That previous tweet about the internet of the late 90s got me reminiscing down memory lane about web development in the 90s / early 2000s... (see how many of these you remember)

Front end code used to render *drastically* differently depending on browser and there used to be more even distribution of browser usage. In my first job as a web dev in 2004, we would tear our hair out over IE and Firefox rendering quirks.
https://t.co/FQFLeOvGK5 became the definitive place to look up the answer to the question “why the fuck are you doing that, internet explorer?”
Digg launched in 2004 and had the first mainstream implementation of an Ajax button. It was an epic watershed moment and front end dev became exponentially more fun and innovative from there. Starting with things like Prototype.js leading to Jquery etc.
Early 2000s, mobile phones still had slow downloads and poor rendering capability. You didn’t build “mobile first” or “responsive”, usually you would just build a shitty, basic version of your main site and shove it on a mobile sub domain to be forgotten and ill-maintained 😅
Speaking of maintenance. I worked at a web dev shop in the late 90s before subversion or git were a thing. A coworker irreversibly overwriting your code with their own was actually a thing that could happen. The horror...
In summary: things are so much better for devs now 😅

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)