samplatt

>the ui is still straight out of the early 2000s

There was a lot of great UI back then! None of it in iTunes, but still.

There was an old Tenant-era Dr Who episode where The Master says "shall we decimate them? yes, let's decimate them. REMOVE ONE TENTH."

I instantly howled with anguish. Surely decimating them should mean removing NINE tenths. The Master was a small-minded coward.

Confirming britishism - both are in use here in Australia.

That, the DOS defrag visualisation, and the hex-editing my own savegames is pretty much why I'm a developer today.

>What you previously suggested is that is that stakeholders should give their demands to IT and that IT should figure out how to make it happen. Doesn’t sound like collaboration to me.

That's fair; I did make it sound pretty one-sided there.

>No, it’s unreasonable for end users and non technical managers to simply dictate to IT

Again, false dichotomy. It's possible to meet in the middle, collaborate and discuss technical requirements. It's just that that rarely happens.

Our software (built by us, has regular code reviews and yearly external security audits and is internal-use-only amongst electrical engineers and computer-science guys) regularly gets disabled or removed by IT without warning by accident, and it's usually a few days before it's re-enabled/able to be reinstalled, since the tiny IT dept is forced to rely on external agencies to control their white-listing software.

Your "monkeys in charge of the zoo" metaphor is in full effect at my workplace, but in this case, the monkeys are IT and their security theater.

False dichotomy. The manager of the receptionist, or the head of their department, can decide what's appropriate for their job and dictate this to IT, and then they can lock it down.

At my work currently IT have the first say and final say on all software, regardless of what it does or who is using it. It's an insane situation. Decisions are being made without any input from anyone even in the department of the users using the software... you know... the ones that actually make the company money...

...are fences too costly, or something?

Not unlike Win10 vs 11.

That's a pretty familiar configuration... it wasn't a COMPAQ was it?

The double-speed CDROM in mine was a SCSI. The SoundBlaster 16 card was also the SCSI controller card. Fucking weird piece of hardware. Many years later I found another one that ALSO had a 16kbit modem on it, in addition to being a sound card and SCSI controller O_O

Also, your quest of creating .exe's was cleaner than mine. I scoured the non-internet that was available to my rural country town for QuickBASIC, which had a couple of of syntax differences to QBASIC but it COULD compile .exe's!

To further complicate the issue, "high dynamic range" is a phrase that will come up across a few different disciplines, not just related to the capture & reproduction of visual data.

In reality, holding a piece of paper has nothing in common with relevant ability. Some graduates will exit university as competent people, some won't.

This isn't exactly news, or even a recent phenomenon. My peers who finished their CS degree circa 2004 ish were a broad mix of utter idiots who shouldn't get a job in that field, or damn sharp (if green) technically-minded people, or somewhere in between.

The industry will sort them out; the ones that can, do, the ones that can't, will do something else of use, or find another job.

Plus the JSON structure metadata, which for the average comment is going to add, what, 10%?

China consumes roughly a third of seafood caught globally and is the world's leading exporter. If you think China isn't whole-ass into illegal commercial whaling, then I have a bridge to sell you.

I'm guessing that there's just a younger audience, now. We'd just been off the back of two decades of MS buying everything it got near, it was just what the done thing was. Instagram was taking serious oxygen away from facebook at the time; the buyout wasn't so much an "everyone knows it" but almost an inevitability.

>Most games do skill-based matchmaking

<Bitterly laugh-cries in Rocket League>

SO happy to finally see this get mentioned in one of the yearly FOOF threads on this site <3

3.3 people per thousand is pretty common for something that isn't meant to exist at all. I could meet 1000 people and, due to the ostensibly advanced & cultured world we live in, I would be confident none of them should be slaves.

Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest. Astrophysicists and statisticians often use the word 'common' to refer to vanishingly small numbers, and us uneducated laypeople are usually just fine with that.

Focus-stacking is a feature on (iirc) the A9 level cameras, which are 5x the price, so it's hardly surprising that they want to lock it down.

A side project I've been neglecting is controlling autofocus on Sony Alpha cameras (specifically the A7ii and A7iii which I have) for the purpose of focus-stacking: shooting a few dozen shots with minimal-step focal differences and blending them all in photoshop later.

It took me a while to find the API; Sony made one then pretty much scrubbed it from the internet and has ignored my emails asking for one :-)

But even with the API, achieving results are tricky. Whether or not the focus motor steps properly seems to be based on how busy the camera is at the time... I'm trying various combinations of [shoot] - [sleep] - [step the focus] - [sleep] - [shoot] but the exactly which of these steps actually succeeds just seems so damn random.

To add to the list of drugs, the biggest brand for ibuprofen here in Australia is Nurofen, with Advil being the biggest "cheap brand" version of it.

ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant, sold under many different names.

Don't even have to look outside America. Have a read of the history of Pullman, Illinois.

The wiki page is disappointingly free of all the racism and what would today be human rights violations that George Pullman implemented at the time.

Intended? I don't know, you'd have to ask NASA. Does it have that capability? Sure, if it can deploy arbitrary payloads on destination.

With a far point so far away from Earth it also means that it requires only tiny amounts of fuel for major orbit changes.

I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.

Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.

The same will happen (IS happening) with LLM's.

There are so SO many databases out in the wild that were built by people with little regard for building them correctly - or they simply not programmers/DBA's in the first place, but their boss told them to just make it happen.

I'm not moving goalposts. I didn't accuse WhatsApp of leaking data, stop twisting other people's words.

I think you mean "I'll NOT be surprised if Meta does this", which is the reasonable position of any rational person to take.

I'm allowed to extrapolate expectations of future behaviour, based on past behaviour. Doing otherwise is naive, dangerously so if you're responsible for someone else's security or privacy.

Thanks very much for that. Been thinking about converting an old server to a router + container host for a while.

Weird hill to die on, man. Like, sure credible evidence is one of the most important things in the world... but what, are you honestly saying that you're going to be surprised if WhatsApp turned out to be leaking data?

We don't need the pitchforks just yet, sure, but shit, you have to remain realistic about these things.

What routers are compatible with opnsense? Or does it need a full-blown server/container?

Been happy with my pihole for a few years, and this thread is full of new information for me.