I watch too many videos on expensive guitar pedals I can’t afford.
I’m “on the bench” at the outsourcing company I work for and I am starting to seriously consider going into DSP programming just so I can work on doing this to effects controls.
I want to make knobs available for this this this and this parameter.
For anyone wondering what a document should look like, the DoD publishes that for anyone to read. Just search Derivative Classifier Training. Spoiler alert: this ain’t what a top secret document looks like.
Absolutely the latter. This is similar to how Snowden had access to all the stuff he leaked. He worked at a place that did contract work with the government and was mortified at all he had access to that he should have never been able to see.
There’s a shit ton of articles in the tech space about how companies keep fucking up with stuff like this. No reasonable expectation that the government and their contractors would do any better.
I mean, Amazon isn’t necessarily in the wrong for providing the service. It’s governments trusting a private company, with a history of collecting more data than they should, with sensitive data. It’s just stupid, really really, mind numbingly, stupid
Yea, that’s why I mentioned these companies are just doing it wrong. Governments have the same problems as private companies, in that they don’t really want to maintain their own cloud infrastructure, so they’ll use something like AWS
But for example they could host their own On-premises HSM and encrypt their GovCloud to a degree that it’s inaccessible to AWS
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
1000 DEFENSE PENTAGON
WASHINGTON , DC 20301 - 1000
JANUARY 2021
CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET - NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE
SUBJECT: RUSSIAN HACKINGS OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ASSETS
Throughout 2020, the United States received intelligence that Russian hackers have
infiltrated secure government databases and servers, including those located in The Pentagon, the
Intelligence Community, the US Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, the Commerce
Department, and Health and Human Services. Within the servers affected, 18,000 US
organizations had malicious code in their networks; 50 of them suffered major breaches. As of
the 13th of December, when this knowledge was made known to US officials, the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been working tirelessly to secure networks and
alleviate any vulnerabilities in the systems that were affected. Russia has denied responsibility
for such hackings.
This hacking poses a major threat to US cybersecurity, as it is one of the most significant
hackings in modern history. The Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and CISA have
urged Congress to take action against this emerging threat. In response, Congress has introduced
the following piece of legislation, named after an essential cybersecurity tool: A Bill to
C.A.P.T.C.H.A. (Create a Procedure to Combat Hacker Attacks). It is your responsibility as
Congress to come to a decision on this legislation before more damage is done.
Sounds like BS to me. Anyone can host PDFs on AWS and spoof US government agencies, look up C.A.P.T.C.H.A. Congress. No hits for it. Did Russia hack into US government servers? Probably. Nonetheless, this reads like a scare piece and not a legitimate communication from the DoD.
It also names no names and gives no details, which is odd for something intended to be so internal. Even more damning, it’s addressed to congress, which famously leaks like a sieve.
It’s interesting scrolling through the search results. Seems like a lot of schools, municipalities, and the Philippines have a problem with distinguishing between confidential and public.
Dual monitors are so 2000’s. It’s all about the single large ultra-wide monitor now. You get the benefits of a dual monitor setup without the line in the middle and the RSI neck pain issues.
Yep and in Windows 11 you now have premade window placements so if you hover the maximise button you can select e.g. “right hand, one third width” and another program for “left hand, two thirds width” etc. I use it all the time. I do have a second monitor on top of the ultra wide but mainly because it’s a special colour accurate monitor, for productivity I was doing fine with just the one big UW for years.
I bought an ultra wide at the beginning of COVID and when I started my new job, my employer gave me another one. Now I have two side by side (the newer one is in the middle) and my laptop to the side. Sometimes I struggle to open enough applications to fill all that space.
Have you ever been in an old house? Not old, like, on the Historic Register, well-preserved, rich bastard “old house”. Just a house that has been around awhile. A place that has seen a lot of living.
You’ll find light switches that don’t connect to anything; artwork hiding holes in the walls; sometimes walls have been added or removed and the floors no longer match.
Any construction that gets used, must change as needs change. Be it a house or a city or a program, these evolutions of need inevitably introduce complexity and flaws that are large enough to annoy, but small enough to ignore. Over time those issues accumulate until they reach a crisis point. Houses get remodeled or torn down, cities build or remove highways, and programs get refactored or replaced.
You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict. But the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems.
the fact that a system eventually becomes complex and flawed is not due to engineering failures - it is inherent in the nature of changing systems
it is not. It’s just that there will be some point, where you need significant effort to keep the systems structure up to the new demands {1}. I find the debt-metaphor is quite apt [2]: In your scenario the debt accumulates until it’s easier to start fresh. But you can also manage your debt and keep going indefinitily. But in contrast to financial debt, paying of technical debt is much less obvious. First of all it is pretty much impossible to put any kind of exact number on it. On the other hand, it’s very hard to tell what you actually should do to pay it off. (tangent: This is why experienced engineers are worth so much: (among other things) they have seen how debt evolves over time, and may see the early signs).
