RegW

Where "not now" could be a euphemism for "I don't want to, but there always a hope that they will change their minds later and won't force me", or perhaps it means "I want to wait until everyone else has caved, and my laptop no longer functional".

I only continue to use Windows for work because it is mandated. All new work laptops come with at least one day of entertainment called "setting up". Where the myriad options are explored for the possibility of duplicity, breaking data collection and plain old contrarianism.

DiffDebugging is not a term I have ever heard of before, but I guess it's something I do on a regular basis. The code used to work, it doesn't now, WTF has changed?

Yes, I thought I must be missing something. Seems like a great idea, but I only see animations and not much to suggest that this isn't just a dream.

I wonder what other purposes FB have used those 1.1B+ publicly visible photos to train models for?

Ah. I was wondering why I can never find anything I want to watch on Netflix.

Wot? Even if you are building a reverse proxy?

> Quora being a good option is incredibly surprising to me.

Me too - I'd never heard of it, so I felt compelled to go and look. Bounced off the signup page and thought "That's probably why more people don't use it".

It might be worth signing up, but as I have no clue what it is or if it's any good, why would I invest that time?

Well I assume that the end-to-end encryption is honoured, and the message is not parsed in any way at either end. I also assume that the end-to-end reference is between your phone and the phone of the intended recipient, and not between your phone and the server routing the message. I don't have access to the source so I don't have any way to prove that, but with the objections by Facebook/Whatsapp/Meta to breaking the encryption this seems to be the case.

No, the data-mining with these apps is in your list of contacts. Whatsapp takes these and builds you into a network. Its not what you say, it is who you are talking to and when. That is valuable.

When you sign up, you up load your contacts to Whatsapp. If you try to prevent it, it will insist and not work until you do. You can try to clear down your contacts and sign up without any. However, it will still take your number and look it up in the contacts of all those who have your number. It now has your name and any details your contacts have chosen to keep about you.

> I have lived in the UK for 35 years and I didn't even know Google Messages existed until you mentioned it.

Exactly, even though it is the default messaging app on Android and receives their SMS texts for them, most users don't realise they are using it or that when they "send a text" to another Android user it is actually sending the message over data.

Anyway my understanding is that a text is a SMS text, and a whatsapp is a whatsapp message. I know that Google Messages hides itself by sending SMS texts when the number isn't known to Messages, and I guess Whatsapp does this too. I also live in the UK and occupy a space within multiple different communities which insist on different messaging apps. May be I just don't the option to be so vague.

I don't think so. When you text somebody it's assumed it's SMS, but if your friendship circle is on Android then in actual fact it's Google Messages.

All the same benefits: end-to-end encryption and data mining.

Often examples don't make it clear what is expected. As a consequence you might copy the example value temporarily until your understanding solidifies, but it never does, or doesn't before it gets a dependency on it.

So foo.bar.com or my-subdomain.example.com?

I also remember having to work around the lack of environment variables (in the 80s I think), but reading through the Wikipedia entry it looks like that restriction is long gone.

> Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality.

Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued?

I like the idea of Quadratic Voting: https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...

I also agree with the later option.

I've been using databases for a very long time. For the past 2 decades there has been a drive by framework providers to transparently handle such things and relieve developers of any difficult decisions. Often there isn't an option or it is deeply hidden. I've arrived on jobs to find Spring applications where database transactions have been unwittingly disabled (or not enabled) and no one has realised.

There is also a lack of upfront thinking about types of data and the required consistency. Some items really should be consistent and some don't need to be.

In one of Martin Fowler's earlier books he describes the difference between knowledge and operational data. Knowledge data is almost like configuration - perhaps the description of a currency and number of decimal places it has. Operational data might be an invoice generated using that currency. The description of a currency changes rarely (unlike a currency rate), it could be cached a long time for use by many processes without issue. However, the invoice must be consistent, but only one process will be involved in creating it and nothing else is held up waiting for it, and once it is created - it will never change.

In practice most data items lie somewhere along this spectrum. However, you choose your tool and then everthing is either ACID or NoSQL.

I am that old, and I don't need to be in motion to hit the issue. Tactile buttons feedback through your finger that your finger is indeed in the correct location, and when you get that positive feedback you click the button.

Touchscreens don't provide this. If your finger comes into contact in the wrong place, the wrong thing happens. So your first contact must be absolutely correct.

Your arm is extended. Your hand/finger partially blocks your view of the button. Your depth perception of that flat plane with fluid reference points is not good. Bang! The wrong app completely opens.

