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.”
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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?
Software doesn't age, it doesn't make sense for your computer to become slower as it becomes older. (some) Software just becomes more shitty and bloated with every release, which is what you're experiencing.
I think there's room for an exception here: operating systems or other software that handles a large number of files could bog down with use as the number and size of files grow with time.
Doesn't help with the bloated web and local webapps, though. Also, you'll need to choose from a set of desktop environments that were made with lower resource usage in mind. Also don't forget that while linux is often faster, a slow drive is still a slow drive and it can help only so much if you keep your OS and heavyweight software on a HDD.
Radioactive contamination: things don't transfer the property of radioactivity to everything they touch and/or irradiate. If that were the case, the entire Earth universe would have become radioactive gray goo long, long ago.
When radiation workers talk about "contamination," we mean radioactive compounds have physically transferred from one object onto/into another. For example, tools becoming contaminated with radioactive metal dust from equipment they touch, or clothing absorbing radioactive iodine gas from the air.
There is a form of radiation called neutron radiation that does make some formerly stable things (mainly metals) radioactive. This isn't something you're likely to encounter unless you're a specific type of radiation worker, however.
This is mainly gear-grindy to me because the reason we don't have gamma-sterilized produce in the US is completely unfounded fear that gamma irradiation "contaminates" everything it touches. So we could be having lovely fresh strawberries and peppers that last weeks longer than they usually do, but no, we can't because rAdIaTiOn ScArY 🙄
Physics/nuclear literacy in the general public around the world is lower than bad, even many scientists from other fields seem to be genuinely uninformed or misinformed, then posting wrong and often alarming interpretations in social media, which laymen give weight to because "it's coming from a scientist", never mind that their expertise may be in areas of biology or astronomy, nothing to do with the subject they are posting about. And they themselves might have gotten their bad info/interpretation from other figures in academia.
What about contamination in disaster sites like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Is that also mainly radioactive substances that we're spread around the area by air/water making the whole place dangerous to live or are other previously-non-radioactive objects radioactive now?
Yea basically the main contamination issue is that radioactive substances were spread around. Contamination of the surrounding area isn’t the only issue we have to deal with, nor is it the most serious, but it is generally is the most costly remediate.
The contamination problem is caused by radioactive matter spewed into the air and settling on the trees, buildings, ground etc… in the surrounding area.
The main remediation strategy is to remove everything in the surrounding area including the top ~3 ft or so of soil of the and haul it off to an underground landfill to slowly decay for at least a few hundred years safely separated from humans.
Space is hard. You're strapping something inside a big tube with basically directed explosives at the bottom, hoping it survives the trip, then subjecting it to constant radiation, huge temperature swings, and other brutal environmental factors like micrometeoroids. Just because we've been sending satellites and people up to space for nearly 70 years doesn't mean it's gotten easier; we're just better at knowing what to expect so we can test for it. Failures in rockets or satellites or even manned spacecraft are going to happen as much as we work to prevent them.
Oh fuck, improperly designed HVAC + changes made to a building that really fuck it up... There's no fixing that folks.
"This one room is always hot!" Well, there's no return, the door's always closed, and oh, someone replaced the door 20 years ago and now there's only a 1/4" gap between it and the floor. No, "turning up the fan speed" isn't going to fix it.
Do you have any suggestions for those interested in learning about HVAC design principles? I'm currently far enough along in experience where I've discovered I know very little because of how complex each part of the systems can be. I've ran into so many questionable setups doing inspections but would love to be able to look at a unit's specs and follow the runs making sure nothing immediately eye-catching is going on.
I have similar experience with Electrical and Plumbing, 99% of the time it's common mistakes made by installers or not following code properly. HVAC is near impossible to fully grasp because of the code terminology and arguments over best practices. Even something as simple as a range hood gets people confused because of the exhaust type versus code requirements.
Do your security updates and use different passwords for different sites.
I know it’s a pain in the ass, although it’s a much smaller one than you’re making it sound. But yes it is important, yes the “hackers” will come after you (or more accurately their automated systems will that come after everybody).
I do not literally build buildings. I design them, I document them for construction, I collaborate with other people who do actually build the buildings to make sure everything's on the level.
I remember my university orientation so vividly, because I was sat next to several people that were taking the "Game Development" degree. They spent the entire orientation talking about what consoles they brought with them.
