oldjokes

Typing systems and language choices are really small potatoes in this field. There are much more scary problems to solve to make software work right.

When you can side channel attack any CPU with a branch predictor and bits get flipped regularly by cosmic rays at high altitude then you need to rethink what software engineering really means. The big problems are rarely actually about the software or proving some algorithm is correct.

The internet, at least as we knew it, is dead. What we have now is a highly segemented, highly federated, highly monitored, centralized communication network. The walls and the controls around access are getting more intricate every day, we've long ago left the idea of an open network in the trash can.

It sure seems like the future is more and more walls, more and more reactionary defensive measures. Nobody seems to have any inclination to resist this trend.

Intel has been proven unreliable and untrustorthy time and time again, people have been complaining about how awful and unscalable x86 is since the 90s.

The future is more likely ARM- I know a few companies are experimenting with moving their internal servers to ARM, and AWS started offering that platform a few months ago.

But I'm not sure how long this takes, people have also been wrongly predicting the death of x86 since the 90s.

I've only had three interactions with the police in my very old life and I have come very close to dying each time. Not sure if I just ran into three people on extremely bad days but I can't emphasize enough how lucky you are if you have never had to interact with United States law enforcement. You don't know what you're missing, and that's a good thing. Keep missing it.

The idea of an algorithmic bug leading to false arrests is not exactly the worst case scenario I can imagine, but it's really close to the worst case scenario I can imagine.

Yes, but investors don't care about profit or sustainability anymore, always just this perpetual, artificial growth.

A million years ago when I was young the IPO market used to be the end of the bullshit, you actually had to make money and have a long term plan. That is no longer true, the fictional growth narrative is demanded over actual money now.

Boeing appears to already be lawyering up their execs while throwing engineers under the bus. It’s going to be all about denying everything now.

I love how browsing the web now is like gearing up for war. Need our anti tank and our anti air of course.

The problem is that gas station is owned by Google and in theory the faceless algorithm that runs everything says all cans are the same but in reality the RC Cola can criticized Sergey a few years ago and keeps making jokes that reveal some uncomfortable lies and you now have to go in the bathroom and climb a ladder to get the RC Cola.

If the reality is as you describe it then John Deere is effectively a government entity now, there is no way the feds/state would actually allow them to collapse and all those fields to die off. If you work at or buy John Deere products you're just living on the taxpayer dime, call it what it is.

I'm not sure why half our economy suddenly seems to be structured around these "too essential to fail" business models, but it's brand new and really really stupid. I guess this is the end result of a generation of people coming up while a gaggle of billionaires get bailed out while absolutely nobody went to prison.

Which technologies? Teflon? Tang? Now that we have more and more of our country living either in prisons or under bridges than at any point in time, which of these amazing space technologies will most benefit the prison population/mentally ill the most?

I stepped over human feces yet again this morning, how about some infrastructure to deal with that? "Incredible civilization" you say? For who?

I'd be ok with calling Zuckerberg a good person if anything he has ever done has indicated he's honest or open to serious change. But he's not. The pattern is pretty clear.

Ever since the Beacon fiasco he's been saying that privacy is important and that he's going to take it seriously and make changes, while every action he and those around him take moves blatantly in the opposite direction.

He's been lying every time. Year after year, over and over again, just lying straight to our face. It's not innocent, it's not naive, he's not dumb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

I remember people expressing concerns about this exact scenario back when Oracle bought Sun.

Reminds me of a James Gosling quote: "during the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle"

This one really freaks me out. Especially since many of the TOS are downright abusive. Discord, for example, reserves the right to read through and listen to all your communications and monetize that in any way and you agree to let them sell all that to anyone, forever.

The fact that we're just sort of expecting everyone to slave away on github every night and weekend to remain employable is pretty disgusting too. That's not sustainable.

This is not a sustainable mindset.

Yes this. I have gone through insane numbers of CFLs and LEDs over the past ~20 years of being a homeowner. They fail, they buzz, they flicker, they fail more. I would have saved money and the landfills would be better for it if I just stuck with old incandescent bulbs that burn your fingers.

This is hilarious, if you actually do this you should make videos where you tell jokes or just film yourself silently drinking for an hour while waiting. Instant viral success.

