I can’t and wouldn’t teach your kid to be gay. I can’t get him to write his fucking name at the top of the page.
That’s generally not what they’re really concerned about. “I don’t want teachers teaching my children to be gay” is just code for, “I don’t want teachers teaching my children that it’s ok to be gay.”
Or just tolerating them in front of their kid. In fact, they’d probably prefer the teacher teach Timmy to hate like mom and dad do.
I hate that more people don’t understand this. It leads to a bunch of discussion and anxiety about nothing at all.
Rough day, huh?
Parents can be overprotective, (I.e. become shitty parents) and you can’t really do anything about that, except hoping that the universe educate them.
Just because I’m an IT guy, it doesn’t mean I know why your laptop is slow.
Also, that software engineer and IT are not interchangeable terms
“I’m a software engineer, not a printer whisperer”
^ This. So much this. I’m a software engineer, and people will ask me IT questions about software I have no clue how to use.
“Can you hack my ex-girlfriends Instagram?”
Or, “I have an amazing idea for an app…”
“My app idea is that you can see where your girlfriend is at all times.”
“So you’re telling me you want me to build an illegal stalking system? Have you really thought this through?”
(Based on an actual conversation.)
Clearly, if my years on the internet taught me anything, the killer app ID is an app that hack’s ex’s socials with bonus functionality for changing their school grades
My app idea was location based reminders instead of time based.
The next time you’re at the store you’ll get a notification with your notes.
I think it’s a neat idea but i never have location on so 🤷♂️
Apple Reminders does that.
Was gonna say Google keep has had this feature for years too
very cool
I think you can use existing software to do that. If your store has wifi (even if you can’t access it, I think), you can geofence an area and have some action (such as popping up a reminder app) trigger. I’ve not used software like this myself, but I remember people describing behavior like this at least on Android. If it might be useful to you, you should give it a search.
I have an app that’s meant to schedule things, but I just use it as a checklist and preface each action with the location. So long as I check it (second home screen on my phone, so not a huge barrier), I’m usually good.
Example
- costco: chicken
- costco: paper towels
- Cainz: sunscreen
- grocery: milk
- grocery: eggs
yeah quite a few apps are existing software wrapped into a convenient bundle
I can’t hack insta. But I can probably hack your ex. Spearfishing is largely just a matter of time.
Or how to fix your printer.
Nobody knows how to fix a printer
I can’t even get my own printer to work.
I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.
I mean… 802.11g is still able to be used. Even b is supported under the radios I’m familiar with.
The router he got did have support for 802.11g, but for some reason I don’t remember we couldn’t turn it on. It was some integrated 5G router. The solution was just to use the printer’s built in AP to print. He has to disconnect from the internet to print things, but it still works.
Did you know they still sell dot matrix printers? Wild.
Everything since then has been a mistake.
Best printer setup experience I’ve had.
Eh, you probably do, you just don’t want to spend three hours wading through mountains of malware for free.
I don’t want to do it for money either.
I mean, 90% chance it’s because: still using a hard drive, old ass CPU/heat issues+throttling, OS and software bloat.
And they need to download more RAM
Bloat
I’m on a laptop from before the Mayan apocalypse. Works fine for everything except gaming. It’s bloat.
I mean if their hardride isn’t full, and their task manager isn’t showing a bunch of bloat, then it’s 95% of the time a hardware issue.
Yeah, but what could it be though?
Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Lil’ bits of paper with representatives watching the vote counters is a pretty solid system. There’s no problem there that needs to be fixed.
I say this as a Canadian who has volunteered as an observer in federal elections. I know Americans have their thing going on, but seriously. Paper ballots all the way.
As a software development expert, I take issue with
“our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.”
That’s way off base.
She under-stated the hell out of that.
Our average practitioner is bad at both their own job, and at the jobs of those whose lives their shoddy work complicates.
Anyone trusting us with their lives or livelihood should be very very alarmed.
