Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API

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=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)."

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.

There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time.

But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels.

"Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.

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/

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