You’re writing extremely bad code if that’s the case and you need to refactor. The point of a function is to return a value. Anything else is just there to waste cycles and make the code less readable. You should also never use else statements for arithmetic due to their massive relative overhead. Your processor can do multiple arithmetic operations in the time it takes to process one if statement, and don’t get me started on people who demand you use nested if even though switch statements are way faster and leagues more readable.
Those who are the most wrong have the strongest conviction
EDIT: I make a lot of edits because unlike you, I care about the quality and accuracy of what I write. You’re going to spend like an extra 10 minutes tops writing for something that will be read by thousands for years to come. It’s basic courtesy.
Who’s suggesting that people are using if statements for arithmetic?
The only time that you can feasibly replace an if statement with arithmetic is if it’s a boolean, but frankly that’s an edge case… Also if you’re not writing in rust or c or whatever then don’t worry as the interpreter will run a huge amount of branches for every line of code (which is what all your nested ifs, switches, gotos, returns etc. will compile down to anyway)
god forbid anyone do multiple non-nested if blocks one after another in the same function as the function does multiple different things or (horror of horrors) put an if-else inside a loop
also unless your compiler is completely and utterly brain dead (as is the case with Python, Java, C#, and most other languages that only pretend to be compiled compile to bytecode) a switch and a series of elif statements will compile to the exact same sequence of machine instructions. you can check on godbolt.org if you don’t believe me.
modern compilers are insanely smart. as an example, this loop counts the number of 1’s in the binary representation of a number:
<span style="color:#323232;"> </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">while </span><span style="color:#323232;">(n)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> n </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">=</span><span style="color:#323232;"> n </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">&</span><span style="color:#323232;">amp; (n </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">- </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">1</span><span style="color:#323232;">); </span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;">// clear the least significant bit set
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> count</span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">++</span><span style="color:#323232;">;
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span>
LLVM will recognize that this is what you are trying to do and emit a single POPCNT instruction on x86, eliminating the loop entirely.
also how would you even use if statements for arithmetic at all? you aren’t thinking of that one joke isEven() function, are you?
It’s much more readable when you use else depending on the checks. You can still use return in an else block.
def Allowed()
<span style="color:#323232;"> if name == "Octopus1348": return True
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> elif name == "Bobert": return True
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> else:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return "You are not allowed to use this script."
</span>
Fun fact I learned today - you know how when there’s a compound conditional, the interpreter stops once the result is known? (Eg, if the left side of an and is false, it’s false so it doesn’t bother checking the second condition)
Apparently, visual basic doesn’t do this thing every other language I know of does… It might be a debug only thing for the convenience of the depreciated ide I’m forced to use, but I did a null check && called a function on it if it’s not null, and it blew up
I pride myself on my ability to change to a new programming language and make progress on day one, but vb is truly the most disgusting POS language I’ve ever seen. From syntax to jarring inconsistencies in language design, it’s just gross
Are you serious? It’s one of the most basic and common if statements that exist.
If( foo != null && foo.isBar() )
That’s what we’re talking about. Looking before you leap.
I take issue with the whole “too clever” argument fundamentally (for a number of reasons), but this isn’t some fancy quality of life feature. This is as simple as it gets
Scroll on down to the first common example there champ.
If you really think that’s being “too clever” I don’t know what to tell you… A big reason I think that argument is bullshit is because writing simple code isn’t a goal (what does that even mean?) - readability is a big one, and breaking up every part of every conditional would just lead to unreadable spaghetti
Also, take a look at the languages being discussed. This is a long settled question - every language I’ve ever used has this.
Including VB, I found out it uses AndAlso…so gross
several languages that are still in use have eager evaluation.
I’m a dumb programmer. The more I need to keep implicit behaviour in mind, the higher the probability I’m writing bugs. Short circuit evaluation is an optimization technique IMO and shouldn’t be relied upon for control flow.
The aggressive tone you’re using is completely unnecessary and immature, so I’ll refrain from responding any further. Have a nice day.
You’re the one who started this by criticizing my knowledge and my coding practices, in response to me sharing one very specific example of why I believe VB is a bad language
I held off because I thought you must’ve misread it and we’d laugh and maybe talk about language design… But no, you confirmed you just came at me with a bad take extremely dismissively
Postgres handles NoSQL better than many dedicated NoSQL database management systems. I kept telling another team to at least evaluate it for that purpose - but they knew better and now they are stuck with managing the MongoDB stack because they are the only ones that use it. Postgres is able to do everything they use out of the box. It just doesn’t sound as fancy and hip.