We’re also now producing artificial intelligence tools that allow us to do equally shoddy work, but now in dramatically greater quantity.
Edit: Let’s say this is 60/40 sarcasm and sincere, and I’m not sure which is the 60%…
I work with some of the best, and I’ve worked with plenty of the worst. I’ve also been both, on different days.
this Lemmite is, indeed, a software development expert
Lemmite? I was always figured Lemmings seemed the most appropriate name for Lemmy users.
I have never volunteered to count or observe elections. However I am a professional programmer, and I absolutely agree, electronic voting opens up tons of new attacks, whereas paper voting “security” is basically a solved problem at this point
We don’t have a unified thing. We definitely don’t.
oh it’s a thing
Ok, i made an edit
Brazilian elections continue to be fine for decades, this fear mongering is precisely what the right does whenever they lose.
If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.
If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.
Financial transactions are logged and the logs maintained for a certain number of years. You can definitely use a similar system for voting when the stakes are low - local elections, for example. But an electronic voting system cannot be both secret and verifiable. In practice you make finding out how someone voted as hard as possible, and hope that a future government will not put in the effort to crack your system. All of which is completely unnecessary when paper ballots exist, and can be both secret and verifiable.
Local elections are not low stakes. Most of the services you receive are from the municipality you live in.
Just because they’re less polarizing doesn’t mean the stakes are lower.
‘Low stakes’ as in ‘the new mayor isn’t sending everyone who didn’t vote for their party to jail’.
Works fine in french election abroads.
But yes vote by mail is best.
I’ve been there too. It’s works pretty good. Voting machines don’t always for whatever reason, even though it’s a simple problem.
I don’t really buy the conspiracy theories, but it should be waaay down the list of things that need automation, since elections are only occasional.
This is naive me, but having a robust, online voting system would make it a lot easier for direct democracy.
But we would also have to pressure politicians into using that system.
I actually question if direct democracy would be good, after the amount of exposure to typical voters I’ve had, lol. Representatives can be questionable, but at least they know what they’re deciding on.
Autocracy is just completely awful and depressing, though. No doubt about that.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer
But someone who is better at managing computers than 99% of people.
But that someone will have their own priorities that will most likely not always coindice with yours.
This.
Debatable.
Yes, but just by being a conscious that a screen turned off doesn’t mean that the computer is unresponsive, and you still should have care to not smash keys blindly, already puts you on one of the higher branches.
Next you’ll be telling me Serverless is just code on servers!
Not if I’m Jeff Bezos.
The more users you have, the more expensive it is to run.
Like, compute, storage, bandwidth, none of that is free. If you’re providing a free service, like Wikipedia, and you have many millions of users, like Wikipedia, your expenses will be enormous. You can either accept donations, like Wikipedia, require payment, or sell your users.
If there’s something you like that’s free online, support them. If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.
Also when “you’re the product” that doesn’t just mean that your data is the product. A user is a person whom you can influence. “You’re the product” means this company can direct you, influence you, change your behavior. They can offer your behavioral changes, as a service to their other stakeholders.
Marketing can be such an immoral, insidious process.
And it takes thousands of people pushing this shit mindlessly, because hey… “It’s just a job, right? Nine to five”.Shit. People think they collect all that data just for fun, don’t they? Time to change how I talk about this…
This ☝️✅
If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.
A statement has never been truer than this
Turning your computer off and back on again will solve 90% of your problems.
Of the other 10% an additional reboot while on the phone with the IT person solves those.
Yep, I turn off my devices when I’m done with them. I’ll restart my phone from time to time.
Most software isn’t made for patchwork while running. Sometimes even if it’s on a server lol. The stuff that is gets tested quite a bit.
Turning off and back on is not the same as restarting. If you want to force a restart like turn off, hold shift while clicking shutdown.
You have a very strange phone.
Sounds like the windows 10 ‘innovation’ called fast startup. Some genius decided instead of shutting down, let’s just log the user out and put the OS into standby… That’ll save a lot of boot time!
