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).
I'm probably missing a joke here, but irrecoverably as in they most likely needed another computer to fix it: In this case, create a new startup floppy disk - there was no hard drive, after all.
The computer is inaccessible, and if you did that, the best way to fix it, while also avoiding any other potential issues stemming from that, is just to reinstall the thing.
One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
That makes me wonder what designs they were considering. The ones I’ve seen use a sort of pinch motion under metal hood. Maybe the idea there is to require dexterous forelimbs, rather than any intellectual ability.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “100 is the middle score of those sampled”. A subtle, but important difference.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
Glancing at the eclipse while it’s in totality is not going to give you permanent damage. Now if you stare at it until totality is over and the sun is on full blast again…
Yes, get yourself eclipse glasses, a pinhole projector, a floppy disk, digital camera or whatever allows you to observe the eclipse safely – no phenomenon is worth risking your eyesight over. However, the consensus is that you can watch the sun flares without protection during totality. The totality lasted 0 to 4 minutes depending on your location.
Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Total eclipses aren’t rare, but them being in an accessible location and not just over some random place in the ocean is. I looked this up the other day, and any one particular location on Earth will see a total eclipse once every 350 years or so.
Except they aren’t just visible from a single location, so almost every time they are over an accessible place on land. Not for the whole thing, sure, but visible all the same.
This might be helpful for reference. It’s maps of where the next 50 years worth of total eclipses fall. The first one that isn’t really visible by people is 2039 in Antarctica. There’s a few like that. Other than that, there’s at least an island you could go to for it, and see one every few years. Eclipses being totally unavailable to view is actually far more rare than seeing one :)
Same with shooting without eye/ear pro. I dunno about other folks but I use my eyes and ears a lot, and I’d hate to miss out on music and color the rest of my life because I thought I would have a transcendent experience blowing them out for a minute. 😬
If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines (well, for this purpose) and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
I've seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn't be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn't require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
I code maybe 2 times a year at my job. Every other time I am doing some sort of paperwork to verify features work, or I am using fucking excel. It’s incredible.
I feel you. I spent 48 hours this week streaming shows, waiting for a possible call to some in. I’m sure that’s some people’s dream job, but it drives me nuts that I have to be on site for no reason. I like the feeling I get from actually working and the sense of accomplishment it gives you
I love working from home. I game all day. But man I miss my service industry jobs for how much satisfaction they could give but the trade off is high levels of stress.
Don’t forget refinement where you describe your plan to add the “height: 80pt” rule (literally what the client wants), and then poker planning where you say it will be 1 point and the lead dev says 3 points and the other dev asks what is a point anyway leading to a time consuming discussion, and then the task gets scheduled for not next sprint but the sprint after, and then you do it and push your code, make a pull request, then during code review it is suggested you use tailwind instead but your project isn’t using tailwind because it’s some legacy PHP monster started by a junior who was just learning PHP, so now there’s a POC to consider using tailwind meanwhile the lead dev (who has a background in QA) designs a reusable “height engine” which uses rabbitmq to alert all worker nodes (there’s only one) about any changes to the height rules in mongodb. The height engine doesn’t include units so you have to hardcode if the client is expecting rem or pt. The product owner asks you in sprint review why this ended up taking a week when you said 1 point initially and the team agreed on 3. A team decision is made that all future CSS rule changes require a POC prior to implementation.
!screenshot of two comments from the video “Expert”, both from seven years ago, @argentorangeok6224 wrote “As an engineer, I eventually learned to just agree with them and then did whatever actually needed to be done- knowing they’d never even know the difference.”, @Alfosan2010 wrote “This is not comedy, this is corporate life”
Don’t talk them down, but also don’t follow insane shit
The main thing I hate about inflated expectations in job postings and interviews is I keep expecting to do interesting and challenging work. And the jobs keep being like “make a powerpoint and summarize your results to someone that does not know what a number is”.
I’d say April Showers is a great porn name, but these days you gotta value search engine optimization, which is why my porn name is “Best Airfryer 2024”
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