function_seven

I can't prove it, but I know what happened.

Low-level software engineers are all afraid to push the STOP button. They slightly softball their estimates, the impacts of their bugs, etc. Their supervisors soften it up just a bit more before reporting to their management. (This is all done via a byzantine tangle of Excel "project trackers" stored 7 folders deep on various Sharepoint sites.)

At the weekly meeting where the managers update on progress, they do a little bit more nerfing of the seriousness. They have faith the dates will be met, so all Criticals become Majors or even Minors. Majors become Minor or Warning.

Someone at the very top will get this shipped. They have no time to hear about failures, they want only Solutions. There are no Problems, only Opportunities. The wider employee base gets to attend monthly meetings with Powerpoints that show how "We're updating our Culture for a new Paradigm". What they take away from these meetings is to keep your head down and don't get in the way of The Paradigm Shift.

Only when the rubber meets the road (literally!) is all this exposed.

Any details on the defeat device?

VW's code looked for things like (lack of) steering input, the fact that the car is stationary during the tests, etc.

What did Cummins' device do? If their statement is that they saw "no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith", is there any reasonable way that could possibly be true? We didn't let VW get away with any statements like that.

Literally importing the wind from one place to another. What a time to be alive!

I think that’s the best thing I’ve ever read.

Thank you.

"Wait... something is modulating that sine! The frequency is rising."

It was a really jarring moment when I forgot my phone a couple weeks ago. I listened to FM radio for the first time in years. The oldies station. The one my mom listened to all the time that played a mix of Big Band, Doo-wop, and some 60s rock.

But what I heard was Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The VoIP gateways we were installing a few years ago still supported pulse dialing on the FXS lines. Those gateways supported all sorts of archaic and arcane POTS features. All the classic feature codes (like *69) had support. I think it could be set up to emulate a DMS-100 or a 5Ess as well.

If you have a copper landline from your local telephone company, I'm willing to bet it still supports pulse dialing? Maybe it's 50/50 now?

The top of the chat window says, "Powered by ChatGPT". The "Chat with a human" text is a link for the user to change to a human.

I had the same confusion as you, though. The UI is a bit opaque here at first glance. Maybe, "Chat with a human instead" would be clearer?

Good point. I went straight to the most sensational way it could manifest.

And, yeah, still can’t think of a good solution.

A completely natural and expected outcome. “Hey, you feeling depressed? Let’s take your livelihood away if you dare seek help.”

I don’t have a better solution, but I also don’t really think it’s a big problem to begin with. The vast, vast majority of suicidal people still won’t take hundreds of others with them. They jump off buildings or shoot themselves or swallow a fistful of pills.

If I was a pilot, you bet your ass I’m going to hide any mental struggles I’m having from the FAA.

Now, I suppose if I had persistent and intrusive thoughts of darting my plane into a mountainside, I’d hopefully—during a moment of clarity—remove myself from any position that would enable me to carry that out.

But for “run-of-the-mill” depression? That’s my business. I can still perform the job.

How many pilots have intentionally crashed their planes for mental health reasons? The only one that comes to mind is that Germanwings pilot a few years ago. (EDIT: Apologies if the article answers this. I can’t see behind the paywall)

This was true before digital switches were ubiquitous. To trace a call that was routed through mechanical switches, actual people would have to spring into action and actually trace the circuit through the selectors and trunks and whatnot.

A surprising number of places were still served by these ancient switches into the late 80s. Maybe even early 90s?

I’m worried about others in my vicinity committing crimes.

Should I leave my phone at home whenever I get a spidy sense that a criminal will be crime-ing within a 100 yards of me?

You’re a Dozenalist. There are dozens of us!

What makes it especially appealing to me is that we don’t need to invent new names for the digits A and B (though I’d like to come up with better glyphs than reusing those letters).

Ten and Eleven work just fine, and can be used for larger numbers like “forty-ten” (₁₀58) and “eleventy-four” (₁₀136)

Another bonus is that when we transition to this superior numbering system, I can sneer at the metric world, what with their archaic finger-based measuring system. The Foot will return to a place of honor.

Even worse, I don’t know what “it’s a quarter of three” means. I’ve looked it up, but for some reason I forget it by the time it’s quarter of four!

Because Ma Bell was a regulated monopoly, and iMessage is not a monopoly. People routinely use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, SMS, FB Messenger, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I love that these guys are poking the bear. I wish Apple would do something to let me send high-quality photos and videos to my Android-owning friends via "text". But I don't think the government has a place to force that issue. Plenty of alternatives exist.

Wow. I didn’t know the .NET version still supported that. I remember it from VBA code in Excel and VB6 stuff way back when.

I guess if I’m forced to support an “ignore all errors” feature, doing implicit try/catches in the IL is as elegant as it’s gonna get without having to maintain custom IL to support VB of all things.

I do kinda miss VB6 though. I wish RAD was still a thing in desktop applications.

