aleph_minus_one

> Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.

> And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.

I know that experience, but I do have a different opinion on this:

Many such people studied computer science (a similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines) because they love coding.

Unluckily, the job that they got does involve barely any clever coding, but rather

- tolerating and gluing together shitty code pieces that someone else wrote

- tolerating red tape

So, such people simply do in their free time what they love. And to come back to my point "similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines": these people try to use their little free time to prove some novel theorems or put their shed full of machines like 3D printers, CNC mills, CNC lathes, laser cutters, self-built pick-and-place machines, ... to work on their own beloved engineering projects.

> If you see a person without legs, do you tell him he is a piece of shit because he can't run? So why harass autistic people?

If you have not yet realized it, here is a black pill for you: most people are deeply manipulative and bullying basically all the time. For example nearly all social rules that are commonly accepted in society are basically about which kinds of manipulations and bullying of other people are accepted by most people vs not.

With this in mind, the answer to your question

> So why harass autistic people?

is trivial: because it is currently socially mostly accepted.

> Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).

Rather: perhaps 50-100 USD per month got and still gets you a quite good server to start your project. If you were looking for bargains, you could even get a server for less.

> Every time a company has spent resources doing this, a competitor innovated on the software and made the custom hardware irrelevant.

This often happened, though not always.

An important counterexample are 3D graphics cards, which basically put the OpenGL/DirectX fixed-function pipeline into silicon. It took a long time and many iterations to make the pipeline more programmable until the 3D graphics cards turned into modern GPUs.

Even today, GPUs live on as separate hardware in a computer instead of having become integrated into, say, the CPU. Intel's attempt to do something like this with the Larrabee project [1] was discontinued.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larrabee_(microar...

> I broadly agree with your thrust but I'm going to assume you're a bot. Who would benefit from such a perspective as yours?

Not ReptileMan: Depending on the country and social environment that you live in, such opinions of "ordinary, living" people are nothing unusual. In my experience the reason why many people think such opinions barely exist "in normal society" or accuse posters of such opinions to be bots is that these normal people live in a bubble in which such opinions are rare.

> will have to place a human behind the keyboard with the authority [...] to change the data from incorrect to correct.

Whether such a person has such a permission in the system or whether the permission system of the software can actually model this is a work process that has been turned into code.

> That being a slow process is not a software engineering issue, but an organizational issue.

Business software is work processes that has been turned into code.

> I'm trying to think of a single metric by which the EU hasn't been a massive success.

- Number pages of lunatic regulations

- Money gone into the EU

- Not a metric, but fitting very different philosophies of how to handle the domestic currency under one umbrella (ECU, Euro) has lead to massive tensions between the involved countries and their populations in particular when the Euro crisis hiy (e.g. in German "Pleitegriechen" [bust Greeks], PIIGS (pigs) countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain)). If there wasn't a common currency, each country would have solved this problem on its own terms. Now there is hate that continues up to today, and these countries (including their citizens!) can be used as scapegoats.

> If CEOs were legally required to regularly use their own products as an ordinary customer, the world would be a better place.

This is like the argument "developers should use the software that they write" (dogfooding).

Let me give one example: the previous person who designed and developed the previous version of the software which I now work on really could use "his" program insanely well. The problem was rather that he was basically the only person who really did understand it sufficiently well to not to be triggered by problems other users had. Yes, a huge part of my job is over the years to turn this piece of software into something that is understandable by other people, too,. :-)

> Nah, it should either become one, or dissolve, but this half baked shit definitely isn’t it.

Since the current situation is shit, and one EU national state will be shit, too, this only leaves one option. :-) So let's dissolve the EU before even more billions are wasted in this futile project.

My experience is rather that the typical software developer is ultra-cautious, and will always leave some loophole open in the workflows of the software in case something unexpected occurs that could not be foreseen, in particular considering the high stakes that are involved when something goes wrong with the software: I am not exaggerating when I claim that if something like what is is described in the article happens to some people, they often will start praying to their god that he kills the responsible people for this bug in the software in the most brutal imaginable way. Software developers know that.

Other stakeholders typically don't apply such caution.

> America does it with 50 states

And Germany has 16 federal states.

> People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one.

Rather: if you look at what the EU is doing, it is rather a huge advertisement that the EU should not become one.

> Software written by people that don't use the software themselves. It has happened to me so many times, I come across a piece of software with weird bugs or interactions that would be immediately fixed if the developer just spends 5 minutes using the software like an end user would. Dogfood all the things!

My experience is completely contrary: developers typically do care deeply about such things. The problem is rather that very commonly managers actively disallow these poor developers to apply their diligence to the software that they develop.

I really have a strong feeling that you want to participate in the ugly vendetta against software developers that has been going on for decades ("Replace all software developers"; current season: "Replace them with AI").

Don't do that. Rather fight the people who are really responsible (who are often (project) managers or Scrum masters).