Two weeks later, they were all gone. The course was arguably harder than my CS course, based on some of the required classes they had to take. I think the dropout rate over the full degree was ~90%. CS was high, sure, but barely anyone actually graduated with the Game Development degree.
Game dev is hard, and I'm yet to meet a game dev that didn't bemoan how utterly ruthless it was.
Medicine is not an exact science. Every human body is different and will react different to treatment or show different symptoms.
That your doctor couldn't diagnose you right away or a treatment is not working for you as wanted (or as it did for your neighbor) has most often nothing to do with the competence of the medical personel but with the fact, that your body is not a massproduced machine but 100% unique a änd individual biological mass.
that is only partly true, health system (here) also proposes to make false diagnoses for making money while the really needed treatment is underpayed or not payed at all or - in some cases - not payed at all if some facts change "after" the diagnosis so that the involved doctors spent time and money while afterwards not beeing payed at all. doctors doing false diagnoses (here) are mainly following the systems suggestion to skip real treatment but instead abuse patients.
That is a pretty big accusation you are putting on health care professionals.
Of course the cost often is a deciding factor on what treatment is possible. I've seen this in european hospitals as well, that we couldn't run certain diagnostics or give certain medications because they were too expensive and would mean the hospital spends more than it gets for the patient.
But what you are saying is that doctors and in consequence nurses, medical technicians and all kind of medical staff are all in on a conspiracy to MISDIAGNOSE ON PURPOUS (!!) causing bodily harm (again on purpous) to their patients in order to get payed by insurance?
Please provide reliable sources and proof for this accusation of significant criminal activity that is apparently the norm in your ("here" means the US I assume?) Health care system.
I understand that your health care system is wack. But the fish stinks from the head and that's usually not the medical staff providing your care, which you are accusing of serious crimes here.
The mRNA itself would behave the same from person to person. The immune response and specific cells that get "infected" can vary.
The immune system works to produce cells that can produce antibodies that bind well to the antigen, the specific part that they bind to can be different from person to person. The immune system tries to avoid antibodies that also bind to other things, but it's not perfect.
If the injection ends up getting into a vein, then the mRNA could infect heart cells, which then later get killed by killer T cells and can affect heart function in the short term. Or potentially, they could end up anywhere in the body before entering a cell.
But, the same applies to the actual virus, only to a higher degree.
When you have a live virus infection, the immune system has the full virus to target with antibodies, so the variance will be higher compared to people only getting a subset of the virus, and has more chances to overlap with things we don't want our immune system targeting.
And a real viral infection generates copies of the virus to spread to other cells instead of just producing proteins that the immune system will target. It's like getting another vaccine shot every time the period it takes to produce more virus copies passes, from the moment you get infected until your immune system manages to get the upper hand (though distributed very differently).
It makes sense to be wary of new things you're advised to put into your body, but it's also important to frame them correctly. It's not just risk of vaccine going wrong vs no vaccine means no risk. It's risk of vaccine going wrong plus risk of infection breaking through times risk of vaccinated infection going wrong vs risk of getting infected times risk of unvaccinated infection going wrong.
Sometimes your printer won't print in black and white if a color is out because it uses all of the colors to create a deeper black. Depends on the model though.
And some of them use yellow as a lubricant because yellow toner has a consistency close to water.
Also, please do not copy money or your butt. Trust me.
I remember hearing that money is n issue since it has some copy protection features, but your butt? What’s wrong with that? (Other than sitting on a piece of electronic equipment, lol.)
Something doesn't work in a particular piece of software. "Don't they test their program?". "All they need to do is X, obviously they don't know how to code!".
Known issues that don’t interfere with the critical user stories are usually not prioritized. They should be disclosed, and even better if workarounds are published, but fixing them usually isn’t in the budget.
Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff and focus on the golden path, which means comprehensive testing has to be skipped or bugs have to be explicitly left in.
Yes it's bad. Yes it sucks. But it's that or nothing gets released at all.
(I wish it wasn't that way. I try hard to make sure it isn't that way at my job, but for now that's how it is)
The speed of the conveyor belt does not impact the cycle time. No you cannot fucking slow down the conveyor belt to make it so you can work slower. You can’t speed it up to make people work faster. The speed of the fucking conveyor belt determines how long the things stay on the fucking conveyor belt. If it’s too slow things just stack up on it
Sorry, fucking line workers, managers, and executives in a factory…
An analogy to thinking faster conveyers means faster production is thinking faster speed limits on the highways leads to higher reproduction rates (or faster graduation or whatever).