I know this is just a joke, but I’ve recently become a project manager for the first time. I’m open to tips and suggestions.
I’ve really enjoyed it and have worked hard to give my developers everything they need as soon as possible. Otherwise I try to stay out of the way and do my best to shield them from the pressure that’s being applied on me to achieve deadlines.
I’d agree that anyone can ask for project updates, but I really do work hard to balance client demands with c-suite expectations and the realistic outcomes described by my developers.
You seem like a person who wants to try and do well and be a good manager. So be very careful of burnout, because the constant tension between doing what is right for your team and meeting upper-management expectations can drive you crazy. It did me anyway, which is why I don’t manage anymore.
Take regular vacations and actually disconnect from work when you do. Try to do the same for at least 1 or 2 weekends per month. Being organized is important and helps with the job and the burnout, but there’s a thin line between “keeping notes in Obsidian keeps me focused” and “my entire 2nd job is now maintaining Jira tickets.”
Organization is for you, keep it for you, and don’t let your organizing become a part of your “public api” or else it’ll become another avenue for status updates that you’re obliged to maintain. Turning your notes and private charts into data for upper management is why you compile special reports, just for them.
Really helpful. Yeah, it’s already invaded my vacations and time off, but I’m working to create better boundaries moving forward. The problem is that there’s literally no one else who can answer certain questions or resolve certain problems and everything will grind to a halt if I don’t deal with it in a timely manner.
I mean, if they want more coverage, they can hire more staff. At some point, just as you stand up for your reports, you have to be willing to say no when it comes to you.
Yeah man, that’s how it starts. You become the guy to answer question and before you know it you will be assigning tickets to yourself because nobody else can solve them.
Please be careful, I would not recommend that to anyone after living though it once.
This might sound twisted, but something that helped me take more time to myself was when a guy who was “the only one who could answer certain questions” with something like 30 years of experience in our field dropped dead of a heart attack at home. We figured out what we needed to figure out soon enough and his position wasn’t filled for a year because five or six of us took up the tasks he was in charge of… My point being, no one is irreplaceable. Disconnect when you’re not at work.
Do questions really need to be answered outside of work time? Are blockers identifiable in advance so a plan can be put in place. Not many things need to be done outside work hours and team members can cover vacation if something desperately needs to be done.
Yes and no? My team is scattered around the US, so if my east coasters hit a snag early, I genuinely don’t want them in a holding pattern until I get around to it. Same for my coworkers on the west coast.
Some of the intensity of it has been that I assumed control of a team that was already severely mismanaged and had missed it’s initial deadlines by a month.
Of course that manager got promoted to an area that better suited his skills and I was asked to step in and try to right the ship. Our final deadline is today and we only have minor and cosmetic bugs left (that we know of).
We have plenty of new features to add moving forward, but with the project back on track and the foundation established, I’ll be able to set better deadlines for everyone’s work life balance.
I will probably always have some temptation to pull long hours for my team scattered around the country, but it becomes much less urgent now that we’re past our insane crunch.
Maybe it’s hopelessly naive of me and the next deadline will also become a crunch, but I have some control over those future dates, so I hope it will be less of an issue.
Just being forced to talk about how it’s going and what’s blocking can be helpful, so I’m glad you’re questioning for to be more useful, not doing a little rubber-ducking isn’t all bad.
I always thought project managers were useless until I got a good one. Then I realized the issue was that most I’ve dealt with were as useful as this parrot
The key of a good PM is to know their job is to ensure you can do yours. My good PM had that internalized and his only goal was to remove obstacles for us… glorious times
So if I were to say, “I’m playing phone tag with the vendors liaison because all he does is poorly repeat what I ask to others inside the company”, my good PM would get on the phone with the vendor and get a list of contacts so I could skip the crappy middle man
Another time I said, the network folks don’t agree with the security folks on how to proceed. He would get everyone in the same room and get all ducks in a row, then let me know what the decision was.
If I said, I’m wasting half my day asking for availability to book meetings, he would ask who I needed to talk to and book everything himself
Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.
Be transparent with the business’s goals and frustrations you are facing. There’s an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.
Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.
