But obviously that implies that you are a chicken dinner.
At least according to some people's expectations, presumably.
1,725 karma · joined October 4, 2012
At least according to some people's expectations, presumably.
Calling that 'dead' and demanding status updates is the overreaction here. Unless you're paying this person to work on it full-time.
One of the bits of software I use has an update as recently as 2019, and before that 2015 and two 2013. It's clearly still relatively active. For software released in its current form in 1997, after being ported from an older version.
Even if modern software might sometimes need more frequent updates, it's still pretty demanding to insinuate death and demand status notes from an open-source maintainer just because they're not moving quick enough for you.
Tell that to the banks, government, and companies still running software older than I am. And for which, on the rare occasions when maintenance is needed, the developers are likely using tools older than I am to do the maintenance. (I'm middle-aged btw.)
It's been a nice 23 years since the major Y2K projects, and we've still got 15 more until we really have to hustle on the Y2038 projects.
As a Windows user, it's sad that so many people think that way nowadays.
I've encountered one DOS program from the early 90s that doesn't run anymore because it used its own custom memory management which newer systems don't allow, but that one was later re-released in an updated version that still works today. And there were one or two late-90s Windows programs that no longer run either because they have 16-bit components or depended on some then-standard now long-gone libraries to be on the system, but those run in a VM.
Other than that, there is plenty of software dating back to the 90s, some to the 80s, that mostly still works fine. It doesn't need constant maintenance and updates. It worked about 30 years ago and still works today and should still work tomorrow. You'll find even older legacy code in major organizations that's still chugging along.
That's hard to find in modern software. Now everyone always has to have the latest thing and it has to be updated almost every single day just to keep a massive chain of transitive dependencies from collapsing out from under it.
I guess that's why people get rude and ask whether a project is 'dead' even though patches have been released for it multiple times within the last 10 years.
It does have other UI quirks though. IIRC, focus was determined by mouseover so if you bumped the mouse while trying to type in a textbox the keys would get lost. I found that significantly more of a problem (without an easy fix) than the screen resolution.
When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?
Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).
And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.
I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.
ALT+SPACE, M, arrow keys is forever in my brain due to so many poorly behaved programs which would open their window somewhere off-screen, and that was the way to move them back onto the screen.
Those of us who've played D&D or something similar are familiar with rolling dice, say a 10-sided die and a 6-sided die, and cross-referencing the results against a table to generate random monster encounters, treasure, etc.
If you roll a die to determine how many gold pieces an orc is carrying, and you roll a 5, that is the result. You don't claim that the dice was hallucinating or confabulating or got the facts wrong or whatever. It's a random generator, and it generated a random number, and that result is truthfully the result it generated.
LLMs are also random generators. They're not databases of facts, they're not mathematical calculators. They are like the D&D random generation tables, only developed deeply enough such that they can string together randomly generated words into coherent sentences and paragraphs.
That sentence/paragraph is just as true as the result of rolling some dice. If you roll an 11, then you rolled an 11. The dice didn't hallucinate it, confabulate it, lie about it, or get it wrong. The true result is that you rolled an 11. If you wanted to roll a 12, too bad. You were unlucky. The dice weren't somehow magically 'wrong'.
And an LLM is not somehow magically wrong or incorrect or hallucinating or even confabulating when it gives you an answer that isn't what you wanted. It's randomly generating text. And its answer is every bit as correct as the result of rolling dice or drawing a card.
I don't know about chess, though earlier computers didn't have the power, so people could've reasonably said that.
But we certainly saw it with Go. Many people said that a computer could beat a person at chess or checkers, because they were simple, limited games, but Go was too complicated, too many possible combinations. A computer could never beat a Go champion. And here we are, with multiple generations of AlphaGo pushing the boundaries. They might use a couple thousand CPUs and a few hundred GPUs, but they can do the impossible thing.
I'm always surprised when I see things like this on HN. Also complaints about it auto-rebooting to install updates, requiring an MSN account, etc.
I turn all that stuff off when I first install it, so I see none of those problems. I just kind of assume any tech-savvy person or power-user would also do so.
And we might think the defaults suck. Rightfully, they would for us. But for granny or a gen-Z kid with no computer knowledge? Somebody who isn't going to know to make backups, run scheduled updates, or know the difference between local search and internet search? Those defaults probably make sense.
For me, it works great because I turn that stuff off and I know how to manage a computer. For people who don't, it also probably mostly works great, because they don't have to know how to do that.
Seems like there's just this one odd slice of people caught in the middle who know enough to get irritated by the defaults, but not enough to configure their system the way they want it. If you're in that group, then you're tech-savvy enough to look up how to change the settings to make it work the way you want. I encourage you to do so and make those changes to save yourself some stress and irritation.
Another is that they tried to get too helpful and it backfired. There used to be a bunch of search operators that you could use to be specific and most of them don't work anymore. Because that was too complicated for most people. So now instead Google just ignores what you searched for and tries to guess what you actually meant, and ends up showing a lot of irrelevant results, some of which don't match what you searched for at all.
The third is that nowadays almost always, Google tries to spin it into a commercial request. The top results are usually for e-commerce sites or something selling products or services, no matter what you search for. It always assumes you're trying to buy something, not trying to find information.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago, and it generally gives much better results, but even it seems to be slipping a bit now. Still way better than the modernized Google, but for how long?