It’s universally hated by IT and made redundant by SSDs
Also it really fucks with some peripherals. I even had a motherboard with RGB lights (don’t judge me, it was actually cheaper than the “normie” version I originally wanted) that didn’t turn off the lights and the fans because of this shitty feature. I never got around to investigating who was doing things wrong between Microsoft and the manufacturer in this case though, I just got into the habit of holding shift while clicking the shutdown button.
I hear you I turn off Linux devices too. Zombie power is a thing as well as software being a house of cards.
Windows 8*
Really? Wow…
I’m a welder, and the general public doesn’t seem to understand why we charge so much for our services. Like, 80% of my work is fit-up, alignment, math, measurements, and work area prep.
All the public sees is “durr, me hot glue metal! All done!” That’s exactly what you get with Jim Bob who owns a welder yet has never trained for it. He’s cheap, his welds are ugly, and they’re likely to fail in the near future.
Also do trades. People seem to have no perception that quality varies. They assume it’s busy work, it’s either done or not done, works or don’t work. All as if you flip a couple magical switches and everything’s finished.
Always frustrating to explain how the electrician that’s 15$ an hour is gonna get you killed, and that wiring isn’t just snaking cords through a conduit.
Just show them some of my work as an amateur just sticking metal together and surely they’ll pay for your work.
Like I try to at least measure, do some math, clean it up, and be steady but anybody looking at can know its my day job lol
A huge, HUGE amount of a welder’s value - nay, almost any skilled worker’s value - is in the years you’ve spent gettin’ good.
Yeah I don’t hire tradesfolk thinking I’m getting something cheap. I hire tradesfolk thinking I’m getting something that’s gonna fucking work when I need it to for as long as it can be expected to. That weld ain’t the cheapest part of the bridge by any means but it cannot unexpected fail without catastrophe, so if trained and reputable welders are expensive then welds on that bridge is expensive.
I can run my own wires when the wife lets me. But I won’t because that expensive electrician will do it safely and in a way that doesn’t cause even more expensive problems in the future
Good labor isn’t cheap and cheap labor is rarely good.
Read the error message. The whole thing.
This comes up even with coworkers who are allegedly senior software developers.
“It’s just a white page it’s not working”
“Ok well what does the console say? Network requests?”
“403?”
“Ok now what’s in the response body?”
“The what?”
"Click on it. Then response "
"It says I don’t have permission to view this page "
“Do you have permission to view this page?”
“…no.”
“What does the error message say?”
“I already closed it. Those things are always gibberish”
Yep, so many clients: I have this problem and an error pops up, I need immediate help.
Me: Ok send me the data and the error log, and a description of what it is telling you on screen.
Client: I forget what it said, i didn’t save the log, And i needed to keep working so I deleted the file and started again.
OR
Client: My set of files is doing this, and giving me this specific error.
Me: Ah OK, that is a known issue, close all the fikes and open the top level only, open each sub fike one by one till the error pops up, that will be the culprit so run this clean up tool on that file only.
Crickets
Week later, Client : Im having that same error again, can you help?
Me: That cleanup tool should have fixed it.
Client: I didn’t have time to do those steps so I just kept working as is.
me: hopefully a gangster shoots me in a drive by crossfire on the way home.
“That’s fine, when you have the time, run the tool I sent you, it takes 30 seconds and should solve your issue!”
I wish that worked. Rather than spend an hour diagnosing which file is causing the error, they would rather struggle with it crashing for a week.
Yep, but that is their problem, I have it logged that I gave them the tool with instructions on how to use it, with them dismissing it, even when I followed up on it.
I won’t work myself up over a user who is not interested in solving their issue.
Now obviously in real life I would remote in and run the tool for them, but there have been time when they have been unwilling to do that due to some pointless reason, that’s fine, I have logs showing that I tried.