Was working on a team of 4 people, each with a different skillset (frontend, backend, design, CMS). The project manager basically just told us what we have to do in which order, without explicitly telling us who or how someone should do it, which i think everyone appreciated and worked really well for everyone.
In my last role there was no project management, and the Boss just assigned random tasks to anyone, regardless of his skillset. One week i had to work on jQuery UI from 10 years ago, next week on some exotic server language with barely any documentation, no examples and no stack overflow help. His philosopy was “fuck your skills and preferences, everyone has to know everything!”.
Before I quit there was some meeting how everyone must now learn video editing, because the product documentation (still with IE 6 screenshots) was not updated anymore but instead we would teach and explain the product in videos “because tiktok is very popular nowdays”.
Front end is hard. Slapping together some form elements, xhr requests, and DOM updates is easy. Building a usable, consistent UI, that makes proper user of the backend isn’t. On top of that, every jackass thinks they get it because they’re a user, so you get unsolicited suggestions from everywhere.
Source: front end devs sobbing in the cubicle next to me.
Ohhh, that touched a deep well of hatred. My first engineering job was full stack and we had a highly modified Bootstrap front end. I’d build the thing they wanted, and the designers would get looped in for QA and insist that various pieces had to look like their little wireframe down to the pixel. I mean look, it’s easy right?
I asked why they are insisting on constantly going against the standards that had been adopted company-wide. Did it stop? Why no! Did I get a suit down with my boss? Why yes!
He is/was a cool guy and saw my perspective but also gave me precious advice on how to survive.
@towerful I mainly program in Go, so when I see all that extra software I notice how much easier it is when I get to just rely on the Go runtime. It does a lot of the heavy lifting done here, but the resulting code is not as clean. Actually just today I read through Mastodon’s code to track down a bug in my in-progress ActivityPub service (in Go) and found the Ruby really easy to navigate!
It probably wasn’t a big deal when it was a niche project until Twitter imploded. Then all the public instances got overloaded with new users and the limits became obvious.
A better design is Lemmy which is written in Rust so it has far more scalability. It’s compiled and because it’s tokio / actix based, it can also do a lot more stuff asynchronously so it’s not spawning thousands of threads to cope with concurrent requests.
Just so long as it’s in dark mode. Light backgrounds burn my eyes after spending so much time in my mom’s basement subsisting only on hotpockets and grits straight off Natalie Portman.
How many times did I push at 2am so I could go home, get to the freeway entrance, realized I fucked something up, sighed, and turned around to go back and fix it…
(This was like 1999, we didn’t have access to Perforce from home).
After a year or so I realized I should just develop the willpower to check it in after sleeping on it.
This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.
Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.
Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.
If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.
I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.
“Brave New World” warned against genetic engineering, but that’s turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields.
I was still a teen when I read the book, but that wasn’t really my take from it when I read it. We are still far away from genetically designing human babies. And you also overlooked the part about oppression/control via distractions such as drugs and entertainment.
I haven't read it in a while, but I kind of took the genetic engineering as a metaphor for being forced into the role/ class the ruling body wants you to be in
My takeaway from BNW was a warning against blindly embracing a society built only on good feelings and numbing anything that forces us to confront pain. The oppression was more or less a side effect of it.
Everyone in the upper classes were okay that lower classes were being oppressed because they all were just as happy thanks to Soma. The pain of the outsiders didn’t mean anything because they “chose” to live like that.
Genetic engineering was just a plot device to explain how the classes were chosen.
The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn't at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you'd rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that's how I felt.
On the other other hand, maybe we only understand the dangers of the Torment Nexus and use it responsibly because science fiction authors warned techy people who are into that subject about how it could go wrong, and the people who grew up reading those books went out of their way to avoid those flaws. We do seem to have a lot more of the technologies that sci-fi didn’t predict causing severe problems in our society.
But this is exactly contrary to my point, a science fiction author isn't qualified or motivated to give a realistic "understanding" of the Torment Nexus. His skillset is focused on writing stories and the stories he writes need to contain danger and conflict, so he's not necessarily going to interpret the idea of the Torment Nexus in a realistic way.
I think you don’t understand what motivates a lot of science fiction authors. Sure, there are a lot of science fiction novels that are really just science themed fantasy, but there are also a lot of authors that love real science and are trying to make stories about realistic interpretations of its potential effects. To say that science fiction authors don’t care about interpreting the Torment Nexus in a realistic way misses the entire point of a lot of really good science fiction.
