bgro

Seemingly everything needs admin permission to run. If the program can't get admin permission from you, it can probably just ignore that and do stuff like install to %appdata%. Chrome does this, for example, apparently to fix a bug where work place administrators didn't want their users installing programs with administrative permission. Chrome or anyone else can just fix that bug by using a windows-level exploit feature.

You can never really be sure what's happening when you install a mystery .exe file until you just install it. Sometimes you can exploit things with hack tools to take a peak inside I guess, but that doesn't seem to work very well most of the time in my opinion.

This horrible permission management system is why a lot of games only work on Windows. If they want to make sure players aren't cheating, the way they do that is by installing root kit level malware. We call that anticheat. It's amazing how that's a standard procedure that can just work on a computer. It also has a history of entitled devs screwing it up big time (Sony) or even doing it very poorly which causes huge performance drops like we see in most modern recent games.

Modern Warfare 2019 crashed and corrupted my OS which was on an encrypted drive. This lead to a 100% data loss for me. I'm 90% sure the root reason to this was the root kit anti cheat bugging out on top of awful coding / performance and bugginess in general we see everywhere in that game.

I don't understand how Windows still works off of you receiving packages at your door and the only way to verify its safety is guess that the timing of your package syncs up with what you ordered and the packaging looks like what you got, and to have hope that the place that packed it wasn't malicious. While nearly all programs do include bombs (unwanted tracking / malware / bad design), usually they're just fairly harmless firecrackers. The only way to open your package up is to put it on the flammable gas pipe in the middle of the house (a left over design from earlier versions of the house) which has a very heavy flaming chainsaw attached to a 1 inch chain.

FFMPEG comes to mind immediately as an example. Essentially, you call ffmpeg to convert media1 with specs and provide media2 as an output for it. I'm mostly understanding and accepting that this ordering matters, because you're applying arguments onto the input instead of trying to do something on the output for some reason.

Where it gets confusing, though, is if you want to resize and crop an image for example. You may end up with different results depending on the order you specify these operations.

Maybe this particular use case makes sense because resizing and cropping hard-coded coordinates could be confusing. However, other operations that seem like they shouldn't interfere with each other sometimes do.

It would be nice to see some type of handling so there isn't this type of confusion. Perhaps some type of --override command, otherwise default to a consistent output regardless of order.

In contrast, I can't think of any issue I've had with "ls". I like that -l -a -t -r can be combined into -latr, but it does make learning the terminal very confusing for beginners when this isn't always supported or consistent in other programs.

Try to write a 100 line script in CMD. Oops, actually it needs to be in powershell. Convert the CMD script to Powershell.

Program has an update? Time to reinstall the entire program. How could we possibly remember your settings? No... You need to do that all over again in this UI that changes to a new size on every page.

Oh, admin access wasn't available or we didn't bother to ask? Don't worry, I already know what to do. You wanted this on the C drive in %appdata%. What? You have a small SSD C drive only for the OS but your programs are installed on massive HDDs? Well that sounds like a YOU problem for not using our OS correctly.

Backing up a game data? We got you. That's why we created %USERPROFILE%/Games to replace %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Games. Oh you're a developer but your game might not be unique? That's fine, just use %USERPROFILE%/Documents/Games/Games. Oh you want admin access because you're installing a root kit... I mean anti cheat program? That's fine, I give you permission to use %appdata% or %userdata% to bypass the user having to have admin access. That would just be inconvenient. Also we duplicately installed the data to every previously mentioned folder just incase some program needs it. However, we are only reading from 1 source... Per line. Ish. We need all of them, to be clear, but most of the changes are read directly from only one of these duplicated install locations. The others are critical dependencies that corrupt the OS if you delete them, so don't do that.

We installed your game to C:\Game. Oh, you wanted to put it where literally every other game is? Well we uninstalled part of it and then re-installed most of it in C:\Program Files(x86)\Game\Game. Oh you didn't want it in the games dir? Fine. Specify a custom path. C:\Program Files(x86)\Game? Fine. We put it in C:\Program Files(x86)\Game\Game. Oh still not ok? Well literally too bad because the registry files are hard coded to where we installed it.

Also, we created C:\Program Files\Game as a second install just for fun. Also, it's installed in %appdata% for no real reason. IDK. Game dev hard you're not allowed to criticize me. Also, here's a shortcut on your desktop, and start menu, and again in the start menu, and we created a new folder in the start menu with a shortcut to the program but it actually links to the uninstaller instead.

If you want to work for us you better be able to complete this leetcode question! You’re not a real engineer if you can’t!