Yeah, sometimes we can’t remote in due to IT policy or ITAR data. And I was just being dramatic with the comment, it just boggles my mind that they will just keep calling back without even trying to help themselves. Even scheduling a call…“I don’t have time for a call I just want it fixed” LOL
“Sorry, I cannot help you without the message.”
Close ticket.
I literally once got an email from another engineer using our internal tool at the big tech company I used to work for which said something like, “the page isn’t working. Please help. Attached screenshot of error.” The attached screenshot showed the error message, “Your authentication token has expired. Please refresh the page.”
I emailed him back, “oh yeah, that happens when your authentication token expires. Try refreshing the page.”
He emailed me back, “that worked, thanks!”
(For anyone wondering, no, we can’t refresh the page for the user, because they might have unsaved data on it.)
I’ve had this and similar conversations far too many times, I keep professional but holy shit, and then when they do get a call going with a screen share they zoom past the error every. Single. Time.
Building genuinely secure computer systems is incredibly difficult. You might even be in systems/software and be thinking “yeah it is hard”, but to be really secure it’s 1000x harder than that. So everything you use off the shelf from any vendor is a massive compromise and has holes in it. But on the other hand most people don’t need really secure systems.
Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?
You are correct.
The uncomfortable part is what I’ve learned about the challenges to gain physical access.
Most physical security is equally appalling to most Cybersecurity.
Edit: Incredibly unfun exercise: pick a physical security device you rely on, personally, and do a YouTube search for “device name break in test”. I’ve rarely been able to find a video more than 3 minutes long, for any product, at all. And the actual breaking is usually mere seconds in the middle bit.
The lockpicking lawyer scares me.
Imagine you wake up in the night, you hear your front door rattling. Someone is trying to break in. “No problem” you think to yourself, “I have a good lock on my front door”. Then you hear the five most terrifying words you could possibly hear in that moment:
“This is the Lockpicking Lawyer”
That guy is an exceptional picker/exploiter, and he isn’t even the best.
However, I’ve casually picked locks and always have a set of picks with me for the past 20 years. LPL makes me look like a 10 year old kid trying to open a lock with a pair of chopsticks.
In other words, probably less than 5% of the population have ever picked a lock. Of them, I’m probably better than 90% and I still suck at it. So running across an LPL level skilled person, who’s also a criminal is going to be like a list of names on a single piece of paper. Just buy a lock complicated enough that you can’t scrub it open and everyone will be fine.
Me too.
Most online services would struggle to provide their service to their users if all of their servers were air gapped.
Air gap is a useful strategy. But what is that system? You don’t really know anything about its origin or what any of its processors actually do. You know really nothing about any of the firmware or software you run on it. Just getting software on to it securely is a huge challenge to prove its origin and the whole supply chain. And then getting data out is a whole other problem. A general purpose computer is not a great choice if you want the best in security. And having it just in your house isn’t that secure. Obviously as I say, most people don’t need the best security.
Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly
If any state entity is in your threat model then this would be major concern. If you’re of any interest to the state, first thing they’ll do is raid your home and seize your electronics. Your threat model shouldn’t depend on assuming an attacker can’t physically access your device (I know you never said an air gap should be the only defence, I’m just saying in general).
Allow me to drop a bunch of innocuous looking storage devices in the area, maybe some power cables with hidden microchips, or perform another supply chain attack. What if your computer is probing for wireless devices without your knowledge? Can one be snuck in?
It’s a good step, a major one, but even an air gapped computer can be infected if you have a well-funded, advanced, and persistent adversary.
Yeah just think about BIOS and drivers, and again some vulnerability in SSH…
It’s at least mostly going away nowadays, but…pulling a fire alarm will not make your school fire sprinklers go off. Getting one sprinkler to go off is just that. One sprinkler. None of the rest will go off.
