ago. It's not something the nerds of today need to know. All these great sources of nerd allusions will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
- account42 1y ago
  You are aware that there a number of contemporary star trek movies and tv-series (as much as I wish they wouldn't exist), right? Besides, real nerds very much are into older media and not just current pop culture. Which is why things like trek (and blade runner for that matter) end up getting sequels - because there is an audience for it.
wiseowise 1y ago
Nerds gatekeeping nerds. Truly old internet moment.
u5wbxrc3 1y ago
Not every interest comes with age. I am interesed in some antique stuff that's way older than me.
filoleg 1y ago
Not every nerdy person is into Star Trek? Star Wars is imo way more mainstream than Star Trek these days (especially with Disney pumping it), but even then there are tons of people in their 20s working in tech who haven’t seen it and have no interest in it. I don’t think there was more than one person on my previous Android team who would’ve gotten the Tricoder reference, and I was the youngest person there (29 years old at the time; learned about Tricoder literally just from this thread myself). If you picked a random person working on Android source code and asked me to guess whether they know about Tricoder (without knowing any additional info about them), I would have decisively guessed “no”.
- rs186 1y ago
  About a decade ago I started watching Star Wars movies for the first time, when there were "only" 6 movies to finish. But by then there were already 12+ Star Trek movies plus TV series. I decided that I'd "choose" Star Wars, and that was enough for me. I am sure Star Trek is a fascinating universe, and I see it mentioned all the time, but I don't think I care about it enough to ever go into that world.
  - filoleg 1y ago
    Yeah, pretty much the same for me. Plus, Star Wars universe just felt way more interesting and fascinating to me than Star Trek as a kid. Star Wars felt like knights and wizards and jet fighter pilots and heroic adventures in space, Star Trek felt like “adults doing boring adult things… but in space”. Not trying to dismiss ST, clearly it has a lot of appeal to tons of people, but it had zero appeal to me as a child. It also helped that SW universe had some of my favorite games at that time, like SW:Demolition (vehicle combat genre, similar to Twisted Metal), Jedi Knight series, Knights of The Old Republic, etc.
    - l72 1y ago
      I think it depends on if you lean more towards fantasy or sci-fi. Star Wars is space fantasy. Star Trek is science fiction. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they appeal to different personalities. I personally struggle to get in to fantasy, whether that is Star Wars, DnD, or fantasy video games. I’d much prefer to have a court room debate about ethics in the future. The Star Wars vs Star Trek debate has always confused me as you are comparing two totally different genres.
rs186 1y ago
Star Wars and Star Trek mean very little to people outside "Western" countries. If you go to China, most people won't understand a thing about Star Wars, including computer nerds/science fiction fans. And they live their life just fine. Don't assume certain things that happened during a certain period are universal to everybody.
- ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  China I would expect not to know about Western cultural phenomena. But Star Trek references made it into Japanese animation like the Daicon IV opening (1983) and Dirty Pair (1985?) and quite a few others. It was a globally popular series.

TrianguloY 1y ago

If you want to test the isUserAGoat and isUserAMonkey on you own device, I published this small app that does just that: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy.isUserAMonkey https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy... Maybe I can add these other easter eggs...

mixermachine 1y ago
On my device with Android 15 I can't install your app. Google enforces a minimum compielSdk now. Maybe you can upgrade it in your build :)?
- itsTyrion 1y ago
  If you check the app description, there's a GitHub link, which in turn has an f-droid link you can use. But you're not missing out since `isUserAGoat()` will return false on Android >=11 anyway and `isUserAMonkey()` will return true if and only if you're using the monkey test suite.
ROllerozxa 1y ago
That would be quite fun, especially if you would have some thing that checks the DISALLOW_FUN policy. While doing a quick search on GitHub while reading the blog post to see if any Android apps with available source code were using it, all that came up were repositories containing code for the system Settings app locking away the version easter egg based on it. You might become the first third-party to use it!

londons_explore 1y ago

Notice how pretty much none of these are added in the last 10 years? Android's become 'more mature' - ie. Boring, and the joke to code ratio is dropping rapidly.

