fujinghg

I’m a statistician. What point are you trying to make? Write it off as an anecdote? It’s not 1999.

It’s two observations. Observations lead to questions which lead to collecting more data. Which lead to a conclusion that it is not pretty.

When managing risk you judge a company not on a good day but how they handle things on a bad day. And Monzo are terrible. It’s a pattern.

Go look and find.

I was going to do a mathematics PhD years ago but I’ll be honest and I’m not bashing the process or the outcome here.

I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.

Or maybe I just have higher standards and better risk appraisal after seeing their customer support response for two separate people after they had problems was “fuck off and talk to the ombudsman”.

Problems being stuck payment during migration to another bank (after payment issues) and a frozen account after false positive on a fraud.

No those aren’t fuck off things they are fix them. Missing or stuck cash is not a go away thing unless you are utterly incompetent as an organisation.

I wouldn’t assume that is the case. The failure modes are different that is all.

I saw a whole corp POS platform a couple of decades ago that was hanging off a TFTP server on a machine that no one dared turn off in case the world ended. One day the DC UPS failed, it didn’t come back up and they had no retail operations for several hours while they sent a bunch of cash to a guy who had left to help them fix it.

There’s stuff like that everywhere lurking in the archaic.

I know of a modem in a DC which is used to talk to a branch office running AS400 hardware that is so old they have to buy spares off eBay.

I work in the sector. There are lucky people and unlucky people. Welcome to lucky land. So far.

I’ve been here a long long time. Around 2009. Occasionally I walk away for a few months.

I was there when it wasn’t possible to criticise MSFT because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when Google did no evil. Now look where we are.

Ah I just get annoyed. You write up your genuine experience and it gets buried. That's not helpful to anyone. It's not helpful to the engineers on a project or the customers. But it validates someone's ego somewhere. It just seems so immature.

I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.

This is exactly the problem. The logical outcome is so bad that the only risk mitigation is to not use their services at all.

UK here. All my data has been removed from iCloud and other public cloud services now. I cannot trust the UK government, the EU or the US government to do the right thing for my data. I also can't trust the cloud vendors to handle my data either on this basis as they are subject to the laws and as indicated recently intimately involved in political matters.

The only option left is to draw a hard line and stay behind it and of course withdraw the only minuscule stick I have which is my investment in their business.

Ha I saw that one when I was trying to work out why this wasn't working. Alas no nothing that good.

Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.

I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.

Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong with that!

Mine is that one where I can't open ODS documents if my printer is turned off.

+1 for imap-backup. I use this as well and have used it to migrate IMAP mailboxes between providers. Very reliable.

This stuff worries me. I have already seen colleagues using LLMs and not checking the results. Really it just makes stupid people more dangerous. And there is a weird absolutist mechanical faith among certain people to the point even criticising the things is blasphemous and yes everyone is going to be replaced by LLMs and that's a good thing.

Real problem: crap is being normalised because no one wants to call the vendors out on it, because it'll devalue their business.

I figure I'm just going to sit this out at this point and watch everything burn.

To be fair Open University still do a lot of decent stuff which goes deeper than documentaries. It's quite well hidden: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@OpenLearn_OU/videos

That is exactly the problem. When my family watch science documentaries I die inside a bit. They seem to have left with some insight but they managed to slap about 20 words together and some fancy scenes and extrapolations and turn it into an hour of garbage.

Cue Brian Cox thoughtfully staring into oblivion.

I hate marketing releases for scientific papers.

The one paper I co-authored whilst mostly drunk on a Mediterranean island would have been described as "new statistical model could save billions of lives!" if we hadn't called the university out on it. It would have been a grand extrapolation of a nothing.

Funnily enough the first thing I thought was ketamine.

My father was a professional photographer. He was also a professional asshole so his response was always to respond with the shittiest worst lens he could think of and see if they bought it.

We jumped I think 8 year old CentOS versions without too much issues.

It depends how badly you fucked up in the first place really.

Most professional photographers use autofocus all the time.

Photography is less about the technology and more about the art.

No one remembers Expert Systems which were supposed to do this before but failed spectacularly due to the complexity of the issues, some of which were political and contractual, and the requirement of actual intelligence to resolve them.

I reckon Musk is so over extended that the only reason he’s doing what he’s doing is to basically rob what he can to cover it before a bigger fish comes along and he falls off a yacht like Madoff.

Zombo already took that title

https://zombo.com/

This I appreciate :)

I think you might have hit the nail on the head there.

I'm not sure what you mean by "modern backups". Have you done a "modern restore?". Urgh.

I backup once a week. And both the machine and the disk are encrypted.

And the disk is entirely physically disconnected so there's no risk of cryptolockering it. And if that does happen, there's a 3 month rotation still on another disk.

This is not rocket science.

I don't keep anything I can't replace on my phone.

Hell I still use paper for some stuff...

This should probably be phrased as:

Why didn't the medical procession find my autoimmune disease after $100k and 30 hospital visits?

You're making it much harder than it needs to be because you're used to operating in 2024 mode. Roll back to 2004 mode.

You probably don't need to sync everything.

You probably don't need a backup vendor.

You probably don't need to change the OS.

You probably don't need a homelab or massive cluster to run all your stuff.

For me, all I've done is turn off iCloud sync for most of the stuff and deleted the data in the cloud. Backups are handled as before: on/off site rdiff-backup to physical disk. Email I moved to a local provider that runs IMAP and keep nearly all my folders offline. Code? You don't have to push it somewhere!

The best option is to remove everything you have from any cloud at this point and stop bothering about the vendor’s policies entirely. I am in the process of doing that.

What I use it for now may be an issue if a regime changes. As evident from the US situation.

If someone wants your data they can come and get it, with a court order and due process, not a rubber stamp from whatever incompetent incumbent meanders into power and fucks stuff up. Then quietly via a side channel with no knowledge and effort.

Notably without iCloud my iPad is basically useless. So it’s going on eBay tomorrow.