Also, fires in a building are never a spot here, a spot there, over there a spot, and just randomly burning patches all over the place. It just grows out and up from its origin point, for the most part. It doesn’t magically plant little patches all over the place. It’s also often times so smoky and so thick with smoke that you quite literally couldn’t see a big portion of fire if it were ten feet in front of you. You feel the heat and maybe see a faint bit of orange glow. Sometimes you don’t even get to see that.
Learned something today. Thank you
Does this affect any fire evacuation procedures? For example, would it be likely that the nearest exit stairwell happens to be the source of the fire? If so, how would that change the plan?
Not OP, but that’s why fire codes specify multiple escape routes - for example, a window on a bedroom.
That current “AI” is not turning into Skynet any time soon.
It might turn into dumb skynet though. Like a version of skynet that does malicious things, but not because it’s trying to hurt people, just because it’s really stupid and we put it in charge of things.
Yeah, the McKittrick effect (remember Wargames?)
Oh like politicians and CEOs? Can we try replacing them with AI?
Boards are certainly looking at this. They certainty won’t align with the workers, consumers, or publics interest.
We can’t even get them to not be racist under light adversarial conditions. Billions of dollars have probably been spent on that problem to no avail.
LLMs like ChatGPT have kind of just turned the problem of getting knowledge into a computer, into the problem of getting it back out in a controlled way. It’s still hard and failure-prone but now nobody knows how it works inside.
I’ve begun to think of LLMs as compression algorithms for patterns. It can take an existing pattern and apply it on unusual subjects. Like take the pattern of a limerick and apply it to the patterns of Danny Devito, that’s the upper limit of their creativity. So rather than storing information, it stores these patterns making it seem more dynamic.
The way I see it, human creativity is the combination of patterns but in a chaotic non-analytic way. We make leaps of logic that without precise knowledge of our brains can’t be exactly replicated. Meanwhile LLM’s just do the basic combination of patterns that result in the most generic realization of any idea.
However the well dries up as soon as we stop training them. They’ll store the basics of any field but fail to replicate new developments or conclusions until trained.
However the well dries up as soon as we stop training them. They’ll store the basics of any field but fail to replicate new developments or conclusions until trained.
Exactly this is the reason we should prevent any further data collection by these bastards…
Don’t feed the beast!
Everyone gets older. Everyones body breaks down eventually. The amount of elderly who have said “I never thought something like this would happen to me”. Look around Edna! What made you think you were going to avoid what happens to everyone else!?
At least personally, the idea is that I will die before I get old.
I dunno that seems awful c-c-cold. Are you just trying to cause a big s-s-sensation?
Well I didn’t, so now am.
Upvote for The Who reference.
“Everything that happens happens to someone else”
Also the reason people don’t buy even the most basic insurance, or take even the most basic disaster preparedness steps.
At most corporate pizza places only a fraction of the delivery charge goes to the driver. My job, for example, charges $4.99 for delivery and gives the drivers $0.60.
I once interviewed to be a delivery driver for Domino’s and my Dad was adamant it was a bad idea and I should find different work and then insisted that I ask them about insurance if I was going to do it.
It felt super awkward because I was pretty young and people just don’t ask those kinds of questions for minimum wage. He wanted me to ask them if they provided insurance to their drivers when they’re driving cars for them on the clock and explained to me that if there’s an accident while using the car for work then my insurance wouldn’t cover it which I checked and indeed they wouldn’t.
The interviewer said they didn’t provide insurance but asked if I was insured and if I was, wouldn’t I be fine anyway? I said the insurance was not going to cover me while using the car for the job and the guy had this answer in a different tone like a kind of I’ve got this super clever scam that no one’s ever thought of but I’ll let you in on it vibe and leant forward and said “oh yeh, we know what to do here in that situation, what you do is you just say you weren’t working at the time”. I was incredulous but still a nervous teen and kind of meekly protested “but like what about the several pizzas in a bag and the uniform?” And he’s like “oh you just tell them you were on your way home from work and that’s your dinner”. That, along with many other fucked up things that occurred in the brief space of time this interview occupied convinced me to nope out of there.
