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
I actually question if direct democracy would be good, after the amount of exposure to typical voters I’ve had, lol. Representatives can be questionable, but at least they know what they’re deciding on.
Autocracy is just completely awful and depressing, though. No doubt about that.
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.
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!”.
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)
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.
Since February the Uber Driver app has had a bug where elements from the “not in a trip right now” UI state render over top of the “in a trip and navigating” UI state.
It means that the user can’t see the text for the next turn, and also can’t see the direction of the next turn.
However there’s a workaround because they can see the distance to the next turn and once they’re close they can see which way route line goes.
No, replacing your HVAC or control systems will not magically fix the engineering issues present in your home/building. You will have to compensate for poor design indefinitely unless you want to demolish and start over.
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.
Because modern houses really don’t give any thoughts about airflow or natural cooling. Heck, even getting the AC compressor installed on a side of the house where it doesn’t get baked in the afternoon sun is too much to ask for.
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).
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.”
Sounds like the windows 10 ‘innovation’ called fast startup. Some genius decided instead of shutting down, let’s just log the user out and put the OS into standby… That’ll save a lot of boot time!
It’s universally hated by IT and made redundant by SSDs
Also it really fucks with some peripherals. I even had a motherboard with RGB lights (don’t judge me, it was actually cheaper than the “normie” version I originally wanted) that didn’t turn off the lights and the fans because of this shitty feature. I never got around to investigating who was doing things wrong between Microsoft and the manufacturer in this case though, I just got into the habit of holding shift while clicking the shutdown button.
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.
I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.
The router he got did have support for 802.11g, but for some reason I don’t remember we couldn’t turn it on. It was some integrated 5G router. The solution was just to use the printer’s built in AP to print. He has to disconnect from the internet to print things, but it still works.
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
I think you can use existing software to do that. If your store has wifi (even if you can't access it, I think), you can geofence an area and have some action (such as popping up a reminder app) trigger. I've not used software like this myself, but I remember people describing behavior like this at least on Android. If it might be useful to you, you should give it a search.
I have an app that's meant to schedule things, but I just use it as a checklist and preface each action with the location. So long as I check it (second home screen on my phone, so not a huge barrier), I'm usually good.