Then the real work is an awfully designed mostly front end disaster. Nobody knows how anything works. But they passed the interview somehow.

I don’t get the people who do leetcode for fun or who get hyped up about it as an interview process. I guess they made it in life by cramming for tests just to forget it all immediately after.

Wasting time memorizing tedious things that have no value is especially awful and draining for me. It’s not fair some people can just do that if they spend a small amount of effort and try. It’s a monumental impossible task for me when I’m otherwise exceptional with software engineering. I’d rather climb a mountain, to put it in perspective.

I’d rather actually learn the concepts used on tests and be able to adapt them into my learning, rather than have a history test where I fill in an endless amount of blanks with the exact day, month, and year is somehow relevant or useful for anything.

Does anyone actually process those types of questions as actual comprehensible dates instead of memorized strings that are better suited to memorize with a jingle?

Then I started thinking about all the massive skyscrapers that are just offices that people show up to for just 8 hours a day and then reallocate the space crisis to their residence elsewhere. It seems like a comical design choice almost.

It’s interesting the browser can get access to this information with no prompts

If you don’t use text/call data and can get away with mostly messaging on wifi and then having that the cell connectivity for wife check ins or emergencies at work, this plan costs like $5 a month or something. Compared to a jump to $20 or higher at the next tier. For a lot of people, that’s significant.

Work arounds shouldn’t be a real solution anyway. People can’t restart their computer to solve basic IT problems. Imagine if they had to change their phone settings through multiple layers of menus.

Aside from all or nothing cell data toggle, I’m not even 100% sure if disabling Find My’s data connection stops this situation. It could go through an unknown system service for all I know. Anyhow, I classify this as an essential security app that would be unfairly unreasonable to have to opt out of for this specific use case.

Your paid phone and service just shouldn’t be freely used without your consent to benefit other people while costing you money.

Maybe it’s a nice idea, but that’s not how anything works in the society we currently have.

Edit: also another thought on this topic as a whole… if you’re the only person who goes through a specific area that someone set up with AirTags, wouldn’t that make you personally identifiable when the AirTag owner gets alerted?

You could set these up in a vault for example. Imagine the WiFi signal gets through when it’s open. When the one vault manager comes to complete the alert circuit, you would have the times he’s there or even as a boss you could see if he’s skipping his duty.

Or if 500 separate people saw those news stories and each did it individually for legitimate package tracking, perhaps that would be a more believable situation.

My other concern was if these are hijacking your data plan. Maybe it's not that significant amount if you have a huge plan but like Ting for example gives you 100MB of data usage each month on their basic plan. That's MEGAbytes. I checked my system clock app for example, and it's using like 500 MB a year of cell data. So the cumulative data it uses per year is about half of that plan's budget.

Settings uses like 1/5 of a month of data. What does settings even use cell data for? Every random app has data usage like this. Sure, you can turn it off but why should that be the user's problem in the first place? We don't live in an opt-out society.

If you're a cargo delivery guy and someone decides to ship 500 airtags for fun that you walk by, are you now just screwed in over charges because Apple decided it was OK to use your cell data for whatever purposes that have no benefit to you?

I thought MHTML was NOT standardized which is why it wasn’t across all browsers yet. From what I remember, every company was doing their own implementation of it. Maybe it’s gotten more standardized the last few years though.

Word documents and other special formats always break in different versions or operating systems. Or they get corrupted. Or they can’t do some basic feature like side by side comparison.

Apples note app deleted all my notes a couple years ago on some version update. It was apparently hidden somewhere in the terms of service. It’s impossible to get those back or rollback. Everyone on the internet says it’s my end user fault for not reading the apple TOS standard popup before pressing the default ok button one time.

There’s just an endless amount of problems. I put everything in text files in a set of folders now to sort it instead of tags that break, and nothing gets corrupted or loss. It also of course just syncs to google drive for version and backup.

However, he said heated seats (and some other luxury things) are an absolutely critical feature that couldn't possibly be omitted in an emergency situation like this. They're essentially as critical as having the steering wheel or brakes.

In school I remember finding project files students in the past had left on the servers. Mostly like digital art files. Sometimes papers or a miscopy from a flash drive or a small game. I thought that was cool, like uncovering artifacts from the past.

Social media groups of the recent graduate classes were just starting at the time. A couple of times, I remember uncovering a couple years old discussion from my school after I went down the same path and wound up in that online space. They were just old enough to be seniors or still be friends of current students.

There was also the flash games everyone played in computer classes. Everyone must’ve gone to the same few sites and played the same games. Just about everybody could probably relate to stories of playing flash games in the computer lab although there’s no real record to share of the sites are even still around.