aaronbrethorst 1y ago
Good, I hate ‘funny’ code. Just get to the point, I’m not here for someone’s notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years ago.
- girvo 1y ago
  Ah I see you're one of those who would enable `UserManager.DISALLOW_FUN`! I personally quite enjoy a bit of whimsy in code. What we do (mostly) isn't that serious (modulo those, including me once upon a time, who work on literal life and death software)
  - jrockway 1y ago
    I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the classic example; turned off because schools threatened to not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.
    - joshstrange 1y ago
      That’s quite different from what we’re talking about though. That’s adding games or fun into your product whereas in this specific sub-thread we’re talking about naming code concepts (functions, classes, variables, enums, etc) funny things.
      - notpushkin 1y ago
        When you’re building an API, it is your product.

lawgimenez 1y ago

How isUserAMonkey API came about: https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA...

znpy 1y ago
"image not available"
- riffraff 1y ago
  that's because you're not a monkey
rompic 1y ago
To ensure that the monkey of a monkey test (an emulated user doing random taps) cannot do all possible actions. https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=68BZEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA... "Bruce grew the lab over the years from an initial set of seven devices to more than 400. He said there were some unanticipated problems to resolve over that time. "One day I walked into the monkey lab to hear a voice say, '911-What's your emergency?" That situation resulted in Dianne adding a new function to the API, isUserAMonkey(), which is used to gate actions that monkeys shouldn't take during tests (including dialing the phone and resetting the device)."
fredoralive 1y ago
Interestingly, the original Mac had a similar MonkeyLives flag: https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html https://folklore.org/Monkey_Lives.html
- ROllerozxa 1y ago
  I assume that's the "The Monkey" testing tool for the original Mac that's mentioned in the footnotes in the Androids book. Supposedly goes back to the infinite monkey theorem that makes monkeys act as a metaphor for randomness, and it was also mentioned that one of the developers of Android had used the same kind of monkey testing for WebTV and Palm OS.

agildehaus 1y ago

Reminds me of BeOS (and now Haiku), which have "is_computer_on()" and "is_computer_on_fire()" both with great descriptions. https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_SystemInfo.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...

yomimiva 1y ago
For the curious minds: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroot/os/system_info.cpp#L215 https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/src/system/libroo...
- tomn 1y ago
  looking around a bit, it's used as an example in the documentation: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/7d07c4bc739dbf90159a5c02e48b9118c47ebbcd/docs/develop/kernel/system_calls.rst https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/7d07c4bc739dbf90159a5c02... This is actually a great reason to keep it around; it's as simple as possible, and nothing uses it so it's easy to find the relevant bits of code.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  Makes sense: is_computer_on() int32 is_computer_on(); Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.
throw74848484 1y ago
I know it is trying to be funny. But those states are quite normal in modern computer with advanced power management. OS should handle wakeups from deep sleep, or state where temperature of motherboard is 200 celsius.
- mordae 1y ago
  Unlikely. Nothing is specced beyond 140 Celsius and many parts not beyond 80.

gyomu 1y ago

Is there anything similar in the public iOS API?

theletterf 1y ago

This means jokes and humour in technical documentation. While it's often frowned upon, I love a bit of humour in docs. I wrote about this here: https://passo.uno/experiment-humour-documentation/ https://passo.uno/experiment-humour-documentation/

Aransentin 1y ago

For X11, from the top of my head: The global variable that toggles a bunch of legacy cruft is called "party_like_its_1989": https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/dix/globals.c#L111 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/blob/master/di... The changelog for the DRI2 extension is "Awesomeness!", "True excellence", "Enlightenment attained" etc: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.txt https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/dri2proto/dri2proto.t...

bertil 1y ago

The `<blink>` tag was an official part of early HTML standard, until teenagers showed up online and sanity prevailed. I suspect this could have been there to maintain compatibility with older webpages.