[Sarcasm] Unlike companies, which are apparently altruistic organizations that exist for the betterment of humanity! It's all those fools who keep yelling "companies exist to make money" who are wrong. Yeah, that must be it. Tech companies charge because they're good, whilst various writers give away some, much, most, or all of their work because they're evil! Sharing is DEATH, kids!
Sorry, I went off a bit there because I'm frustrated at how committed you are to your bad ideas. Also textbooks also have to be sold, at least here in the US where many are (were?) tailored to the anti-education pro-horsecrap preferences of Texas.
Side thing: I'm becoming increasingly convinced that FaceDeer as an account/persona/whatever exists specifically to be mildly irritating. Is that true? Would you admit it if it were?
Nope. Isaac Asimov was a biochemist, why would he be particularly qualified to determine whether robots are safe? Arthur C. Clarke had a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics, which technology was he an expert in? Heinlein got a bachelor of arts in engineering equivalent degree from the US Naval Academy, that's the closest yet to having an "understanding of technology." Which ones did he write about?
Those were a list of authors who were pretty good at getting the science in their sci fi right. They talked to scientists working on the fields they wrote about. They wrote “hard” sci fi
You cannot judge their competence by their formal education
Well, I also am "pretty good" at getting the science right when I write sci fi. Makes me just as qualified as them, I guess.
The problem remains that the overriding goal of a sci fi author remains selling sci fi books, which requires telling a gripping story. It's much easier to tell a gripping story when something has gone wrong and the heroes are faced with the fallout, rather than a story in which everything's going fine and the revolutionary new tech doesn't have any hidden downsides to cause them difficulties. Even when you're writing "hard" science fiction you need to do that.
And frankly, much of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein's output was very far from being "hard" science fiction.
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)
If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.
24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over “Confederate US AU” script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of “Nazi US AU”.
Heck, you don’t even need fiction. Chile’s cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you're right, it's probably been written many times - I'm not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there's a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush.
No it isn’t. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.
Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
We absolutely would be, but not because they make people stupid. All they do is exploit vulnerabilities in our shitty brains that have always been there.
I guess it makes people stupid all in the same way, while they used to be stupid all in their own unique ways. The morons have organized, synchronized, and become weaponised.
Somehow I feel like they're also dumber though - if everyone's an idiot in their own way at least they're original.
And just because a sci-fi writer can make up a horrifying story of the Torment Nexus gone wrong doesn't make it a bad idea. Making up horrifying stories of things going wrong is their job. They've make up stories of how things go horrifyingly wrong while doing research into a cure for Alzheimer's disease, doesn't mean curing Alzheimer's disease is a bad thing.
When they imagine a new technology they aren’t going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome.
“Cyberpunks” weren’t warning us about the internet - they were warning us about the corporations who will control it, and through it, us. We are trying explicitly not to communicate on that medium by using Lemmy (that medium encompasses Reddit, X, the various properties of Meta and Alphabet)
Science fiction mentioning a technology, even centering around it, doesn’t mean it’s saying the technology is universally bad. The author highlights the dangers, but the tech itself is almost always portrayed as neutral. It’s the people who use it to nefarious ends that science fiction is warning us about.
Like the people who would seek to profit off of the Torment Nexus.
The concept of the “Torment Nexus” is a placeholder for any technology specifically described as dystopian or otherwise contributing to suffering in fiction, such as mass surveillance, mind control technology, and so on. The meme refers to modern-day corporations missing the point of the fiction, and creating said “Torment Nexus” as something they view as “cool” and “futuristic”. In some cases, the companies are self-aware enough to not pretend that their creation is anything other than dystopian, but in many cases they try to sell the new technology to the public as a good thing despite that very tech being described as dystopian already.
NO cyberpunk was afraid of the fucking internet. The problem has always been the economic mode of production underlying it, which is unironically dystopian. Also the tech world we live in is PRETTY fucking dystopian, get your head out of your ass.
Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought “Fahrenheit 451” was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.
“Brave New World” struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).
It’s been too long since I read “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.
I don’t see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as “neutral” demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.
I stopped reading when you said the goal of tech companies is to solve real world problems. The only goal of tech companies is to create products that will make them a profit. To believe anything else is delusional. That’s kind of why our society is crumbling and the planet is dying.
