azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

We can argue on whether it's a "bug" outright (since it is technically a correct implementation of a faulty design), but Boeing's MCAS pitching the plane based on the input of a singular faulty sensor has probably caused billions in direct damages, and billions more in reputational damage.

NULL references (which Crowdstrike is an instance of) are often referred to as "the billion dollar mistake", but the actual cost of "historical" languages skimping out on optionally-nullable types is certainly in the trillions.

To: Springfield High Educators
From: Springfield High School Board

It has come to our attention that some of our staff have been teaching Bible verses out of context. This has made some parents, particularly our esteemed LEOs, uncomfortable.

I hereby remind you that your contract binds you to a strict adherence to the Chart of Christian Values of Springfield and the Glorious State of Oklahoma.

For your next mandatory Bible Reading Session, please make sure to select passages that are in-line with those values.

Kind Regards,

Batman fundamentally embodies social justice as an individual violent power fantasy. He's the ultimate reactionary: use violence to fix individual people's problems, never address (or even acknowledge) the violence inherent to the social system. (Some authors' occasional deviations from this core characterization do not make up for it).

At best Batman is enjoyable because anti-heroes are enjoyable (I've heard there are some self-aware issues of Batman). At worst it's painfully unaware, mask-off copaganda (such as the one and-and-a-half Nolan movies I slugged through).

The top comment is a fanfic about Batman explaining social systems to Poison Ivy. Great idea, except that such wokeness is antithetical to his entire worldview. He's basically a Republican who happens to be against the death penalty for personal/religious reasons.

I looked into it after this year's massive price hike... There's no meaningful alternative. We're on the FOSS version of GitLab now (GitLab-CE), but the lack of code ownership / multiple reviewers / etc. is a real pain and poses problems with accountability.

Honestly there are not that many features in Gitlab EE that are truly necessary for a corporate environment, so a GitLab-CE fork may be able to set itself apart by providing those. To me there are two hurdles:

• Legal uncertainties (do we need a clean room implementation to make sure Gitlab Inc doesn't sue for re-implementing the EE-only features into a Gitlab fork?)
• The enormous complexity of the GitLab codebase will make any fork, to put it mildly, a major PITA to maintain. 2,264 people work for GitLab FFS (with hundreds in dev/ops), it's indecent.

Honestly I think I'd be happy if forgejo supported gitlab-runner, that seems like a much more reasonable ask given the clean interface between runner and server. Maybe I should experiment with that...

Just live in a country which refuses to acknowledge cell broadcast exists, then you'll die in peaceful silence in the next national emergency while operators take several hours to to send 11 million unicast SMS.

Taps forehead

It's the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid "win" when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?

There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.

I don't play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you'll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn't feel like improvement.

Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.

In 2022 she announced she was diagnosed with a neurological disorder (SPS) and hasn't performed in public in 4 years. She delivered such an incredible vocal performance against all expectations.

Neither are a problem in the European countries that I'm aware of yet young voter turnout is catastrophic there as well. Some parties definitely have a hard anti-Israel line. I'd be happy to see a counterexample but I think only bitter disappointment lays ahead.

Young people are increasingly disengaged from the "traditional" democratic process, globally. Less voter turnout, but also way less participation in traditional politics (which 25 year olds have a party membership card anymore?)

Interestingly though, Gen Z isn't necessarily politically inactive; they are still being activists, engaging in political discourse, and are donating a larger average percentage of their income than Gen X/Y IIRC.

That's not to excuse the extremely shortsighted decision not to vote, but the problem is a lot larger than some practical barriers. I truly think there are strong and multifaceted cultural elements to the youths increasingly not responding to the traditional representative democratic systems in the way that generations who grew up on TV did. Gerrymandering is bad, but don't expect a hypothetical fix to bring zoomers to the voting centers.

All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we'll have to have it at some point. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn't make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company's part.

There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike's. Instead we're happy to shrug and move on when management doesn't even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn't sound particularly outlandish to me.

But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.

Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.

Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they're buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is "Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials".

Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.

If the dev is "the guy who presses the 'go live' button" then he's an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that "go live" button.

As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything... If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we'd be surprised).

I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but "blame" is not the same as "consequences" and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that "low likelihood, big impact" corner.
Because likely when the problem happens (again) they'll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.

What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer's recommendation).

To be annoyingly nitpicky, how is "unnecessary" defined in this context? Whitespace is usually "unnecessary" but I quite like it for readability.

I broadly agree with you though, the W3C spec changes things.

Clicks on <br>
Example is <br />

The actual thing that matters is that the / is ignored so (unlike with XML I believe) you can't self-close a non-void element by adding a trailing /. But "void elements should not have trailing slashes" is extrapolation on your part; the trailing slash improves readability and is kosher since it doesn't act as a self-close.

Corporate behemoths are going to keep doing what they do best.

Their ISO-whatever certification says they gotta get that kind of software, so they do. Whether it is found to actually increase business risk does not matter in the slightest, what matters is that a box is checked for the audit.

It's like Oracle or IBM, who did not contribute anything of value to the world since about 2005 and notoriously have some of the most aggressive licensing lawyers on the planet. But there are lots of companies out there who sort a product segment from Old to New and pick the first result on account of the fact that it's "established", "reputable" and "reliable", every other consideration be damned.

The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

You: Nooooooo it's religious!

The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we've always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.

Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn't pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

To complain about "religious persecution" of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is... certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.

Belgian here. The rules vary depending on the collective agreement the position falls under (hospitality workers' unions negotiate separately from construction workers' for instance).

Most people in most jobs are some variation of salaried (whether on a fixed or indeterminate duration contract) and the contract must be broken either upon natural termination (fixed contract or tryout period), with a predetermined amount of notice time, or due to an egregious fault (multiple warning notices, stealing from the employer, failing to pay the employee, etc.).

Contractors can be hired and fired willy-nilly, but they normally get paid enough for that not to be a concern. I'm not aware of "hourly" contracts in the way North-Americans usually mean them, AFAIK the number of weekly working hours must always be determined in advance. I just checked, in the hospitality industry there is obviously some regulated leeway for scheduling but the yearly average must be exactly 38 hours/week (hence why some Americans always complain that European waiters aren't kissing their boots every 5 seconds). Though there are many different collective agreements, each with enough different rules to keep the employment lawyers well fed.

"Odd jobs" are legal and not subject to those rules, but if you regularly employ someone for "odd jobs" then it is very likely that were they to challenge it in court, the judge would reclassify that as a salary position and rule according to that and even possibly fine the employer for unlawful employment. Generally speaking if someone can just walk away from a job with no repercussions in Belgium, I'd expect that it is either an illegal employment situation, some kind of odd/seasonal job, or a job where the employer just doesn't care enough to sue (if they were paying out the minimum wage, they certainly aren't going to get anything back by suing!).

It makes some sense contextually.

Purple and light purple are "NFP (left)" and "not NFP (left)". Socialists are traditionally red.

The two blues are "LR (right)" and "not LR (right)". Liberals are traditionally blue.

Yellow are center-right neolibs.

The independent left/right seats don't matter much because they will vote predictably with their political side on most issues, so since this will be a coalition Parliament there is not much point in outlining individual party affiliation (anyways the NFP is already a coalition of several parties).

Uh, they originally weren't paid. They were paid for.