Google and Amazon are ruthlessly strangling tech startups and smaller mom & pop shops that latch on to something and see a big spike in sales. They have all the data on these companies already, and people are just waiting to jump in and takeover or destroy a company completely regardless of industry or location. They just borg cube consume any success and very few people make any money in this process. This is happening every day, multiple times per day.

That's a way bigger problem than relying on an API or building some app in garden.

I have not thought about it like this before but I think you truly might be onto something.

I think that even the most naive facebook fan out there doesn’t believe Zuckerberg’s born again moment line about privacy when everything he has done his whole life is to destroy all privacy worldwide and monetize it as ruthlessly as possible.

He just wants to merge everything quickly under the misdirect of “privacy” so that he can claim some technical reason why it’s impossible to spin off instagram.

The regulators are coming. Probably not for a couple years, but Zuckerberg knows and is preparing.

I went in a few months to get a hardware thing fixed with an appointment set and nobody helped me. I waited for like 10 minutes past by appointment time and everyone was booked up. I tried pestering people but everyone was helping someone else and asked me to wait for another associate.

Eventually I gave up and left the store. I'm sure their analytics never even noticed me, their data says I just never showed up for the appointment. It's a bad outcome, I sold the old half broken macbook and switched to a thinkpad.

I still think their phones are better than android, but mainly that's just because I don't want anything that Google touches anywhere near me.

It's almost surreal reading through the comments in this thread. I'm so used to the internet being a constant wave of negativity and hatred of everyone, especially in recent years.

This thread is such a nice break from that, feels so refreshing. I don't know anything about this process but I hope it works out.

Right now it's not super scary, but in 10 or 20 years it's conceivable that Amazon becomes effectively a state-run entity like the telecoms are now, and then you could start imagining all sorts of awful cyberpunk storylines.

Yeah clearly they are throwing a lot of spaghetti at things, I don't know that that's necessarily bad. At least they are trying to do so openly and in a API-centric way instead of just building the garden walls higher like every other company.

I haven't used Office in years and don't know anyone who has, so I'm not sure how big of a priority it is to add platforms to a product like that.

This is remarkable, and impossible to predict from the Microsoft of 10 or 20 years ago. Satya seems to be the rare visionary CEO of a megacorp, instead of just defaulting to a defensive and reactionary stance like most other leaders.

I tried to order a few boxes of hardwood flooring from Home Depot one time and despite being in stock at the store 20 miles away from me they somehow managed to outsource delivery to some local company that delayed delivery repeatedly because of "weather" for four months. This local company never picked up the phone or returned emails.

I had to do a chargeback as Home Depot refused to refund me, they seemed confused as to where the shipment was. I don't think HD or any company run in the HD mold will ever be competitive if these are the outcomes.

No it's really not. Designing a system that changes the pitch of the plane automatically while relying on a single sensor that is known to fail at a high rate while working proactively to hide this system from pilots is beyond negligent. It's beyond incompetent. It's just malicious greed.

There is no hindsight argument in this case. This is an incredibly simple and easy to understand system, even for a layperson. The few people I know who have worked in real mechanical engineering systems are having meltdowns over how bad the design was.

The thing I don't understand is that if Boeing has been this bad for this long, as many reports indicate, how has nobody come forward to talk about it until these crashes? Zero whistleblowers? Zero people worried about safety enough to call a journalist? How?

The MCAS system design is just so obviously flawed I can't understand how nobody stuck their feet in sand and started saying no, under any circumstances, this is not happening.

I guess you could apply the same question to the people at the FAA, but even after reading the article I still don't understand how the FAA is involved in oversight at all. It kind of seems like they are just checking boxes, but I'll admit that as an outsider the whole FAA/regulatory system is not really something I think I can wrap my head around.

I read all about the DRM stuff but I figured that was just the awful standards boards being awful standards boards.

I didn't realize what a true mess Mozilla had become.

I have spent ~10 years using Firefox daily, tweaking the config and getting the addons set up the way I want. I was a professional web developer for most of those years.

This is the first I have heard of Firefox changing my config settings invisibly in the background. This is obscene. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? The security ramifications are limitless.

I understand all too well that most companies have decided to start A/B testing things on subsets of users, but that doesn't mean you should force that mode of thinking into everything. What a horrible decision. I don't recall ever seeing any news or notifications or checkboxes about studies or "Normandy" at any point.

Are there some other good open source alternatives to Firefox? I remember hearing about Brave but also that it was tied into some cryptocoin nonsense, so I'm not sure what else to look at.