Yeh dude, I’m going to try and commit insurance fraud… very poorly… for Dominos… who can’t simply provide the necessary protection to allow people to do the job they’re asking them to do. If I have to get my own insurance, if it has to be a special kind of more expensive insurance that’s going to cover me driving for work, then I’m a contractor, not an employee and I’m going to set my own rates and they’re going to be a lot higher then what they were offering considering I also have to maintain my own vehicle and pay for fuel and insurance, to a certain extent I even arguably have to use the skill of knowing how and also being licensed to drive in the first place which makes it not exactly “unskilled” labour in this first place.
Former pizza driver here: Yeah it really does work like that, the cops never ask nor do they report it unless you say “Well there I was, delivering a pizza…” and your insurance company doesn’t send reps to accidents. We had people get in accidents, including me twice, every one was covered by the person’s insurance without question. Nobody cares but the insurance company and everyone from the store to the cops seems to agree “fuck them.” Sure it’s kind of insurance fraud but they deserve it and I never saw anyone get caught in the 10+yr I worked for multiple stores/companies.
Now, your rates going up? That’s a different story. That’ll happen just like any other accident, and for that reason it’s better if the store pays, but that just isn’t how it works at any store nor for Uber/Ubereats, etc.
Yes I figured that that was how it worked when Dad insisted I asked because, although, of course, logically what he was saying made sense, I knew intuitively that that isn’t the world I live in, and that unlike a white collar career, the minimum wage world does not care about making conditions or contracts that would attract or retain employees because they have 100% of the bargaining power and will find a different wage slave if you ask weird and inconvenient questions. That was why it was so awkward and I was reluctant to ask in the first place.
The thing is, while I’m all for a “fuck them” attitude towards insurance companies, if I’m going to commit insurance fraud, even if I think the risks are exceedingly low, I’m not doing it for Dominos, and doing it for them is indeed what’s happening there because in a just world this should obviously be the cost of offering a delivery service and by taking on this legal risk myself (and the burden of the increased premiums in the case of an accident) I’m gifting Dominos, the multinational megacorp, the opportunity to shirk what should definitely be their responsibility.
The insurance issue and terrible amateur legal advice alone wasn’t actually what made me pass on that job, despite really needing it at the time. The rest of the interview was a train wreck in terms of me evaluating them as employers and though they seemed keen to hire me anyway on the basis of me apparently having a pulse, I was fortunate enough not to actually be destitute at the time and so wasn’t obliged to accept the offer.
To play devil’s advocate, it’s not just the delivery that’s included in those costs. It’s also the development and maintenance of the ordering platform, vehicle maintenance, etc.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes even though I specified I was playing devil’s advocate. Also, in the Netherlands, pizza companies provide their own vehicles which seems normal to me.
Vehicles are generally owned and maintained by the driver. Also, these charges long predate the digital age. They pass them off as paying for maintaining a shitty app for ordering, but it is just a convenience fee, extra money they can make off those of us who are too busy, tired, stuck, or lazy to go pick it up. Always has been, always will be. Proof: if I go the old school way and call in to order it directly they still charge it.
Exactly one pizza place I’ve worked at (pre online ordering) had an adjustable delivery charge based on mileage that went entirely to the driver. However that was a Mom and Pop shop so it doesn’t count for this conversation about corporate pizza.
The pizza place doesn’t pay for the vehicle’s maintenance, usually.
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So young. So naive.
Just google the error message. Copy, paste. Read the top 5 results.
No, click on the results and read the page.
Did you read it? Explain to me why it doesn’t work.
Still broken? Call the vendor.
Hello Google! Hey I was trying this function in Android and it’s not working. Plus when I search the first link is to your bug tracker and it’s marked as non fix.
What do you mean this is a Wendy’s? What do you mean that’s a free product and there’s no support?
If you want your chicken extra crispy, it takes longer.
