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eitland

12,042 karma · joined October 18, 2009

I work for a large consulting in Drammen, Norway. We provides specialists in cloud, machine teaching (i.e. programming), machine learning, project management, digital transformation and more.

We are a nice bunch. If you are stuck in Norway in a less than ideal job and you are a friendly person who knows any of the above as well as enough Norwegian to communicate effectively with Norwegians at work, shoot me a mail.

Writing I think is funny:

- http://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach

- http://erik.itland.no/simplified-and-more-precise-privacy-policies-for-big-companies

- https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails (Less funny. I wish stuff just worked.)

Stuff others upvote on various sites:

- http://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right (About Google+)

- http://erik.itland.no/are-you-making-a-chrome-application-or-a-web-application

Tell HN: I think (2017-02-22) that user data should be treated in much the same way as nuclear raw materials. I would suggest considering a User Data Non-Proliferation Treaty along the lines of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

I am a:

Sysadmin that prefer nix but have worked for years with a big, widely distributed, safety critical Windows system as well.

Programmer

  * Java, Java EE, Quarkus, Spring Boot
  * C#, Asp.Net MVC
  * Client side Javascript (TypeScript now)

I don't do graphic design.

I'm happily working for a Norwegian company.

You can reach me at erik.itland_at_gmail.com

submissionscomments
eitland··on Squeak 6.1
We could in Java Swing (and Visual basic, but lets not talk about that) as well. Well, not runtime, but we could design applications and just right click on the objects in the IDE and go directly to the click (or double click or right click) handlers.

Then again, not having to disable this for runtime is a feature if you ask me.

Yes, current web applications are prettier and easier to upgrade but we lost a lot on the way wrt developer experience and ux.

eitland··on Parametron: 50s Japanese computer that uses neither transistors nor vacuum tubes
It is fine to call out AI if it is annoying.

Someone hunting for things that might be AI and polluting discussions with it is a service I did not sign up for.

Besides it is my opinion that not all AI detectors are reliable and this might currently be a big problem in some cases, especially in education.

eitland··on Mythical Man Month
I agree with you.

The danger is not however that only that people write their own tools for calculations and capacity planning etc.

The danger is people make useful stuff that is very fine as long it is just an internal tool, but then someone add credentials to other systems so it can access and maybe even update stuff and it gets exposed to third parties etc and all of a sudden we have a major data breach going on.

eitland··on Mythical Man Month
Obviously it was not the same s since models that could write programs were not available 10 years ago.

And if you just mean your friend taught himself programming on his own, well that is actually very cool, I did too back in the 90ies and so did many others here.

My point is that it is now possible to vibe code a full application from frontend to backend today and still not be able to understand a line of TypeScript or anything else.

eitland··on Mythical Man Month
My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production.

Complete frontend + backend + database.

Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.

Does that count as an example?

(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)

eitland··on Composition shouldn't be this hard
Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.

It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.

On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).

On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.

And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.

But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).

eitland··on Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked
It absolutely isn't free here in Norway either, around $86 is what I'd have to pay now to get an id card as an adult (same price as a passport but easier to carry).
eitland··on Document poisoning in RAG systems: How attackers corrupt AI's sources
> That's a big flaw of LLMs, not limited to RAGs: it lacks the fundamental understanding of "good and bad", like Richard Sutton said in that Dwarkesh podcast.

After paticipating in social media since the beginning I think this problem is not limited to LLMs.

There are certain things we can debunk all day every day and the only outcome isit happens again next day and this has been a problem since long before AI - and I personally think it started before social media as well.

eitland··on Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years
There is always the option to use battery (some modern mines use this),for example RAAMS.

The problem is of the enemy know you use only mines that work for max n hours or m days they just wait for n + 1 hours or m + 1 days.

There is a lot more to say about this, but there are probably people way more qualified than be here to explain it.

eitland··on Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
My take is that Bluesky got the network effects right, with hyping and gradual release and careful curation of who seeded the network and that is - IMO - the important thing they got right.
eitland··on Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
Let me present my take on why the federated alternatives struggle to replace X:

Twitter didn't succeed because it was a particularly good solution - it really isn't. It succeeded purely on the back of the network effect.