One thing it will affect is how long a part takes to go from initial production to release. But there's a trade-off with how many products are "in fight" at once.
Not anymore. Companies paint cars in such a rushed and cheap way that you can find examples all over of huge differences in paint thickness on new cars.
90% of an actor's work is preparation (memorization is just a tiny part of this- a big part of it is studying the scenes and figuring out the character's realizations and decisions)
By the time you're performing, you shouldn't have to think about the scene or dialogue at all, but just connect with your scene partner and let them guide you through it.
Acting isn't about you. You're not important, it's about the moment that's in between you and the people you're performing with.
I can't "blow up" an image you screenshotted from a video your sister posted on facebook and make it look any better then a pile of angry pixel garbage. I can, however, remove the pause icon from your garbage picture.
Weirdly enough, that not all newspapers are the same company.
I work for a free weekly newspaper. We get calls frequently from people who want to subscribe or cancel subscriptions to other papers. This means they have to actively be looking in the entirely wrong place. The correct phone number for subscription services is IN those other papers or on their website.
We also get calls from people asking us to put their event or news in our paper, oh and “can you also put it in these three other papers?” (Three competitors who are entirely seperate companies).
Even weirder is people who try to request songs on the radio by calling us. We are not, in fact, a radio station…
Factors of safety are defined to deal with the probability of things going wrong in a manner that is acceptable to society based on a body of knowledge and experimentation. You can't just define your own.
Also, just because something is designed for a specific load doesn't mean it will fail at that load.
What if it doesn't have the bit that goes between your legs?
I bought a seat like that because I understand that the normal bike seats put pressure on that area in a way that can lead to impotence. I haven't tried the seat yet because I'm lazy, so I don't know how comfortable it is. Though even if it isn't comfortable, it's a trade-off.
It's a very small percentage of the population that is affected by bike seats without center channels. It may help you, it probably won't harm you.
A slight warning there is some concern that the cut out collapses as the saddle ages, causing the padding to pinch your anatomy rather than support it. The less pressing on your saddle the less of a concern this is.
The best place to have padding while riding your bike is against your anatomy. Wear a chamois if you're planning on riding longer distances. You can get them as either the classic spandex or as a pair of padded briefs you wear under some shorts.
The most important part to bike saddle fitting is thus:
A saddle designed to support the width of your sit bones
A saddle designed for the posture you ride your bike with (a euro style city bike needs a much different saddle than a keirin race bike)
What you're taught in school is not the whole picture. Doesn't matter if it's maths, history, french or even a master's degree. After you finish school, there's still a shitload to learn. A curriculum is always a finite amount, so you have to make concessions. What makes it into the curriculum and what not is sometimes obviou or mandatory, but other times it's purely based on personal preferences or even internal politics.
You need to take the cap off your bottle because if you discard or lose it on the floor it with the cap on, it's a huge tripping hazard that WILL be fatal incase of an emergency. It's not because the festival or venue wants to sell more drinks.
Why is a bottle with a cap on riskier than a bottle without a cap on?
Also, I'm not sure what you're referring to, so could you please clarify? Are you saying that there are venues that ask people to open their bottle caps and keep the bottle and the cap separately?
Because the call still being on gives the shape strength. Instead of harmlessly crushing into the ground, it holds the shape long enough that it will hold YOUR entire weight on one foot in a way you can't balance on before you fall.
By the time the liquid or air is able to get out of the bottle, because the cap is on, the damage will have been done.
In the middle of people frolicking dancing jumping pumping thumping moshing surfing the bottle with a call on might as well become a looney tunes or Mario kart ananas peel
There are different screen sizes. Your monitor isn't the standard universal size of every other monitor, some are larger and some are smaller. Your phone isn't the same width and height as every other phone. The website will look different on different devices.
Which actually means it would probably end up being a multi-stage multi-day engagement that would require cross discipline techniques and for me to commit multiple felonies across several different, state lines, over telecommunications lines, international borders, not to mention how many three letter agencies, all so you can see who he's fucking now.
The pharmacy is not where the people that stock the front of the store work. They are very busy trying to fill hundreds of prescriptions and deal with doctors, patients and insurance companies.
Don't ask them where to find the cosmetics that are on sale. We don't even know. We are not a service desk.