Now you have to spend time dealing with the consequences of that your error, even if you don't feel inclided to try again. Instead of rewinding to re-listen to the last 20 seconds of a podcast because traffic demanded your attention, you are now listening to the radio and have set an alarm for midnight.

Doh! I was expecting something about mirroring databases.

or future?

Tasword on the ZX Spectrum used a font that fitted into 4x8 (so the characters were 3 pixels wide). It wasn't brilliant by today's standards, especially given it would usually be plugged into an 80s TV. However, this allowed 64 character lines on a 32x24 screen.

I worked for Tasman Software and answered lots of phone calls and written queries, so I know it was the first word processor used by a great many people. I wonder how many are now blind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

I just can't take the maths seriously. As a younger person I hated to skate on a rebellious subject or show my ignorance of what must be obvious to everyone else. As a better person I knew I must be patient, but was annoyed with those that didn't speak up when they didn't understand, or those that wouldn't accept the glaring truth. As an old fart I just try to stop myself letting go too loudly.

I'm so dumb that this question didn't even occur to me :-)

> no vote to strike was taken.

Those involved might have thought that not volunteering to work overtime isn't a strike, and so wouldn't realize that one was required. Clearly this company believes this to be incorrect but [there] must have been some room for misunderstanding.

I do wonder what the overtime take up rate must have been before this. If it was less than 100%, then was it made apparent that this was illegal, or were employees left thinking that it wasn't mandatory and were on strike without realizing it.

Perhaps, it was deemed acceptable for not all employees to take the overtime available. In which case, who decides which employee must work and who need not? If just one takes up the overtime, would it still be a strike?

During a particularly bad period at one company I worked for in the 80s, a coworker declared that there would be points awarded for each reference made to the Titanic during the upcoming project meeting.

He sat quietly making notes during the meeting, while we all tried to work in "lurking beneath the surface", "steaming ahead regardless" and "only 10% of the issues are visible above the waterline".

As the meeting went on the quality got worse. It was quite clear that something was going on, when suddenly he stood up and announced the scores. Even awarding one of the managers points for mentioning Belfast.

I think this is using the term "asynchrouously" where others might use "off-line". When the meeting turns up a problem that isn't going to be resolved in a few words, you might prompt those involved/interested to organise a specific meeting rather than bore the rest.

However, "Can we take that off-line?" can also come to mean "Stop bringing problems!" :-)

Ah ha! I like it. Mangers with a restricted budget for meetings. The more people they invite, the more rapidly their quota burns.

> ... websites that hijack mouse wheel ...

half way down the page - to suddenly reduce the size of the page content.

May be. However, my memory is of 2 factors that made line editors like ed necessary.

1. The keyboard mechanics and having paper as the output medium made typing very slow. That's probably why all the commands were short (ls, mv, rm, etc). Coding was not the stream of consciousness you might experience today. You would have to hold a load of stuff in your head (and ignore interruptions) as you slowly typed it out.

2. The paper only ever advances upwards. If you make a mistake there is no up arrow. Your easiest option may be to use the delete command and type the whole line again. Hopefully someone will give you one of those paper cheat sheet summarizing all the editor commands soon. I wonder how many potential computer geniuses dropped out of CS at this point.

Imagine you are at the command line and you take a few minutes to quickly type:

  $ cp inupt_KJuusiwbHSgh.txt output_HswbXVfgawYuq.txt
  cp: cannot stat 'inupt_KJuusiwbHSgh.txt': No such file or directory

Rats! You didn't notice that you mistyped "input". What now? You can't do copy and paste from paper! Well you could use the line editor:

  $ !!:s/up/pu
  cp input_KJuusiwbHSgh.txt output_HswbXVfgawYuq.txt

Job done.

> I'm not quite willing to call it fraud yet,

Great. So if you're happy with just a bit of disconnect, I'll get down the dump and pick up some old oil drums and fire up a kitchen in the garage. What do you fancy? KFC? Nandos?

No. If we can pretend to represent someone else without their concent, based on unverified 3rd party data, then we're cooking with tinned worms.

Passer by: "Oy mate! D'you know you've left your stable door open?"

Parsons: "You sire are a horse thief. You shall hang for this."

Yep. Been there. Done that.

In the 80's I worked for a guy who insisted that we wrote all our C using macros that made it look like FORTRAN, amongst much other nonsense. How fondly I remember the many hilarious hours spent trying to pin down the cause of unexpected results.

I don't remember any specific examples, but consider:

#define SQ(v) v*v

int sq = SQ(++v);

> We have not banned tulips because of the Tulip mania.

True, but now we grow them as flowers, rather than hold them as a potential source of value or use them for exchange.