When every open-source alternative simply copies the existing restrictions without adding any unique value, why would users switch to an equally flawed version where none of the accounts they actually want to follow are?

eitland··on NetNewsWire Turns 23
How do you combine them?
eitland··on Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.

I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.

We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.

The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.

eitland··on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
Personally I ignore most ads but I have also bought some really good products based on ads and there are companies I wish would advertise more, for example relvant conferences that I only find out about because someone posted about their experiences being there.
eitland··on I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.

eitland··on Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
https://kagi.com/search?q=apple+ad+network&r=no&sh=6Khbxq4uM...
eitland··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
My experience as well:

Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others.

At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.

eitland··on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
Late, but thank you!

Both for explaining the simpler way to do it and also for the contect.

(Why? Because it feels good to know that I am not the only one who cannot find documentation for this and other things.)

eitland··on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
After 7 years I learned. Thank you!

How did you learn this hack?

eitland··on India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
>>> Just grab any man you see on the street, throw him in the van and ship him to the conscription office for processing.

>> 1. This is a wild exaggeration:[1] There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.

> With the right papers clearing them of draft obligations, sure.

So basically you agree with me that it was a wild exaggeration?

[1] Also your computer seem to have a bug where its clipboard selectively remove words (see the part in italics) from the text you quote without inserting ellipsis or any kind of marker to indicate it. The alternative would be that you very deliberately misrepresent what I wrote and that wouldn't be a nice thing to accuse you of.

eitland··on After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be
Didn't MS fire most of the QA people together with the translation people a few years ago?

Or is that just a rumor that many of us fall for because it seems like a great explanation of what we see?

eitland··on India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app
1. This is a wild exaggeration: There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.

2. Why single out Ukraine here? Isn't this what any country does with people who don't appear for the draft? (Unless they can pay a doctor to diagnose them with bone spurs or something?)

eitland··on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".

Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.

Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.

Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.

Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.

eitland··on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
Especially when it happens at night.

But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)

eitland··on John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
This is a problem all over our industry:

- almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)

- almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)

- almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)

- referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)

We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.

eitland··on What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription
Could borrow the concept of FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non Discrimatory IIRC) from tech companies licensing patents?

I don't know much about it and I do not think it is perfect, but from what I remember from discussions here it prevents certain forms of abuse.

eitland··on Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)
They actually do mention bloatware in Windows 11, so it is a bit confused.
eitland··on `satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)
TypeScript isn't primarily meant to be enjoyed.

It is meant to be a much better alternative to Javascript while dealing with the fact that the underlying engines use and existing programmers were used to Javascript.

That said I absolutely enjoy TypeScript, but that might be because I suffered from having to deal with Javascript from 2006 until TypeScript became available.

eitland··on Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification
Are you serious?

It is rather obvious why a software designer want to know how a piece of software is used and also to know it over time. If number of cancelled screenshots increases (or decreases) compared to general usage of the screenshot feature it might give an early indication that a recent change was bad (or good).

As long as it only logs counters like this and not who I am or any of my data or who I am I actually want them to log it and if it was disabled and there was an easy way to enable it I would do it.

The problem is that they have:

- a history of not being completely honest (unlike certain other actors who have a history of being actively dishonest)

- no easy way for people to choose what they send

- and a number of other problems, for example what I suspect is that they ignore actual users seemingly in favour of what their ux designers and developers think a user should want. (And that seems to always be dumbing down, "simplifying" and making it more like Chrome.)

eitland··on Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification
Someday they'll stop changing the context menu if I accidentaly select something.

(Some UX designer or developer thought it was a great idea to remove the back and forward buttons from the context menu if text is selected so now I have two different context menus and one of them lack the thing I am looking for most of the time which is the back button.

Or fixing the tabstrip API (someone has decided we users are now too stupid to use only tree style tabs and for our own good we must be prevented from hiding the original tab bar).

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