larsrc

The list in the article lists more code quality issues than user visible issues. And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere.

"highly durable"

/me laughs in digital archivist

Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company.

While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around.

Quality code is hard to write. Code that works for now is pretty easy. Anyone under pressure to produce code quickly will produce crappier code. Which means every startup, every Big Tech company, everything in between, and all the other companies suddenly depending on software.

And then there are us engineers. We get a kick out of making things work, we love starting new projects, we are enamored of the newest framework. But carrying the task through all the way to nice finished products with full test coverage and beautiful code is a slog.

It's easy to blame capitalism, and it has its share of the blame. But we cannot absolve ourselves that easily.

My bad, not actually surprising. The word Hoover came from the name, didn't exist before.

I'm not going to argue against Knuth on that.

Hoover: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hoover_Company

> I would like to see PCs ship with a 'jumper' connected to a physical key position. Enabling that jumper would E.G. allow BIOS updates, including changing the installed / enabled list of allowed signing authorities, including locally provided options. Empower the end user

This would make most users never update their BIOSes, even for security fixes.

That probably voids any kind of accident insurance. One house fire and you're homeless. One injury to another person and you're facing millions in bills.

We just got a new Mac as our fourteen year old iMac is not getting Chrome security updates any more. Otherwise runs fine. Kudos to Apple there.

I always try to research my appliance purchases, but longevity info is decidedly not at my fingertips. Had not considered appliance repairman forums, that's a nice idea (until it gets commonly known and then abused).

Pfft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_index

Many old formats were essentially just binary dumps of memory, or something not far removed. Documenting the formats was not a standard. Yes, I agree that there is a social responsibility, but having worked in digital archiving I can tell you that the olden days were really, really messy. No, really.

I happened to find out what the Danish laws for not getting paid on time are, as the company I was working for got into financial trouble. If you're not paid on time, you can send a letter setting a deadline for the payment - typically a week or two. If you're not paid by then, you get to declare the company bankrupt. You can stop working, and you will get the next three month's payment from a state-run fund, even if you find other work. Isn't socialism just wonderful?

It's still there, just used it to see if I had guessed right on Rachel's workings (I hadn't). Thanks for making a very useful tool!

Also known as pundits?

Well, duh! We hardly know the population of any country more that a few hundred years ago. Even now, some numbers are guesswork - how many Russians have died in the war in Ukraine? That's already an uncertainty of tens of thousands.

For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods?

And that's even assuming there _is_ a census. The Domesday Book was quite exceptional a thousand years ago, and even that only gives us a population estimate between 1.2 and 1.6 million (see Wikipedia). Any place with a poorer census or written record (i.e most of the world at the time) would be even more of a guesswork.

Apart from the data processing problems already mentioned, there is also a possible bias towards locally-known artists. For Denmark, one of the top scorers is Niels Bjerre, who is fairly obscure in Denmark at large. But if he was well liked in a number of smaller towns that were growing at the right time, he could get streets named for him many times over, while the bar in big cities would be much higher.

Coming from the Socialist Republic of Denmark, this seems like a very silly question. Why should ownership be a problem for restaurants?

If a restaurant is owned by an investment fund, the fund will try to get as much money out of it as possible, regardless of the restaurant's long-term fate. But owned by the workers, they have a common interest in having good and secure jobs for a long time to come, and so can set up running parameters to best ensure that.

Now the _leadership_ is a different matter. If everybody tries to be the head chef,.you get a confusion. But that is distinct from ownership and can be arranged in many different ways, some of which work.

If all business were worker-owned, one would be right to ask whether a nom-worker-owned business could work.

In Wikipedia, being an encyclopedic work, heavy linking is a good thing, and one I rely heavily on. In regular articles and blog posts, I definitely don't want that many.

Obviously the author relies on the automatic linking, so they don't have to bother doing the manual work.

There are also further savings in not having to figure put, publish, and update fare systems. And if the change results in people taking public transit instead of cars, there are knock-on effects in the forms of less road congestion and fewer accidents. Accidents that cause costly policy work, hospitalizations, loss of work days, etc. These savings in other parts of the city finances are rarely figured in.

I like this experiment! I hope to see some further analysis on the results. I came to a similar conclusion years back about languages: it's impossible to translate a word perfectly because the border cases differ. Is it a cake or a bread? Banana bread is called bread in the US, but as a Dane I consider it "kage" (the usual translation of "cake").

I worked on AspectJ during a summer internship at Xerox PARC i n 2000. Very interesting, but did not convince me that AOP was a good thing. They had a few good examples (logging was the big one), but added so many advanced features to support other use cases that the code ended up being very hard to understand. Same problem I have with Guice.

And here I was waiting for it to turn out to be a phishing attempt due to clicking the link in the alert.

Same here, using a bullet journal took a lot of strain off my mind. Now I wonder if I could adapt this advice to it.

Meetup is pretty active around here, with many things for various interests. A good starting point.

Me, I have found Belegarth and other variations of foam swordfighting to have great communities.

If Habitat For Humanity were active in Germany the way they are in the US, I would certainly volunteer there.

Had it been Google doing this, the Metaverse would have been declared dead on arrival, not after this long.

That is so Silicon Valley. 30 years as the longest span? There are businesses here in Munich that have been around longer than the US has existed. They are not "investable", though, they just go about doing good solid products that people need.

I still would like a better way to follow a line back through history. But what we have is already pretty good.

You'd be amazed at how much experienced programmers fret about local "optimisations" that are actually made irrelevant by the compiler and just serve to make the code harder to understand. And with incomprehensible code comes actual errors, not just slowness.