A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
kiwiziti.com
kiwiziti.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com...
> I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning C, we were given sample code to fix. Everything was perfectly formatted, and the program ran without issue like be 99% of the time, but every once in a while, it’d give a totally incorrect value, or throw an error, and it was to teach us all about concurrency and race conditions and how even when we know we have done everything right, there might be something wrong that takes a deeper understanding to idntify. My professor was awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/com...
> In my old team, every line above 400 was considered an error. 2000 lines was a cause to put the development on hold until the end of refactoring.
Apparently 1.9 million people (the number of subscribers).
I've always assumed they're apocryphal, ie based on the truth but considerably dramatised to be more "Daily WTF" material, somewhat like The Onion articles. Basically, if your best source is an internet comment in a joke-y forum, just like if your best source is "Rob from accounts said at the water-cooler", then some corroboration before you promulgate that information would be absolutely in order.
I'm also just asking myself what's more likely here. Think of the demographic of that forum. It seems to me like some up and coming nerd kid fancied themself an expert and cooked up a half baked theory about what was happening.
Still, one should do extra double checking before taking anything there literally.
Once you see dozens or more people jump on a made-up bandwagon you're a little bit better prepared and alert for the cumulative stupidity we collectively produce.
So to me it is not obvious it is a joke because programmers can also laugh at very silly real world bugs.
But the main story here is that news outlets don't bother to fact check. And that's another reason you should avoid news.
At that point it's probably best to avoid human language altogether
Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on random social media posts. What is really interesting is that the posts were there first, and the internet amplifies them on its own.
To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then upvoted organically to a broader audience.
The author didn't write misinformation for ad views, sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke.
Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to make false points, etc.
These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is: jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy.
It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is absorbed at face value.
This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the point.
Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from actual facts.
Your solution of stopping to consume social media doesn't work, as other mediums have been just as bad at being unbiased truthseekers.
Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though your can't even watch YouTube on a Google Glass. There was no broken window. The was zero evidence except for two sentences on Twitter. Nobody did any fact checking whatsoever.
It's not a new problem, but it definitely feels like it's gotten worse.
You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had zero evidence behind it.
Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy clickbait, that's my fault?
What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?
I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful - people use it to say things and then hide behind ‘but I was just joking’ having already pushed the message out.
People will post lies online regardless of whether the good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is not the satire, it's the blind trust.
Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details and I'll get the money wired to you directly.
So much ad absurdum in this thread...
In addition, you've completely altered what the author of the blog post was saying. They're not using the dismissive "It's just a prank bro", they've actually written quite a thoughtful post explaining the context behind the incident. They didn't apologise but they didn't need to.
At some threshold we shouldn’t need to dumb it down any further. I think journalists being able to tell the difference between parody, that’s clearly labelled as parody, and real news is already lower than I’d set that bar.
Ask yourself what’s the value in journalism if they’re just going to build a story off of a tweet with no verification/ fact checking?
People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We are only able to actually police those terms when it comes to actual business transactions.
Exposing the failings of the sources of information is always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your dog all As in premed and med school he will become a capable doctor.
I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911."
That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not have intended to deceive but I would bet most people visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter information.
I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's description, but we should still be expecting more effort from reporters.
Twitter should crack down on this misinformation.
Do these people explain why the chickens were crossing the roads?
HN: Clearly the original user who purported to have recorded what a chicken said is lying. He hasn’t learnt anything from the whole thing. What a misinformer. Practically Pravda.
The problem is how news outlets that care so little about the quality of the information they present continue to exist.
This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.
Are people confused by the fiction section?
> Well people publish weird stuff in the non-fiction section as well.
Ok... what's that got to do with the fiction section you were talking about?
I fully agree news outlets should verify what they publish. Still what this guy did was kinda crappy and I fail to see any humor in that. (before someone starts implying something I didn't say - I don't call to "cancel him", "ban him" or whatever you do this days)
There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it become part of news cycles and eventually a commonly repeated statement.
My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this though. Evidence:
- Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution (later renamed the Wii).
- Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10 indefinitely[2]. Who wants to be forever one version behind the competition?
- After Mac OS bumped their version version up to 11, Microsoft abandoned the above and went to 11 as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/mi...
Sure, "implied" in the sense that the article quotes a spokesman saying "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows".
I find a lot of "Reddit knowledge" in areas where I need accurate information to do my job (vintage console repair especially) is complete bullshit, but it makes you look smart if you repeat it.
Almost always it requires an understanding of some sort of niche knowledge/art, like metal fatigue, heat transfer or potentiometers. At the same time, it's usually irrelevant to the problem at hand.
In this case, the statement is nothing more than a vehicle for showing off that you understand what integer overflow is, and therefore signalling to others how smart you are.
And that said, I've probably repeated the "Nuclear Gandhi" myth to a dozen other people, complete with a short explanation of unsigned integer overflow.
Well, no. It's not something you could believe if you ever played Civilization with Gandhi. (Which is itself relatively uncommon - he can only appear in half of games that are configured with 6 opponents. With fewer than 6 opponents, he can't appear at all.)
I almost never played 7-player games, but I can tell you from long experience that it's not plausible for any civilization to be more aggressive than the Zulus. For Gandhi to be "25 times more aggressive" than the other civilizations in the game, he'd need to start breaking peace treaties several times per turn as soon as he developed Democracy.