> Is there another game like Syndicate or Lemmings out there?

Concerning Lemmings: Gemini listed the following games that are at least similar in spirit:

- Humanity (2023)

- Zombie Night Terror (2016)

- Spirits (2011)

- Craftlings (2026)

> Even Syndicate has a spiritual successor made by former syndicate devs

For those who are asking: this successor is Satellite Reign:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Reign

Did you seriously believe that governments play fair? :-)

> > If a magic oracle tells you p=np, that's useless. How would that change anything?

> Oh it would change a lot. It would be an enormous psychological boost for everyone to find a practical algorithm.

OK, I tell you that P=NP, and that I am a magic oracle. So, you have you psychological boost for finding a practical algorithm for free. :-)

> I've forgotten now when it changed, but I remember older versions of Windows let you exit back to DOS once you'd finished doing GUI stuff. I'm guessing that was probably removed in Win95 as that was the first "proper" Windows that didn't rely on already having DOS (IIRC).

Until Windows 3.x this was possible (though not recommended). With Windows 95, there was a boot menu that you could access via the F8 key - my previous post should make it very clear why I still have this in my muscle memory after 20-30 years. Via this boot menu, you could boot into DOS 7.0 (or if an older DOS version was installed before the Windows 95 installation, also this older DOS version). In DOS, you could still run

> win

to get to Windows 95.

> I do believe there is some truth to it. The reason we have had an upswing in diagnosed people is that society's demands have gotten higher and what was previously considered normal is no longer within the normality corridor.

Related quote from the Jargon file [1]:

"1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), supposedly characterized by (among other things) a combination of short attention span with an ability to ‘hyperfocus’ imaginatively on interesting tasks. In 1998-1999 another syndrome that is said to overlap with many hacker traits entered popular awareness: Asperger's syndrome (AS). This disorder is also sometimes called ‘high-function autism’, though researchers are divided on whether AS is in fact a mild form of autism or a distinct syndrome with a different etiology. AS patients exhibit mild to severe deficits in interpreting facial and body-language cues and in modeling or empathizing with others' emotions. Though some AS patients exhibit mild retardation, others compensate for their deficits with high intelligence and analytical ability, and frequently seek out technical fields where problem-solving abilities are at a premium and people skills are relatively unimportant. Both syndromes are thought to relate to abnormalities in neurotransmitter chemistry, especially the brain's processing of serotonin.

Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. Thus, hackers aware of the issue tend to be among those questioning whether ADD and AS actually exist; and if so whether they are really ‘diseases’ rather than extremes of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT. In either case, they have a sneaking tendency to wonder if these syndromes are over-diagnosed and over-treated. After all, people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’.

So hackers tend to believe they have good reason for skepticism about clinical explanations of the hacker personality. That being said, most would also concede that some hacker traits coincide with indicators for non-hyperactive ADD and AS — the status of caffeine as a hacker beverage of choice may be connected to the fact that it bonds to the same neural receptors as Ritalin, the drug most commonly prescribed for ADD. It is probably true that boosters of both would find a rather higher rate of clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 3-5% (AS is rarer at 0.4-0.5%)."

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[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html

> I wonder if a whole external device is really necessary for the one-handed device for chords. I think with a customisable keyboard, you'd be able to chord.

Not with a normal keyboard (though there do exist specialized keyboards for gamers with which this might be possible). The reason lies in the key rollover, which is very limited for many off-the-shelf keyboards:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Key_rollover&oldi...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Key_rollover&oldi...

"To reduce cost and design complexity, most computer keyboards do not isolate all keys. Instead, they use a matrix of key switches, without any isolation diodes, that assumes that only a limited number of keys will be held down at any given time. With these keyboards, pressing as few as three keys can cause ghosting effects, although care is taken when laying out the matrix arrangement that this does not happen for common modifier key combinations."

> I suppose it isn't if you never had it on real hardware. Win32 was well marked as the complete OS takeover for the PC. DOS remained only to boot Windows and as backup OS. If you absolutely needed to jump back to DOS you still could, however you were heavily expected to force your DOS programs to launch and live in their own little DOS environments, much to everyone's chagrin.

I remember that at the time of Windows 95, I very often had to boot back to DOS 7.0 (which was also delivered as part of the Windows installation) to run DOS games, which were still very popular until like the middle of the 00 years.

And yes, when Windows XP came out (2001), people were somewhat disappointed that you couldn't simply boot DOS anymore to play your old beloved games. Over the years, DOSBox got sufficiently stable and PCs got sufficiently powerful that this gap could be closed.

> This is explicitly about commemorative coins, not regular ones.

The formulation is not so easy to read (very common for German laws), but it includes also the regulations for normal coins:

"Erfolgt eine einzelne Zahlung sowohl in Euro-Münzen als auch in deutschen Euro-Gedenkmünzen, ist niemand verpflichtet, mehr als 50 Münzen anzunehmen; dies gilt auch dann, wenn der Gesamtbetrag 200 Euro unterschreitet."

