It’s wrong, but also, it’s right a surprisingly good amount of the time.

For you, I’ll make an exception.

Just in case anybody didn’t read the article and doesn’t already know: Wild animals infected with rabies aren’t just the stereotypical raging aggressive terror beasts you see in the media, they can also be super friendly and usually docile.

Obviously the best advice is just to leave wild animals alone and keep your distance. However, if you see a feral or wild animal behaving in an uncharacteristic way, added caution is needed. This includes things like seeing traditionally nocturnal animals like skunks and raccoons out and about during the daytime or having them be unusually friendly / fearless / docile to the point where they don’t retreat and may even come up to investigate you. It doesn’t mean that they are infected with rabies, but that’s definitely a potential symptom of rabies (but can also be a sign of other infectious diseases that should activate your spidey senses).

You are not a Disney princess and Cinderella is not a realistic presentation of how healthy wild animals act.

It was a single PHP file containing upper tens of thousands of lines of code (i.e. probably 60k+ but I no longer recall the exact amount). And the horrors didn’t stop there. Function names and code formatting were haphazard, some functions were descriptive enough to be helpful(ish) like check_if_first_friday_of_month() but most were literally along the lines of function12() with no comments to indicate the purpose. A̸n̶d̷ ̴t̵h̵e̵ ̸h̷o̵r̶r̸o̷r̵s̸ ̸d̷i̸d̵n̷’̷t̶ ̵s̶t̴o̸p̸ ̷t̵h̶e̶r̵e̶.̴ This application was storing sensitive personal information in the database in plain text. And the horrors didn’t stop there.

Congrats to the developer, though. This project was the one that finally got him fired and he immediately pivoted into a management position at a big tech company (don’t recall which but it might’ve been Microsoft or IBM) making an order of magnitude more money.

Personally, I’ve been compiling a cache of datacentric interpolations of real-world metrics used to synergistically integrate human intelligence with the intersection of science, technology, mathematics, arts, and philosophy since the moment I was born, and let me tell you, this is what I was born for.

This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?