My 100 year old house has marks on the floor that look like it was worn from a door swinging. Very distinctive arc pattern. Like it was there for many years and was under frequent use.
The problem is that there’s no door there, just a wall, which is also the edge of a dormer…so if there were a door there it would just open out onto a sloping roof.
Every time I register it I contemplate why it’s there and wtf happened.
There was most likely a closet or other crawl space storage area there. My house has closets like that but luckily full height entries to them so we can actually step in. I’ve seen other houses with 1/2 or 1/3 height doors leading to under-roof crawl spaces for storage.
You can and should design for change, within reason, because all successful programs will need to change in ways you cannot predict
You’ve yourself here. You can not predict how it wull change. Which means that whichever design for change you’ve made, may just as well completely miss the future utilization
Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t design for change at all… Just saying.
As long as loose coupling, and separation of concerns are well tinkered into your application you minimise risks of breaking everything on a restructuring.
If you have for example shared state leaking everywhere into the program, your most probably doomed on the slitest changes.
I am not saying you’re wrong, but there are ways to mitigate the risks even without knowing what will happen in the future.
You can design it to be changeable at all, though.
In the simplest case that’s just proper abstractions. You can’t change details in the rest controller, if the persistence layer absolutely needs to call methods from the rest controller for no reason.
Finding the right balance between YOLO and YAGNI is almost impossible to get right. But you can at least try not to land on the extremes.
You can build your systems with as few assumptions as possible. The fewer assumptions you make, the less probable it is that any of your future assumptions will conflict with your previous assumptions. Your code will be built for change.
If your API call to some external system assumes the existence of a particular button in the UI, then your system isn’t built for change. Maybe you want to change this button? Then you need to go through all places in the code that relies on this particular button to see if it doesn’t conflict with any of their assumptions.
You’ll find light switches that don’t connect to anything
My house was built in the 1960s and had a switch like this. I was always curious what the switch was actually doing. One day, I was replacing all the light switches with smart switches, and discovered that the switch didn’t even had a load connected to it! It was literally doing nothing.
I was perplexed by this until I saw some old photos of the house, from the early 2010s when the previous owners bought it. It turned out that there were originally ceiling lights in the room (George Nelson bubble lamps, fitting the mid-century modern design of the house) that were removed at some point, and the switch was left behind. I had an electrician install recessed lights in most rooms, and they found old wires for the old lights. It wasn’t actually proper power cabling though… They had used speaker cables to power the lights!
I used to work summers as an apprentice electrician. The amount of crazy wiring I saw in old houses was (heh) shocking. Sometimes it was just that it was old. Real old houses sometimes just had bare wire wrapped in silk. … And a few decades later that silk was frayed and crumbling in the walls and needed replacing.
My current house was wired at a time when copper was more precious, so it was wired up and down through the house, with circuits arranged by proximity, not necessarily logic. When a certain circuit in my house blows the breaker, my TV, PC and one wall of the master bedroom all lose power. The TV and PC are not in the same room either.
in the 80s I helped gut a house that had aluminum wire with paper thin cloth wrapping. anywhere you touched it it would just disintegrate. blew my mind that the place hadn’t burned to the ground, especially all the dead rodents that had nested in the piles of fragmented cloth wrap.
My hallway has a light like this that was removed from what I can only guess was water damage and the accompanying upstairs bathroom renovation.
It’s astounding to me that they would go through the trouble of renovating the bathroom, but not have reinstalled the light so that the hallway isn’t a dark safety hazard… 😒
I feel this personally today. I just looked at some code in a module where it started out with nice, short functions with good names. I looked back at it today, and it now has a 180 line mega function full of nested conditionals and I don’t know how this happened.
So many developers don’t seem to understand the point of modularization and add lots of abstraction just for abstraction’s sake. It’s hella frustrating to take over a project like that.
We have those parts of code someone wrote years ago that is heavily abstracted for no reason at all other than that the developer thought it might be good. It’s just endless clicking on methods just to find no code at all and then you have to deep dive to figure out where stuff is actually computed.
Make it just one simple method call? Nah, it should be divided into 10 different abstract classes because whatever reason.
It’s also the most buggy part of the code because no one currently in the team dares to touch it.
It happens in English too — just think about how many people never learned how to properly use paragraphs, quotations, hyphens, parentheses and footnotes.
It’s just the human condition to attempt to communicate in known blobs without thinking about what you’re actually trying to communicate and how it can be most effectively done with the tools at hand.
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