And even then, Democracy arrives long, long before nuclear weapons. Gandhi would never have been noted for an affinity for nukes[1] - he'd have been noted for an affinity for stabbing you in the back with horse-mounted knights.
The nuclear Gandhi thing makes sense as an example of someone who is completely unfamiliar with a system making up behavior that he thinks sounds interesting. But not as an example of people detecting false patterns. The true patterns are too obvious.
[1] Nukes aren't likely to come up in a game of Civilization in any event. They appear too late; you'll win or lose before they're relevant.
Then a few years later I started seeing the image I created as "real" in various forums to legitimate publishers and major newspaper websites. Everyone believed in the image, taking it as a fact (which is fair as it looked legitimate and was posted from a "reputable" source), commented under it with various levels of confusion.
I still Google that time to time to giggle a bit, but it also shows how Internet people tend to copy stuff from random places (e.g. My Facebook album) and post in various places and things go viral exponentially without almost anyone questioning it.
If you can accidentally plant a false, story imagine doing so intentionally.
Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get important things wrong just through the game of telephone and becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly report true things.
We really do live in a post-fact society.
The difference now is the distributed nature of both the bullshit generation and fact-checking.
If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
I'm not totally sure it's relevant to this particular story, but now I'm curious, are you suggesting this story about a joke bug report is an example of that real problem of hate-inducing news? (I mean, it might be).
You might say, what if it has real consequences like who gets elected, having a war, or making personal lifestyle choices? Yes, but true news already influences people to make bad decisions like that using its emotional tricks, so what's the difference? At least if it's all false, people won't take it so seriously. I think the truth in news is mostly there to enhance entertainment value, like a movie that's "based on a true story" is more satisfying than one that isn't.
I wasn't thinking of this particular story. Doesn't seem vary hate-inducing to me, but the meta-story about how journalists aren't doing their job does!
Duplicate MACs were (well, still are) a huge problem in places with multiple on prem VM pods with shared networks. It's one of those things that seems automatically handled until you realize it's not ALL automatically handled for you.
> It's not meant to bash news outlets over journalistic integrity. The internet is a difficult thing to document. It's not meant to justify my joke. If you don't think it was funny... OK. Depending on the day I'm sure I'd agree with you.
It’s why we laugh at “it’s behind you” in a pantomime. We’re in on the joke that the actor knows it’s behind them.
Except that part was clearly an exaggeration and it's very easy for a few bytes to overlap, or for many many byte sequences to cause a reboot.
Even if the post wasn't meant to be plausible, it is a plausible off-the-cuff explanation, and I wish the author would realize that before making criticisms like this.
And that's about it for the original post, it was only a couple sentences.
It's entirely believable as someone who mostly knows what the problem is, but doesn't have a perfect understanding, tossing it into a quick reddit post.
Are fleets of 100s of Rokus used in commercial settings? A quick google suggests no.
Do fleets of commercial network devices typically implement some weird peer-to-peer leader election thing to... save some bandwidth on updates? Also no, centralized management service/console is both way easier to implement and a desirable feature to boot. Chances are that's how device fleets are managed in places you've worked.
Then what is 'a quarter mil in CDN fees'? Once? Per update? Per month or year? Oddly specific details like this are often a hallmark of a tall tale and this one is both oddly specific and oddly nonsensical.
We also have to believe a billion dollar revenue company did this much more convoluted, complicated and highly atypical thing to save $250k and then just left it completely vulnerable to trivial replay attacks.
Could one or some of these things, plausibly, happen? Maybe. Taken together, though, it's a house of cards and every card is a joker.
Or perhaps reporting has been in decline for decades and were just finally seeing it.
Pokemon Sword/Shield was really causing Roku devices to boot until Roku issued a patch as the "background" section details.
The joke was this involved a collision with some signed Roku command and that's the fluke our universe gets over a planet of Justin Timberlake clones. It's not a "2 guys and a priest walk into the bar" type joke, it was on /r/programminghumor after all.
https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p...
Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
The etymology of the words kind of sort of supports the meme, but I never managed to find historical evidence of the difference in meaning being as outlined. Both come from Latin, so it's not the case like cow vs beef where the Germanic word gets a new meaning because the language adopts a French word alongside it. Additionally no other European language makes that distinction and it's extremely rare for a concept to exist only in English.
I've tried to hunt down where this confusion started and it seems to be some meme English teachers repeat, like "i before e except after c". Australians in particular are very invested in it.
If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years back.
Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world, but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be brought to life out of nowhere.
Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
Ethernet protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n...
IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-n...
Transport protocol ports: https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
> and packet leading bytes
No registry for this past the transport layer, standard protocols will tell you in their standards though.
That said I don't think having a registry solves the problem you're implying it does, there are only 65k ports but >65k protocols wanting to use ports so dealing with overlap is a requirement if things want to operate at that layer. Not to mention it's better practice to handle invalid data gracefully anyways.
I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical kindergarten cubby analogies and so on).
Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We’re not relying on luck.
No one said that, so ...
> The odds of two UUIDs being generated with the same values on the same system is very low
…snip analogy description
> Except it could still happen. You usually get some hand-waiving from software engineers when you say this, but... collisions could still happen. Google found one.
That last bit is a link to Google brute forcing a sha1 digest
4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues.
Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context, people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes, do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes the symbol?
So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a hoax is incorrect.
(As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a zero.)
[0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...