theshadowknows

A “fell off the truck” version of Delphi :)

Mannnnn the nostalgia. I loved programs like this and Sub7c my favorite was DivineIntervention 3 I just liked the interface and thought the name was cool lol. I’d love to see what all the devs of these things are up to today. Pri$m, if you’re out there let it be known that your work on DI3 is what got me into programming!

We send multiple billions of emails a year, and text messages, and push messages, and outbound ivr messages, and two way chat messages, and print messages, and in some cases fax messages lol. Our outbound volume is extreme and luckily only a few of our communication streams have trouble with deliverability. But it does take a few different teams to manage it all.

It’s the same where I am. We’re a fortune 4 and the number of people who create jobs for their friends is outrageous.

I don’t know how many folks really know how much money is spent by big (and medium and small) companies on sending email but I can tell you it is considerable. My last job was a small retailer and we spent maybe 2m a year just on platform costs and at my current role it’s closer to 200m (USD). There are some places where it probably makes sense to use one of the vendors. But I think a carefully architected custom solution like this could get most organizations where they need to be. I’m just not sure how much the talent costs. Do AWS experts charge a premium? Or would it just be cheaper to buy Acoustic and let the account team handle all the work.

“ A federally contracted research lab tracks all known security flaws in software and rates them by severity.” …where can one see this list?

I feel like this is one of those “the media creating a story where there isn’t one” situations. Not in terms of apples new changes - there’s definitely a story there and many people are upset about it. But I’d wager it’s a minority. And I still trust apple more than Facebook.

I’m glad that people are trying to figure out any technical flaws in the system as best they can, but if I’m being honest I do trust Apple’s engineers to have built something that is solid from a technical stand point.

Am I correct in that the primary reason folks are so upset is that the system could (probably) be easily modified such that -any- content could invoke legal action? That the main problem is really the scanning at all, and not the chances that it could be attacked by an individual actor but instead by a government?

I very much enjoy when one of my colleagues gets a win and I’ll be their biggest cheerleader. Hey check out what Dave did man this is super cool. Hey did you see what Sally did it’s awesome we’re gonna do a roadshow on this one. But the reason for that is to help them boost their accomplishments list so come review time it’s easier for their bosses to justify bonuses.

For work things I often have to enter a code from one or another app that expires every few seconds. I've always wondered how exactly that works. Where might I go to find out about that? Is it as straight forward as googling "how two factor authentication works" or is there some other terminology?

Where should someone start if they wanted to get familiar and proficient with .NET?

Oh Im sure I’ve broke things that just haven’t been observed yet!

I do know some companies pay to occasionally phish their own employees. I think (hope) it’s mainly used for training. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are teams dedicated to this sort of effort. Would it be illegal?

This reminds me of that movie where the criminal boss gets arrested and as he’s being taken to prison a large crowd of reports gather as he’s a big deal crime boss. He turns to the cameras and says he’ll give anyone who gets him out of prison a hundred million dollars.

Imagine if these groups actually advertised right out in the open. I’m sure they could catch a few people before their free AdWords account got suspended.

I won’t be surprised if there’s a class action launched soon.

My bug fixes almost always start out with “why the F did I do that?????” And then a long series of “oh…” before I finally get to the “ah hah!” Which is a moment I still enjoy after all these years. But fixing someone else’s code I’m more like “ok…I need to find the bread crumbs so I don’t get lost in this forest and end up messing something up…let me test this seemingly simple…ok yeah that broke stuff better roll it back.”

I spent several minutes trying to get my AirPods to connect to my phone today instead of my iPad. Ended up being late for a call because of it. Happens a few times a week. More than irritating. First world problem, to be sure. But still the whole “it just works” line irks me no end.

Is…that what the night sky would look like If we didn’t have so many electric lights???

I love London but man I feel bad for the folks who live there in the city. Same for NYC. It’s like the ultimate goal is to coat every surface in ads. Drive out the people who can afford to leave. Then force everyone else to work three or more jobs to be able to just barely get by.

I work at Big Ass Corporation, Inc. in the US (there’s a very strong chance you use one or more of our services). Hiring is fucking awful. First of all it’s nearly impossible to get approval for a req in the first place. I’m actively looking to leave just because of that…but that’s a different rant than this one.

Once a req is approved then it goes out to the team to disperse as well as hr. Some roles get handed off to the critical search team if the hiring manager pushes hard enough. But that doesn’t really matter.

We get flooded with candidates. Almost every one of them could probably do the job so we have to figure out who could do it best through the interview process. I personally never ask stupid gotcha puzzle questions because those annoy me as much as they do most folks here. I ask people to talk about their experience as it relates to the role. Usually this means I ask about how they solved a truly difficult problem at work, what made it difficult and how they were able to overcome it. Then I like to get into the technical stuff of what they implemented and why. Mostly I just like letting people who are proud of something they’ve done get a chance to talk about it.