Anyway, I thought it’d be cool if there was a digital world designed around leaving notes and things like this.

In Mario Maker, you can see where everyone died in the world. In dark souls, you can leave messages behind. I always thought it’d be interesting to see everyone who was in your position in a world like that somehow.

Imagine the history of stats/deaths/playtime. The story of John Smith and the orange goblin skin with 14 deaths over 53 minutes, 14 seconds he played of jump hero 6 years ago. The English teacher still talks about that guy!

There’s an educational Minecraft version now. If that was more than a trend and became a standard lesson for a week, it would be interesting to see a persistent world students from the past left behind with their trolling to each other, inside jokes, and houses temporary classmate friends built together. The teacher could show off their house from when they played as a student.

In the last 20 years though, I wonder if this would have the same interest. There might just be too much online presence social media for anyone to care about the past worlds.

It also might lose appeal if everything is from long-since graduates that feel distant to relate to instead of current seniors and recent college goers. It may also just get too crowded in the game world to make new things or have them actually stand out. I also wonder if trolls would just destroy the creations of the past— I think modifications are cool but just destroying everything would ruin the purpose.

My point boils down to it seems like there is ambiguity between the technical definition vs the actual practice and security requirements we've currently decided on as acceptable.

Somebody who uses base64 to "encrypt" into a database clearly did their job wrong.

A test question that says something like "True/False, encryption can be used to alter the original string into a different string" is true because it doesn't go into the details about the security that we all (should) know needs to be there. When we ask the question kind of backwards from the ambiguous meaning like this, I think we can get a different definition and end up with silly things that technically meet the definition requirement such as base64.

Anyway, my take doesn't really matter. It's more of venting how I always get stuck on easy questions in software dev interviews and end up losing out to somebody who uses base64 in prod to attempt implementing "encryption" to the database.

In my pedantic technical opinion (technical as in literal, not technical-interview), these are all subsets of encryption. Encryption to me is anything that scrambles the data to non-literal-plain-text in a way where you need a key to read it. These are just encryption, but the password is always just the word "password", or for a specific example, the source text.

In my continued opinion, can't hashes be "found out" in theory if you had unlimited computing time + unlimited attempts at brute force hashing every string?

Encoding is just encrypting the text into a non-literal-plain-text format by using (an extremely weak, known password) to translate into another (computer-readable) language. I don't really have anything to add from the source to this one.

Why is my distinction about the definition of encryption important to me?

In my opinion, we shouldn't limit our mind to ONLY knowing encryption as a method containing some math formula someone came up with to scramble you data based on an input password. There are a magnitude of ways to encrypt your actions in a more broad sense.

For example, what if you identify yourself by handing in a series of paintings to somebody (an authenticator) who physically determines your entry? He can determine if you pass by having knowledge that the order of the paintings and the artist's initials correspond to their position in the alphabet to decrypt your ID number. (Some other tricks could be used to prevent random turn in or duplicates, such as only using a specific style of art, but I'm skipping that for this example.) Is that not an encryption method that accepts a user input and encrypts it with a black box formula to output some code?

I have 5-10 years programming experience and find an unlimited amount of bugs in other developer's work of any and all skill levels.

On occasion, something like a billing calculation will have a function doing the opposite of what they intend to do but somehow nobody has caught it in 5 years. I've also seen ancient security reports that just have a chunk of code that doesn't work like it sounds it should, causing 25% of results to be missed. These are just a couple of actual examples.

I focus on generally not screwing up my work like that as well as finding these problems in my team's code. It's mind blowing to me this has absolutely 0 value though. I and others like me are gatekept out of a lot of work since we process things differently. Developers can't seem to imagine a world where somebody thinks differently than them and memorizing leetcode is just as easy for everybody as it is them. "If you can't talk me through what you're doing while writing your memorized perfectly compilable code on a whiteboard or google doc, I guess you're either just lazy and not really invested, or a bad developer. Probably both."

The only thing that technically matters to get into the dev roles is memorizing leetcode problems in order to pass the interview so that A) You have a job at all (even small companies are doing these now)and B) You can get your actual salary corrected every couple years.

If it's not memorizing leetcode, it's how many (inefficient) lines of code did you contribute? (Thankfully this is finally starting to be phased out as a measurement AND bragging point.)

The people who make it through all this then go on to store their critical world-infrastructure Exchange version number in a 32 bit integer because "It worked and compiled when I tested it, so it's probably good enough." Nobody dares test it due to the toxic hostility back, or because a senior dev wrote it, or "I ran the code and it compiled for me, so it's good."