It is new for 2023, but this guy ain’t the first. The Data Colada guys are also getting sued:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/8/9/23825966/frances...

“Try..catch”—what the hell is that? When I craft my performant error-free code, I only use the finest bug-squasher:

On Error Resume Next.

No need to wrap anything. You declare it once and cruise to your solution.

Yeah, that would be a bad situation, if the re-enforced cockpit door—meant to prevent hijackings!—became an enabler of them.

Hopefully the resistance begins before a hijacker has a chance to jump over the beverage cart while one of the pilots is going to take a leak.

> Not to mention the changed calculus for the passengers if a hijacking were to occur.

If there were no air marshals, and the cockpit door was replaced with a 1970s-style beaded curtain hippie door, I would still expect future hijacking attempts to fail.

Before 2001, a hijacking was almost guaranteed to be an inconvenience for the rest of the passengers. A diversion to another airport, being stuck on the plane while negotiations happen, etc. After 2001 every passenger is going to assume they're being commandeered as a missile. There will be tons of resistance from 1A all the way to 33F.

(Strong cockpit doors are still a good idea. I'm not arguing otherwise. But the changed calculus you mention is enormous. It alone I think would make successful hijackings a rare occurrence.)

> It literally doesn't matter if the prosecutor thinks someone should be convicted or not, that's for the judge to decide. The job of a prosecutor is to make as strong a case for conviction as he possibly can.

It's unfortunate that you're probably right in the de facto sense. This is how many prosecutors view their role. But it's wrong. This is not the prosecutor's objective. Their obligation is to strive toward justice, not a conviction. If a prosecutor has a reason to believe the accused is not guilty, they have an obligation to act on that. To dismiss the charges, to share their belief with the defense, etc.

Here's someone explaining it[0] better than I can:

> The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor—indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one

Another good quote [1]:

> For this reason, while a lawyer defending a man accused of a criminal offense should "exert all his ability, learning, and ingenuity, in such a defence, even if he should be perfectly assured in his own mind of the actual guilt of the prisoner," a lawyer should never prosecute "a man whom he knows or believes to be innocent."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor#United_States

[1] https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&h...

Yeah, I was surprised how hated my comment was. I was thinking something like, "pfft, kids these days are too soft." Or something like that.

When I was in middle school, we had an annual fundraiser for the American Heart Assoc. It was one of those "____-a-thon" style events where we all had to jump rope for as long as we could, and we gathered pledges from family members ("only 1¢ per jump, Aunt Sally!"). But this was only for an hour, and it replaced our normal PE period, so it wasn't a diversion from the normal course of schooling. And not everyone participated.

That's the kind of thing I had in mind when writing that comment, but now I'm realizing the parent comment was talking about the entire student body, for the entire school day.

I agree with you. My original take was hot... and bad. :)

They're doing it (I presume) in the middle of the day, and for a couple of hours maybe. They're not keeping the victims up for 48 hours straight playing the music.

I think it's a fine idea for a fundraiser.

The door close button: Yeah, you're right. I was thinking of the lobby call buttons. Ignore that I said anything about that. (Of course the button is still wired up, it just only works in fire service mode in those cases)

As far as crosswalks go: Yeah, on major intersections where light cycling is guaranteed to happen all day, the button may not accelerate the change. But that doesn't apply to "lonely crosswalks", and I bet that same button will work in the middle of the night if the cross-street happens to die off during those hours. I caveated that in my comment.

If the indicator light is on, the OP presses the button, and that same indicator light remains illuminated: What did we learn?

It could still be a, “hey, press the button” light. Or it could be a “button already pressed” light

Of course it does something in this instance. Otherwise the light would never change to the barely-used crossing.

There’s a pervasive myth about elevator buttons and crosswalk buttons being there as placebos. Yes, I’m certain there are instances where—when the traffic lights regularly cycle all day long—they might be placebo buttons, but the vast majority of them will at least lengthen the cycle time for your direction, and if appropriate will trigger a change sooner than it would have occurred otherwise.

I immediately thought of RFC-3514.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

I didn't know about the rep GS has gotten regarding fraud charges. My main card is a Chase one as well. Everything else is spot on. I use the Apple Card only for buying stuff from Apple (for the 3% cash back), or when I accidentally select it from my watch at the vending machine.

Rewards are much better on other cards, even if they're not as simple as cash dropped into your account on the daily.

It's way better than my previous savings account as well, but still about 0.5-0.75 points lower than a couple of CDs that I have.

Not sure if that counts as significant or not, but I figure it adds up.

Apple Savings: 4.15%

CIT Bank 6-Mo CD: 4.88%

CIT Bank 18-Mo CD: 4.5% I think?

Same experience here. Every once in a while a switch will go offline and I have to toggle it to get it to rejoin the network.

These switches are all GE (Jasco) units. My Inovelli switches are rock solid, as well as my Kwikset deadbolt.

I should probably replace the GEs with Inovellis...