Anyway we’re supposed to score people based on these arbitrary metrics like longevity (how long we think they will stay) and communication ability (this is very, very close to being racist…draw your own conclusions).

I never score people. Managers ask me why and I say because I don’t interview spreadsheets.

Anyway I’m one of usually 4 interviews. I interview by myself and the rest are all panel interviews. And once you finish the last panel that’s the last you hear from us unless you get an offer. I hate it.

Has anyone ever uses Salesforce marketing cloud? You can build emails drag and drop. And the code it creates is…ok. You can even use the UI to do fairly ok dynamic content.

You can build data tables with the UI. It’s…ok. You can do very simple joins and fairly complex filtering with the UI. The filters are actually good so long as you only need the one table. After that they’re…ok

And then there are Journeys. You can orchestrate complex communication streams with the UI. I’d go so far as to say it’s good. Until you need to do an action not built into the UI…then you need to code it :)

All of the same goes for most of the other “low” code or “no” code tools I’ve used like AirTable. They can do a lot. And what they can do they’re usually between ok and good at.

But so far I’ve not seen one that is excellent. Back to the marketing cloud example if you want to make a table in the UI with 10 columns sure. But what about 100? It would be a huge pain or you can write a script and do it in minutes.

I’m sure Bubble is fine. But so far none of these solutions have ever wowed me. But then again like some folks point out I’m not the target audience really.

Wanna know the sad thing? When I was…12 or so… I thought all those cool icons were awesome. So I _only_ installed programs that had them…and all those little “desktop buddies” I had maybe five of them. Innocent days gone bye.

I struggle with this sort of case. I guess it’s the difference between some random half rate web developer and a major corporation. Like if random web guy says he won’t build websites for gay people..no harm done other than an asshole being an asshole. But if, say, Amazon said they’d stop letting gay people buy things from Amazon.com it would be a much larger scope and I’d be much more angry. On the face of it, I guess that’s pretty irrational thought on my part. But I just know that if I personally went to get a website built and the dev said no I personally don’t think that middle aged men with beards and receding hairlines should be allowed to have websites I’d just call them an asshole and move on with my day. And yet I’d probably try to make a huge deal if it was Amazon. Like I said..I know it’s irrational. But I feel like it’s one of those “scale” things to me. Like how Twitter can be seen as censoring free speech but I personally can’t, because they’re essentially a public forum (thanks previous hn commenters for pointing that out to me in the past)

I’m considering buying a motorcycle in the next few months. I wonder if the same applies.

I’d be curious to see how this stacks up against something like a virtual pc on azure? You can make an azure virtual machine in like…8 or so clicks. And you can install whatever you want. Then just rdp or whatever you want in and you’re good to go. Interestingly enough, sometimes my laptop doesn’t let me view the data factory tool, so sometimes I use a virtual machine just for that :)

Apple let’s you take the naked core of safari, stripped of chrome, and slap a skin on top.

I smoked weed the first time when I was 15 or so. A buddy of mine bought some from a friend of a friend. And we continued to smoke mostly on weekends for years. I stopped right around college in 2007 or so.

Then a year or so ago I smoked some legal weed from a dispensary. And that shit almost killed me.

I was nauseated and sweating and I vomited repeatedly for like two hours. And I couldn’t control my thoughts. They got dark very quickly. Like voices in my head telling me to kill myself…it was fucking insane…

So naturally a few months later I tried it again, assuming it was just something with that strain or whatever. And it happened again. And I’m not even talking like I smoked a whole joint. I smoked maybe four puffs from a bong.

I know that’s not evidence of any kind. It’s just my reaction. And my wife smokes daily to help with the symptoms of medication she takes. She smokes fairly heavily and the worst thing that happens to her is she gets hungry.

I don’t know what the difference is between “modern” weed and the grown-in-the-ditch North Carolina weed I smoked in my youth. But it is not the same thing.

Lol this guy was so upset that a random lady on the train didn’t look at him that he wrote a whole blog about it? I’ll never understand this point of view. Omg people look at their phones too much so they don’t experience real life..give me a break dude.

I’ve had an idea for a mobile app for…eight years. I legitimately think it’s something that people would find useful and so far I’ve not seen anyone tackle the problem the way I’ve thought to do it. But..I’ve built nothing. So yeah as of now it’s useless. Hurts but it’s true.

My father-in-law wrote five books during his lifetime. To his credit, they were ok. But he refused to ever work with an editor. And thus none were ever published.