But at least it only takes 30 seconds to install ublock origin, and no extra hardware.
I can't believe some people actually use the internet like that all the time.
Why did these things happen (or not happen)? Insufficient training? Insufficient processes? Were changes being reviewed and accepted by people who didn't really understand the changes, for expediency? Were there alerts but they were lost in the noise of thousands of bogus alerts people had learned to ignore? Was the lack of segmentation a known issue but allowed because it made some things easier? Were the credentials stored on NFS because they simply hadn't setup a more appropriate system yet and that was considered low-priority? Were business priorities getting in the way of technical priorities such that known issues were backlogged?
It's fairly easy to make a bullet list of things that should (or shouldn't) be done. It's a bit more difficult to figure out why, in a specific organization, those things aren't (or are) being done. Even if/when people might know that they should/shouldn't.
The surface level mistakes are interesting. The deeper organizational causes of those mistakes would be interesting. Solving those things at a higher systemic/organizational level can reduce the whack-a-mole nature of individual mistakes.
The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had been donated to our school. I managed to talk my parents into buying one, and they took me to the store but I couldn't find one. Asked the salesman and he said they didn't sell them anymore but now they had these new Macintosh computers.
I looked at the rinkydink black and white screen with a mostly-blank desktop with just a few icons you could drag around or click on it. Couldn't even figure out how to get to the command line, let alone into BASIC. When I asked the salesman he said that you couldn't and seemed utterly baffled that someone would actually want to use their computer.
So I left and went and bought a PC clone instead. Plugged it in and booted it up and I was coding immediately. PCs just worked, and let you do whatever you wanted. Macs were kind of toy computers at the time.
That philosophy still kind of holds to this day, though less so now. I use a Mac for work, and luckily they did finally make it possible to get to a command line and to program on it. At some point, they realized they had to give some power to it or else become utterly irrelevant. But you can tell that it's still not intended for power users. It still can't run most software, and what it does have is limited and simplified, from the OS on up, and still defaults to making things difficult except for the simplest use cases.
And at the time, most programs were text-mode. I/O was only keyboard, screen, and disk (and maybe mouse, joystick, and serial port if you wanted to get fancy). When your program started you had full control of the entire system. There was no multitasking, 100+ processes running in the background, nor GUI architecture over an OS subsystem. So you only needed to learn a very very few things to be able to build software roughly equivalent to professional store-bought software. Simple logic and data structures and 3-6 types of I/O and that was it.
From there it was a short step to something more powerful like Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic, again both of which were pretty much "batteries included" everything you need in one tool.
Today's landscape with its enormous stacks, build tools, cambrian explosion of languages, frameworks, and libraries, etc., and layers upon layers of abstraction and indirection between you and the machine, plus countless dependencies, package managers, containers, etc., all of which are constantly changing and shifting out from under you, is baffling even to professional developers.
Luckily, it is easier to find documentation, tutorials, and other actual people to ask about stuff. But also a lot of that is quickly outdated, faddish and evangelical, just assumes that you already know 500 other things, or assumes that you know absolutely nothing, so only covers the barest basics.
So it's really still more difficult than just picking up a book about C, QBASIC, Turbo Pascal, or Visual Basic and getting started was back in the day.
And that is a general issue with the maintainers not understanding what they're doing, or not understanding how issue trackers work.
If you close an issue that is still present in the current release, then you're doing it wrong - with one exception. If it is in fact functioning as intended and the issue was just a misunderstanding, then explaining that and closing the issue makes sense. (But even then you might want to update the docs or helptext or something to prevent future misunderstanding, if it's confusing enough.)
Closing an issue just because you don't feel like looking at it today just means that someone else will open a new issue tomorrow to report the same thing. And any history, workarounds, steps to replicate, etc. in the old issue will be lost/disconnected. That's not doing anyone a favor.
"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" is about a different topic - disconnection from community and social interactions that we used to have, but it's an overlapping topic. It has lots of data and graphs.
They don't carry old TV miniseries. They don't carry many older classic shows. They don't carry many old classic movies and especially not more obscure ones. They don't carry many artistic/indie movies. They don't carry many foreign movies. Sometimes when they do carry something it's edited all weirdly, unlike the original (perhaps because they didn't get the rights to use the music or other stuff in streaming).
I still like the streaming services for what they do carry and especially for the serendipity of browsing around and finding something I didn't even know existed and would've never thought to look for. But that's about all they're good for. When I'm actually looking for something, they're usually a failure. 9/10 it's available on a pirate site though.
But freedom of speech also means you can't compel someone to say something they don't want to say. That's not censorship, that's freedom. You can't force Google to rebroadcast that message.
And if you think that's the first or only thing they choose not to show, you must be very new. Otherwise you'd've noticed by now that your search results aren't all full of child porn and other garbage. Google isn't forced to show that to you.
If you want to see things that Google doesn't show, you're free to find it by other means.
Of course a long, random, unique password from a password manager is best for security, everyone knows that.
So forcing people to instead use a short, easy-to-type, memorable password clearly couldn't possibly be anything else but an attempt to undermine the user's security and put their account at increased risk. That bank does not have your best interests in mind. With that in mind, it doesn't matter why they don't.
So switch to another bank (or better yet, a credit union) that does.