fredoralive 1y ago
This blink is in a specific UI XML dialect, not HTML.
- ninjaoxygen 1y ago
  True, it has never been in an HTML standard, however it was definitely a documented part of early HTML. The blink element was in Netscape Navigator's HTML dialect in 1993/94, when early HTML was still just hitting IETF RFCs / DRAFTs, you can find blink in the Netscape HTML developer documentation from just after that era, DevEdge. It was never in NCSA Mosaic, the other big GUI browser of the era. Later on in the process of being standardized, when it was more W3C than IETF albeit still mainly the same people, Netscape agreed to drop blink from the proposals if Microsoft dropped marquee, so in that sense yes, it was never in a standardized version of HTML, but many tags in active use at the time were never in a standards doc. See here https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html for some history from w3c, who went on to become the formal custodians of HTML after the IETF days. Edit: here's the earliest Netscape Developer Docs I can see on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/19961115043739/http://developer.netscape.com/library/documentation/htmlguid/tags1.htm#1005356 https://web.archive.org/web/19961115043739/http://developer....
  - account42 1y ago
    Blink shows that the webs often touted absolute backwards compatibility can be broken for really petty reasons. At least these days you can easily bring back the fun: blink { animation: blink 1s steps(5, start) infinite; } @keyframes blink { to { visibility: hidden } }
ROllerozxa 1y ago

uncircle 1y ago

public static final String DISALLOW_FUN The default value is false. [...] Type: Boolean [...] Constant Value: "no_fun" Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManager.html#DISALLOW_FUN https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/UserManag... --- How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android?

objclxt 1y ago
> How the hell did this pass code review? Are booleans strings on Android? You are misreading the documentation, it's a key/value API. `DISALLOW_FUN` is the string key you pass to `setUserRestriction`, which takes a boolean value.
- uncircle 1y ago
  That makes more sense. Thanks.
  - izacus 1y ago
    Also this is an enterprise policy constant, so it gets sent (and configured) as string/string dictionary via REST API from MDM backend. That's mostly because the constants can be of mixed types (e.g. "MAX_PASSWORD_CHARS" : "1", "DISALLOW_NETWORK_SWITCHING: "true" - example, constants not actual).
stevepotter 1y ago
Someone else pointed out the reason for the datatype. A more subtle problem is the use of double negatives. Boolean APIs like "disable" will throw off users of your API.

yoko888 1y ago

[flagged]

aucisson_masque 1y ago
Exactly what I thought, this help reminding that there are (were) actual humans behind any random piece of code or api I use.
account42 1y ago
Makes you wonder if there are little easter eggs in e.g. missile control firmware.
- Neywiny 1y ago
  Haven't written that but have done stuff similar in customer (which is public). I've had code shipped without me knowing. That certainly had such things left in. I've also had code shipped with plenty of reviews to take out all Easter eggs, debug menus, etc.

coxley 1y ago

For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke. In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time. [^1]: It was a big company so this statement could only be true in the circles I had access to.

otras 1y ago
I remember seeing this in React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED, and I've always enjoyed similar lighthearted and unwieldingly-long names. Unfortunately I see it too has fallen victim to defunnification: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789 https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789
- shkkmo 1y ago
  Fun names are OK, but only if they don't introduce ambiguity. In this case the change wasn't so much anti-fun as anti-ambiguity.
  - otras 1y ago
    That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification as a side effect, if you will.
    - serial_dev 1y ago
      That variable name is still confusing.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  Could have added a futurama reference to it __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED_______OUT_OF_A_CANNON___INTO_THE_SUN

eej71 1y ago

On OpenVMS, DCL (the shell and main scripting language of choice) had this as an exit code. $ exit 2928 %SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels

rfrey 1y ago

I want to make replying to this thread a requirement for anybody I'm interviewing to hire. Also for anybody interviewing me. Truly a "2 kinds of people in this world" moment.

owebmaster 1y ago
Why? Googlers adding jokes to APIs is about as funny as dad jokes at Christmas dinner.
- rfrey 1y ago
  So I know which of the 2 kinds of people in the world they are.

khernandezrt 1y ago

The Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System: link isn't working :(

