RegalPotoo @ RegalPotoo @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This is something I'm also interested in; if you find something please update us

The kind of bugs I'm talking about are things like "the logical flow of the code is broken because the order of the if/else if/else branches is wrong", "this program never finishes because you don't increment that counter" and "you specified print the numbers 1 to 100, but that counter starts at 0".

I'm testing your ability to think logically, not your knowledge of stdlib trivia

how many good small acts does it take to overcome a Khmer Rouge?

Ok, take the counter argument then - if I am an average person in, say, Russia right now, how much personal risk am I morally obliged to take in order to fight against the Russian state and the war in Ukraine? Stacking up the abstract evil being done elsewhere against the very concrete reality of my own mortality, if the angels are fighting and nothing I can do can have any real impact, then what good is it me getting in the middle of it?

I've kinda stretched this beyond the absurd, and tbh I do think that individuals have some responsibility to not stand idly by and watch evil happen.

To actually address your original question, I don't think Smith's characterisation of humans as a virus is terribly apt - viruses are mindless, selfish and greedy; they arrive in an area and consume and consume until there is nothing left, even if it kills them. Humans behave like this some times, but they are also capable of peace and cooperation and can learn - the fact that you have access to the internet using equipment and systems that took the collective efforts of hundreds of millions of people working across centuries, the fact that you didn't die of smallpox or TB as a child, and the fact that on average you as less likely to die violently than you ever have been in history proves this.

A lot of the time I find "spot the bug" questions to be more informative, especially for junior roles. We stopped asking fizz-buzz - just about everyone has heard of it by now and it's pretty easy to just rote learn a solution. Instead we give them the spec for fizz-buzz and a deliberately broken implementation and ask them to fix it. If they get flustered, just asking "what does this program output" usually give a pretty clear indication if they can reason about code in a systematic way.

Before you become a master you must make one thousand mistakes; some people choose to make the same ten mistakes a hundred times each

Smith's argument conflates humanity and society as being the same thing, because as a machine he has no concept of individuality - to him, humans as a single unit blighted the planet, and therefore are a plague, because he can't conceive of the idea of free will.

Things can be fucked up on a macro level, with war and selfishness and greed and destruction, while still being comprised on a micro level of essentially good, unique, interesting people who care for each other. Smith doesn't see this, because in his eyes humans are all the same - just like him. He is arguing against his own existence

locked out of that feature

Oh I've met this person. "Can't find the button" = "locked out", "button moved 3mm to the left" = locked out", "I forgot my password " = "locked out", "computer isn't turned on" = "locked out", "I have no internet access because I'm paranoid about 'radiation' and constantly turn my laptop's wifi off" = "locked out"

That's my question; presumably the people in charge of that much wealth aren't total fools and will be wanting to see some actual numbers and a business case as to how they will see a return, not just platitudes and enthusiasm.

"now"?

I had a client once who used to be obsessed with this. By his logic, if a potential customer visited the website and had a bad experience because the site didn't work properly in their browser, they'd think the company was unprofessional and wouldn't come into the store and we'd lose them as a customer forever. Analytics showed that 99+% of people would visit in one of the big three, and he wouldn't pay for someone to test the site on the less popular browsers, instead he insisted on fingerprinting logic that broke all the time and probably caused more bounces than any possible rendering quirks from niche mobile browsers would have caused

Laying fibre is really expensive - in really rural areas it could be $100k+ per subscriber, so you will never see a return on investment for doing that.

The original deal that the telcos struck was that the government would foot a big chunk of the bill of replacing the copper network with fibre even in places where it would make good business sense to do so (and arguably the telcos could have paid for themselves), on the proviso that they also either a) lay fibre; or b) maintain the copper network; in places where it makes no business sense to do so. On balance, the telcos came out well ahead on the deal, but still want to pick option C - none of the above, we take the money and run.

CW: DV >!"we'll have to raise prices if early termination fees are banned" has a real "look how you made me hurt you" abuser vibe.!<

I'm imagining the logic is something like "predatory fees generate $xx million in revenue a year, so if we lose that revenue source we will have to put our other fees up to compensate, because as a multi-billion dollar company our shareholders will get all butthurt if our profit drops by a fraction of a percentage point next year"

To borrow another turn of phrase, warheads on foreheads

Gotta paraphrase RiskyBiz on this one; release the hounds. This kind of attack should be treated with the same severity as if you went and drove a truck through the hospital's main transformers IRL; if you ransomware a hospital, you should be seriously concerned about ordnance coming through your front window

Disagree; a good flag should:

• Be distinctive and recognisable at a distance
• Be recognisable even when hanging limp on a flagpole on a still say
• Drawable by a 6 year old with a piece of paper and a box of crayons

The Northern Britton flag is the only one that really meets all 3. Also, why do you have to do the Scots dirty like that?

• There has been some technical decisions over the last few years that I don't think fit my needs terribly well; chief of these is the push for Snaps - they are a proprietary distribution format, that adds significant overhead without any real benefit, and Canonical has been pushing more and more functionality into Snap
• I previously chose Ubuntu over Debian because I needed more up to date versions of things like Python and PHP, with Docker this isn't really a concern any more, so slower, more conservative approach Debian takes isn't as big of an issue

Ubuntu LTS, but in the process of replacing it with Debian

I spent a couple of years doing contract work in a team that built the APIs that ran behind a fairly complex site; they understood that I was helping build the site, but really didn't get that I had nothing at all to do with the UI or content, and yes thank you for your suggestions about the layout but that's not something that I can "just go fix it" because a) change control is a thing and b) that part of the site is maintained by an entirely different team, from a different company, and I don't have access to their source code

Yeah, I find this super weird. Where I live, any vehicle more than 3 years old needs to be inspected annually, and anything older than 10 years needs to be inspected every 6 months - it's a super basic safety check; are your tires legal, do your brakes work, is your suspension system in spec etc. Pretty much just making sure that vehicle is safe to drive - you get a bit of leeway if the certificate has expired, but if it's more than a few weeks past you risk getting fined or having your car impounded

Or, alternatively, we should build cities where owning a car isn't a requirement to hold down a job, and keep piloting a two ton death machine as a privilege, not a right