I can imagine thinking it’s be funny in the early stages where things wouldn’t really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn’t actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
I was interviewing a couple of months ago, and one of the in-person technical interviews wanted me to write, on a whiteboard, a function that took in a timestamp and calculated the angle between the hands on a clock set to that time. After I did that they wanted me to reverse engineer the linux “tac” command for files of unknown size that I could not store the contents of locally, resulting in probably the most sinful piece of code I’ve ever written.
What really gets my goat about it, is that out of all my interviewing companies, they were by far at the bottom of the list, and was really only interviewing to get negotiating power. My company had worked pretty closely with them, so I was well aware of the poor treatment and absurdly high turnover rate, so they were really in no place to be picky. My top choice company’s hardest question was one of those basic college programming math questions where the answer is “use the modulus operator”.
A lot of the time it’s just an ego trip for the interviewer to show off how clever they are and to gloat over the interviewee when they can’t figure out some really hard problem. This actually fits perfectly with the company having a toxic working environment. When you see these kinds of questions in interviews it’s usually an indication that these aren’t the kinds of people you’d want to be working with.
People speak weird all the time, and LLMs are trained on people. Some aren’t native speakers, some just like to omit verbs, nouns, or tenses when it seems obvious and they want to be expedient, some just do it for fun or laziness (see, l33t speak and or early texting, typos).
LLMs are trained on human input, so of course it on occasion uses our bad habits. Thinking like your comment suggests is what gets people who really wrote their own stuff in trouble, because people think they can identify stuff like this more than they actually can.
You do agree that it’s a weird way of saying it though, which is all I was making fun of. It’s similar verbiage an AI would use. I get it, but lighten up lol
When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it’s just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it’ll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn’t work, because they aren’t paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don’t know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
One user during the night shift tested every possible key combination on the computer to see what would crash our software, so it became a race between the programmer locking the thing down and the user finding new holes. It ended when the user resorted to sitting on the keyboard and breaking the keyboard that got their bosses involved who told the user to knock it off.
The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you’ve done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn’t even have much of an IT background, but man he’s good at breaking things.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
That’s a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we’re all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I’m going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I’m seeing a lot of “it’s technically possible” but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I’m still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz’s contact info? We could always just ask him.
I’ve read most of folklore.org and do not recall any such story. In fact, how do you even “drag the computer to the waste basket” as the first/only icon would be the System floppy and afaik they’ve never had / still don’t have a “computer icon”. 🤔
You honestly couldn’t pay me enough to use MacOS so I didn’t know there wasn’t a “computer icon” but I love that detail. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that whole anecdote is fictitious.
I’m an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver.
Ah, Fedora, that brings back memories. We used to call it RootHat back in the day when it was still RedHat. It was what all the first-time Linux users used before they graduated to Debian or Slackware. They would use root as they day to day account, hence the name.
Havent used it in forever. Is it still as big a pile of shit as it was in the 90’s ?
I’ve been using it since Fedora Core 7 back in like 05 or something. It’s pretty solid. I use mate rather than gnome, but otherwise it’s an excellent, very FOSS, choice.
I wonder if the first attempt was simply dragging that Mac System Software to the trash. Not “the computer icon”, but it’s possible the anecdote was/is slightly misremembered by John
Seems like a simple folley, the person I responded to said it was a floppy (it’s two layers of “mesh”?) and couldn’t remember the computer icons. Details get fuzzy, I had no idea and was curious so I just looked it up. I’ve got no horse here.
The point of the trash was that nothing happened until you emptied it. And the OS was loaded into memory so you could eject the OS disk so it wasn’t actively using those files. I don’t think even dragging System to the trash and emptying it would have done anything except prevent you from booting with that System disk.
I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
The original Macintosh had the OS on a floppy disk. So there wasn’t a “Computer” on the desktop. And if you dragged the Macintosh OS disk to the trash it would just eject it so you could put in another disk. (Unless you were lucky enough to have an external floppy drive.)
QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It’s the “skill-less labor” of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
Isn’t it, haha. And yet I know a place that outsources it to slavic countries to save cash. I guess they’re tech savvy, but as contract workers it’s hard to say their dedicated to their craft.
Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn’t take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him…
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?
Apologies for being so sketchy on the details but I really can’t remember too many of the specifics. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that his family name came first, because that’s fairly straightforward. I think the author might have been from an east or southeast Asian culture? I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name. I don’t want to keep guessing on more details about how the naming conventions were different because I’m probably going to get it wrong, I have fairly low confidence in what I remember from it.
I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name
Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms
Surnames were introduced in Turkey only after World War I, by the country’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as part of his Westernization and modernization programs. Common people can be addressed semi-formally by their given name plus the title Bey or Hanım (without surname), whereas politicians are often known by surname only (Ecevit, Demirel).
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