There's just so much talking down to others and gatekeeping about how leetcode solvers are superior and that it's the only possible starting block for a "real dev". I can't believe the frequency of simple yet major mistakes these people go on to actually do after they spend so much time bragging about it.

"The drugs were dumped into the ocean. The ocean, weighing 4.9x10E21 pounds, according to Google, means we just stopped 4.9x10E21 (plus a few) pounds of drugs from reaching the public. As we all know, this is the official standard measurement procedure used by police in the US.

Cocaine has a street price estimate of $120 per gram on average according to Google. Because of how averages and math work (no source needed), we can just double that to $240 per gram to get the highest price out of the average.

To convert grams to pounds, we just multiply by 453.59237. This means 1 pound of cocaine costs $108,862.17.

4.9x10E21 pounds, multiplied by $108,862.17 per pound means we just stopped $533,424,633,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of cocaine from going to the general public. This is the low estimate, because it does not even include the weight and price of the original drugs or the shipping container it was in. We truly are godly and just heroes on this day."

Apple is currently doing fine with their devices. I think the health industry will adopt some of their tech soon (like the apple watch) to get some of that sweet, sweet healthcare / insurance money

That leaves the "worst" of the group to either Facebook or Netflix.

I haven't heard much about what Netflix is doing, but things seem to be going generally okay so far.

Facebook has extremely negative news all over the media on seemingly both the tech and political side. For example, malicious targeting of children and their platform being used for fake news / propaganda. On the tech side, I don't have confidence in their current, future, or past projects such as Oculus or their extreme hype around the metaverse.

For these reasons (by default and past/present/future speculation) given the wording on this question, I think Facebook is the obvious "loser."

I have friends that got banned because somebody hacked into their account and fraudulently bought things. This is apparently account sharing, ban. Or filing a dispute about the charges = ban. Mass report by trolls = ban. There's a bunch of technical reasons outside your control where your account can be banned.

Most of the legal protections you otherwise would have apparently do essentially nothing when you're banned from the service / platform you are required to use instead of just the thing you bought.

This is annoying when your Steam account is hacked. This is a life altering problem when your YouTube comment gets flagged for a combined technicality of a combo-rule like "hate speech or terrorism" by calling somebody a "dummy," causing your YouTube account and all videos to be shut down, gmail account and all archived email deleted, all google docs deleted, all linked google cloud services to be suspended, and all 3rd party login oauths to be revoked. You won't be able to log into even non-google things, and further can't reset your password / login credentials or prove who you are because your email was deleted.

This entire nightmare can happen to anybody at any time for any reason. Even further, because YouTube in particular is fully automated customer support, your rebuttable is likely to be automatically denied and flagged for trolling putting you in an even worse state. The only chance you have is if you happen to personally know a higher-up human before hand that you're able to talk to.

I don't remember anybody ever complaining about the size of their phone. And although I have literally never heard it, I could in theory believe a small minority of people might want a thinner phone if competitors were able to do it.

I don't buy that the phone manufacturers couldn't work together and agree to release "thicker" phones with reasonable battery though, as they do on just about every other industry feature.

I assume it's just an excuse for them to further close the abilities of right to repair where serviceable or otherwise reasonable batteries would lead to less new phone sales. Exactly the same situation as the screens, I'm sure. Just keep quiet about these things though when marketing this.

"I built a calculator completely from scratch by myself with no help" (by importing calculator.*)

"I invented my own cloud microservice in a language I wrote completely myself" (It's hello world split in 2 files on google drive and the language is just JavaScript but it you added a "framework" (it's single method) that already exists in the wild but your version is slower and worse)

"I built my own computer" (by buying a prebuilt computer but swapping out the ram, or buying an essentially prebuilt computer but it comes disassembled)

The entire mod culture needs to be reworked too. They need mods because more people brings more trolls, but aggressive banning and simultaneous muting so people can't ask why just leads to more trolling. Not to mention most mods just cite every ban in the coverall "read the rules / figure it out" so they have to spend no effort, even though those rules don't cover the actual ban reason.

I just can't believe how many consistently bad decisions are made there. The biggest of all was probably removing the separated and accurate upvote / downvote counters which is a massive feature to show the strength of otherwise downvoted comments.

Aside from these feature complaints, how does a company of this size and importance have such an astonishingly badly coded interface? I always have to use the Old site. It reminds me of an intern coming in and on day 1 marking all code as "legacy" and saying "Electron is the greatest thing ever made, because it's easy and just works. There's literally no reason to use anything except Electron for any project."