Yes, but by other companies. Those problems are not created intentionally in order to create and exploit a market, they’re just consequences of those other companies doing business. Pretty much the only example of companies creating problems so that they can sell solutions I can think of is free-to-play games (e.g. make game excessively grindy on purpose to sell boosters). Some of that scummy monetization is now creeping into real-world products, with things such as subscription-based heated seats that are installed in your car regardless but disabled unless you pay up, but the vast majority of products and services on the market address problems that were not created by their manufacturers/providers.
Tech companies … goal isn’t just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems.
This is so naively wrong it’s laughable. Ever heard of profit motive?
Speaking of Fahrenheit 451, weren’t there seashells mentioned in that book? Little devices you could stuff in your ears to play music? And those ended up being uncannily similar to the wireless earbuds we have today?
There are some good ideas in this comment, but I’d like to counter that the cautionary tales are an instigating factor in implementing safety for new tech. The wealthy few shouldn’t get to blindly and unilaterally decide the future of all through careless and unrestricted development of world-altering tech.
We have all of those things and the dystopic predictions of the authors who predicted them haven't come remotely true. All of these examples prove my point.
We have autonomous weaponized drones and they aren't running around massacring humanity like the Terminator depicted. Frankly, I'd trust them to obey the Geneva Conventions more thoroughly than human soldiers usually do.
We have had mass surveillance for decades, Snowden revealed that, and there's no totalitarian global state as depicted in 1984.
We've had nuclear weapons for almost 80 years now and they were only used in anger twice, at the very beginning of that. A good case can be made that nuclear weapons kept the world at large-scale peace for much of that period.
Various companies have made attempts at "Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverses" over the years and they have generally failed because nobody wanted them and freer alternatives exist. No need to ban anything.
Netflix's Squid Game is not a "real-life" Squid Game. Did you watch Squid Game? That was a private spectacle for the benefit of ultra-wealthy elites and people died in them. Deliberately and in large quantities. Netflix is just making a dumb TV show. Do you really think they'd benefit from massacring the contestants?
"MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” - ok, let's see how long that lasts when there are competitors that don't do that.
"Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives" - firstly, please show me a method for determining the presence or absence of a soul. Secondly, show me why these facsimiles are inherently "bad" somehow. People keep photographs of their dead loved ones, if that makes you uncomfortable then don't keep one.
Each and every one of these technologies were depicted in fiction over-the-top unrealistic ways that emphasized their bad aspects. In reality none of them have matched those depictions to any significant degree. That's my whole point here.
So tell me, what part of their creation was “solving real-world problems” beyond playing to the desires of autocrats and control freaks? What part of their creation was a net positive to society? Or are you happy to live in a world of autonomous drone strikes on weddings and kindergartens, mass surveillance, a thermonuclear sword of damocles hanging over all of humanity, and so on?
Autonomous weaponized drones are useful for fighting wars more effectively, and with fewer lives placed at risk using manned platforms. You may not like that wars are fought, but they will be fought regardless. Drones solve problems that arise in war-fighting.
Likewise, mass surveillance solves problems faced by intelligence agencies. It's also useful for things like marketing studies, medical studies, all kinds of such things. And again, you may not like some of these problems being solved, but they're real-world problems that are being solved.
Nuclear weapons have kept the world's superpowers at bay from each other. They've stopped "world wars" from happening. They don't stop all wars from happening, but there haven't been any major direct clashes between nuclear-armed powers since their invention.
Those metaverses and reality TV shows are entertainment. They are aimed at entertaining people.
MoviePass' ad system is an effort to monetize entertainment, allowing for more to be made.
AI facsimiles of dead relatives are for psychological purposes - helping people work through grief, helping people relive fond memories, providing emotional support, and so forth.
There you go, real-world problems they're all there to solve. And none of them are dystopic nightmares as depicted by the science fiction scenarios you listed, which is the main point I'm making here.
Science fiction authors got their predictions wrong. They spun nightmare scenarios because that's what makes for compelling drama and increased sales of their books or shows. They're not good bases for real-world decision-making because they're biased in incorrect directions.