ROllerozxa 1y ago
oops, no idea why the link I put there didn't work. Just corrected it, ended up linking to the page about the book on Chet Haase's website instead: https://www.chethaase.com/androids https://www.chethaase.com/androids

butz 1y ago

Looks like they finally set DISALLOW_FUN to true by default in latest Android release.

lelandfe 1y ago

> a hidden column in the Chrome task manager that shows how many goats a browser process has teleported Was very dissatisfied to find this no longer works. Here's an old post with a screenshot: https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=articles.goats_teleported https://www.100-geek.net/articles/goats_teleported?action=ar... From 234 columns to 16, what a purge.

paxys 1y ago

I miss the era of easter eggs in tech products. Kinda went away with the corporatization of everything.

GuB-42 1y ago
And also a focus on security. Security people don't want to find anything unexpected in the code they run, and easter eggs are by nature unexpected, sometimes even well hidden. I remember at some point, a contractor for a big company added an undocumented easter egg to the code they delivered, it was fairly innocuous, something like playing music when a special key combination is entered, and yet, it was treated like a security breach, as if it was a backdoor. I don't know if people got fired for it, but it is very possible. This is a public API, so at least, it is documented, but even then I am sure that some very unfun security auditor will only see this as an increased attack surface. Security may be necessary, but damn, it sucks! (not just for easter eggs)
- spcebar 1y ago
  Oh man. Early in my career I was working a job I didn't like and doing work that was by necessity incredibly hacky and tedious—not an interesting challenge, just a grinding one. It involved overwriting template files that weren't supposed to be overwritten and essentially writing multiple versions of the same code in multiple places because the system was so kludgey. This project stretched on and on with brutally painstaking iteration, long hours, fires happening with other clients, etc, etc, long story short, I sort of lost my mind and left an Easter egg comment in the code in a state of minor madness. Years after I had left the job, I got a message from a former coworker that said "Do you know anything about MOOL?" I said I didn't know anything about something called MOOL, and he said, the client had found a long diatribe about a bovine god named MOOL in an obscure template file deep in the codebase, and I said, "ah, yeah, that was probably me." The head of IT for the former client had found the code and gotten in touch with my coworker and said, "I assume this isn't a security breach, but I also don't know what the hell it is." He thankfully had a sense of humor about it, and it ended up being a nice opportunity to catch up. Pretty much the best possible outcome. Now adays I would never do that, after experiencing real security breaches and dealing with that nightmare. But it was fun knowing A. My ancient horrible code was still in production and B. The comment I had left, which I'd forgotten about, and probably assumed no one would ever read, had been found like a flag in the moon or at least a time capsule.

neuroelectron 1y ago

This is why I refuse to use android

tetromino_ 1y ago

My favorite funny function in the Android source is android.os.Handler.runWithScissors() [1] - but (unfortunately) it is not part of the public API. [1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/android16-release/core/java/android/os/Handler.java#564 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

ROllerozxa 1y ago
> @hide This method is prone to abuse and should probably not be in the API. If we ever do make it part of the API, we might want to rename it to something less funny like runUnsafe(). :D
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
I was looking for this in TFA. Sad it wasn't included, as it's one of my favorites.
- ycombinatrix 1y ago
  Why would this be in a Disney Star Wars movie?
  - felurx 1y ago
    TFA = The Friendly Article (or with the other word that begins with f) It's used as a shorthand for "the article we're talking about"

b0a04gl 1y ago

these get into logs, metrics, API contracts. now you're explaining isUserAGoat() to a partner team in a quarterly review. nobody’s laughing then funny thing is, linters catch unused vars but not unfunny ones. maybe we need a linter that flags joke names after 90 days. if it’s still funny, you keep it. else rename and move on

rkagerer 1y ago
"Our developers have a sense of humor. Next question."

pugworthy 1y ago

Love the Lost (TV show) reference as well as the value of the constant. There is an additional Lost reference in https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards https://developer.android.com/games/pgs/leaderboards Also https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/autofill/CustomDescription https://developer.android.com/reference/android/service/auto...