"If a single payment is made using both euro coins and German commemorative euro coins, no one is obliged to accept more than 50 coins; this also applies if the total amount is less than 200 euros."

So, there exist two cases in which the vendor is not obliged to take more than 50 coins:

- The payment consists of both normal Euro coins and German commemorative euro coins

- The payment is less than EUR 200.

--

Independently, there does exist another source of law by which the vendor is not obliged to take more than 50 coins: Artikel 11 der EG-Verordnung Nr. 974/98 des Rates über die Einführung des Euro, EU-Amtsblatt L139 vom 11. Mai 1998:

> https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/DE/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... (German)

> https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... (English)

"As from 1 January 2002, the participating Member States shall issue coins denominated in euro or in cent and complying with the denominations and technical specifications which the Council may lay down in accordance with the second sentence of Article 105a(2) of the Treaty. Without prejudice to Article 15, these coins shall be the only coins which have the status of legal tender in all these Member States. Except for the issuing authority and for those persons specifically designated by the national legislation of the issuing Member State, no party shall be obliged to accept more than 50 coins in any single payment."

Relevant part of this article:

"Except for the issuing authority and for those persons specifically designated by the national legislation of the issuing Member State, no party shall be obliged to accept more than 50 coins in any single payment."

But after one person does this, the source code access is a solved problem.

> It's paying a bill in pennies.

This is actually a problem that is solved in German law:

§ 3 Münzgesetz (MünzG), Absatz 1 [§ 3 Coins Act, article 1]

"§ 3 Annahme- und Umtauschpflicht

(1) Niemand ist verpflichtet, deutsche Euro-Gedenkmünzen im Betrag von mehr als 200 Euro bei einer einzelnen Zahlung anzunehmen. Erfolgt eine einzelne Zahlung sowohl in Euro-Münzen als auch in deutschen Euro-Gedenkmünzen, ist niemand verpflichtet, mehr als 50 Münzen anzunehmen; dies gilt auch dann, wenn der Gesamtbetrag 200 Euro unterschreitet."

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/m_nzg_2002/__3.html

Translation based on the one created by DeepL:

"§ 3 Obligation to Accept and Exchange

(1) No one is obliged to accept German commemorative euro coins totalling more than 200 euros in a single payment. If a single payment is made using both euro coins and German commemorative euro coins, no one is obliged to accept more than 50 coins; this also applies if the total amount is less than 200 euros."

> "To obtain certain source code from Google, you could previously reference git tags, but now you have to fill out a form and wait for a human to give you a google drive link."

Couldn't simply someone mirror these Google Drive folders?

> I wonder what his views on the 4 color problem are. One can explain it as the computer checked a bunch of cases and all maps reduce to one of these cases.

Just burn lots of tokens on the frontier model of your choice to let the AI find a high-level argument why the four color theorem holds. :-)

--

Seriously: since there exist quite a lot of readers on HN who are both hardcore into AI and mathematical problems: This is a challenge for you.

I am looking forward to seeing an announcement of a novel high-level argument why the four color theorem holds on the first page of HN in at most a month. :-D

GitHub is not stellar, either. :-)

> Like the way that they shipped ‘95 without a browser?

Around the time when Windows 95 was released, Microsoft did predict that the internet will become popular also among private users. That is why

- they included Winsock (Windows' TCP/UDP/IP stack) as native part of Windows 95 (in opposite to Windows 3.x where you had to install a third-party implementation of the Winsock API such as Trumpet Winsock), though it was typically not installed by default,

- support to use MSN (the dial-up online service and internet servicen provider [1]) was pre-installed with Windows 95.

What was not clear at that time was that the world wide web would become the killer application for the internet for consumer users (at that time, the more likely killer application of the internet for consumers was seen in proprietary content providers such as AOL, Compuserve or MSN), so Microsoft provided no web browser with the original version of Windows 95.

But even at that time, it was conceivable, though not clear that the world wide web could become important. So, already at the release time of Windows 95, Microsoft provided Internet Explorer 1.0 as part of the Plus! add-on pack for Windows 95. With Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1, the Internet Explorer 2.0 got part of Windows 95, and Windows 98 introduced the (optional) Active Desktop [2], in was centered around the Internet Explorer.

So, in my opinion Microsoft did everything "correct" here: they provided Internet Explorer from beginning on as an optional separate component (Plus! add-on pack), and once it was obvious that the world wide web would become very important, they reacted fast and included the Internet Explorer in the next service release of Windows 95 (Windows 95 OEM Service Release 1).

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_Dial-Up_Internet_Access

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

> Turns out that the cloud doesn’t scale that easily by itself after all?

The cloud does scale that easily, the software doesn't. :-)