It’s not. The default sorter does that, because that way it can sort pretty much anything without breaking at runtime. You can overwrite it easily, though. For the example above you could simply do it like this:
Management: Well we lost 8 billion dollars but we still don’t have any extra money for backups or remote reimaging or vdi, but we will buy you 700 plane tickets to go to each computer and boot it into safe mode, also you’re fired
Management: Our consultants don’t know what ebpf or what immutable filesystems are so obviously your wizard magic is not better than crowdstrike. Also IT will be in charge of that one component and clickops it bypassing the entire CICD pipeline and sanity checking system you have. It’s for compliance which is our word for shut up or we fire you.
Much less invest in a memory safe language. If they don’t take a serious look at Rust, Go, or some other memory-safe language… I’ll stop right there: they won’t. Management doesn’t give a fuck as long as the cost is within manageable margins, or they can fire a bunch of scapegoats but change nothing.
I don’t think that rust would have prevented this one, since this isn’t a compile time error (for the code loader).The address dereferencing would have been inside an unsafe block. What was missing was a validity check of the CI build artifacts and payload check on the client side.
I do however, think that the ‘fingers-crossed’ approach to memory safety in C and C++ must stop. Rust is a great fit for this use case.
I might be wrong, but from how I understand it it probably wouldn’t help. Kernel drivers have a rigorous QA and cert by Microsoft if you want to get them signed, which is a process that may take a long time - longer than you can afford when pushing updates to AV/EDR to catch emerging threats. What Crowdstrike does to bypass this requirement is that the CS Falcon is just an engine, that loads, interprets and executes code from definition files. The kernel driver code then doesn’t need to change, so no need for new MS cert, and they can just push new definition files. So, they kind of have to deal with unsafe in this case, since you are executing a new code.
What Crowdstrike does to bypass this requirement is that the CS Falcon is just an engine, that loads, interprets and executes code from definition files.
If Microsoft really has “rigorous QA and cert” for kernel drivers then they shouldn’t have certified this, because now it’s a certified bypass for the certification.
I am definitely guilt for that, but I find this approach really productive. We use small bug fixes as an opportunity to improve the code quality. Bigger PRs often introduce new features and take a lot of time, you know the other person is tired and needs to move on, so we focus on the bigger picture, requesting changes only if there is a bug or an important structural issue.
I always try to review the code anyway. There’s no guarantee that what they wrote is doing what you want it to do. Sometimes I find the person was told to do something and didn’t realize it actually needs to do Y and not just X, or visa versa.
I like to shoot for the middle ground: skim for key functions and check those, run code locally to see if it does roughly what I think it should do and if it does merge it into dev and see what breaks.
Small PRs get nitpicked to death since they’re almost certainly around more important code
So you’re always behind, patching up small bits of code that don’t comply with your guidelines, while letting big changes with, by deduction, worse code quality through?
I mean I would fucking love somme puppies at work. but also pizza. pizza is good.
my old workplace used to have free breakfast which was the shit. freshly baked bread from local bakery and all sorts of toppings too, it was so nice to go to work, do stuff maybe 30minutes and just go to coffee break and eat some super good bread. and that was every day
I wish at least a little :D I’m pretty underweight because my body just rejects fat and I’m too lazy to do any body building to gain mass by getting muscle xd
We had that, but people knew what the delivery driver looked like or maybe reception had a secret list of buddies to notify …whatever. When breakfast was delivered, within 10 seconds, all the vultures in the office pounced in it, leaving nothing.
Anytime pizza was given on Fridays, same vultures would rush to be 1st in line then walk out with a plate stacked with a whole pizza… Rest of us usually got nothing.
i work for a big multinational and there was this woman who walks around with a little yappy thing. she’s the only one and i haven’t seen any rules about it in the employee handbook. i think she just turned up with it one day.
I’ve seen this kind of thing too many times to count. First it was in high school, then the workplace.
Person notices there is no explicit rule for a thing, or maybe there’s a loophole somewhere
Does the thing
Annoys someone
Now there’s a rule for the thing
Some people just want to push the envelope. Other times, people can have a poor grasp of social norms, or they simply don’t respect others. But on the other side of the coin, people get annoyed for good and bad reasons; sometimes, no reason at all.
Bottom line: it’s a mess, so we get rules. But nobody wants to spend time writing these things and enforcing them, so there’s usually a reason/person/event why they’re there.
Yes, they can indeed be a problem for people with allergies. In my case dogs (and cats unfortunately) trigger respiratory issues. I had that issue at a workplace where dogs were allowed, not fun times. And unfortunately medication like antihistamines are not an option for everybody, personally I get extremely drowsy from them, even from the latest generation meds.
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