I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.

It’s not about the bindings. It’s, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.

Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina’s breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.

It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

(I don’t actually care, it’s just very interesting how even such an innocent map actually shows a strong political/cultural bias)

… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.

Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

• The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
• Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
• The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
• Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.

If anything i18n makes things way worse for everyone. Ever tried to diagnose a semi-obscure Windows or Android error on a non-English locale? Pretty sure that’s one of the activities in the inner circles of Hell. Bonus points if the error message is obviously machine-translated and therefore semantically meaningless.

Unique error codes fix this if they remain visible to the user, which they usually don’t because Mr Project Manager thinks it looks untidy.

We need an app that keeps the gender ratios even.

Isn’t that what Tinder is indirectly trying to achieve with its “Get Super Gold+++ insta premium” business model? To get a somewhat even gender ratio you need to get a bunch of men to drop out, and asking for absurd amounts of money is certainly one way to go about it. Though I hear even premium tinder users vastly outnumber the women.

A raffle could work in theory, but upwards of 80 % of men will have to be thrown out and as a woman I wouldn’t see why I would settle for that instead of an app where attractive men will be falling over themselves to talk to me.

AFAIK the only proven methods for not-super-attractive men to get matches is to either go offline, or be bi/gay. Do with that advice what you will.

Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

It’s really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

We can argue on whether it’s a “bug” outright (since it is technically a correct implementation of a faulty design), but Boeing’s MCAS pitching the plane based on the input of a singular faulty sensor has probably caused billions in direct damages, and billions more in reputational damage.

NULL references (which Crowdstrike is an instance of) are often referred to as “the billion dollar mistake”, but the actual cost of “historical” languages skimping out on optionally-nullable types is certainly in the trillions.

To: Springfield High Educators
From: Springfield High School Board

It has come to our attention that some of our staff have been teaching Bible verses out of context. This has made some parents, particularly our esteemed LEOs, uncomfortable.

I hereby remind you that your contract binds you to a strict adherence to the Chart of Christian Values of Springfield and the Glorious State of Oklahoma.

For your next mandatory Bible Reading Session, please make sure to select passages that are in-line with those values.

Kind Regards,

I looked into it after this year’s massive price hike… There’s no meaningful alternative. We’re on the FOSS version of GitLab now (GitLab-CE), but the lack of code ownership / multiple reviewers / etc. is a real pain and poses problems with accountability.

Honestly there are not that many features in Gitlab EE that are truly necessary for a corporate environment, so a GitLab-CE fork may be able to set itself apart by providing those. To me there are two hurdles:

• Legal uncertainties (do we need a clean room implementation to make sure Gitlab Inc doesn’t sue for re-implementing the EE-only features into a Gitlab fork?)
• The enormous complexity of the GitLab codebase will make any fork, to put it mildly, a major PITA to maintain. 2,264 people work for GitLab FFS (with hundreds in dev/ops), it’s indecent.

Honestly I think I’d be happy if forgejo supported gitlab-runner, that seems like a much more reasonable ask given the clean interface between runner and server. Maybe I should experiment with that…

All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we’ll have to have it at some point. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn’t make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company’s part.

There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike’s. Instead we’re happy to shrug and move on when management doesn’t even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn’t sound particularly outlandish to me.

But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.

Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.

Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they’re buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is “Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials”.

Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.

If the dev is “the guy who presses the ‘go live’ button” then he’s an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that “go live” button.

As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything… If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we’d be surprised).

I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but “blame” is not the same as “consequences” and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that “low likelihood, big impact” corner.
Because likely when the problem happens (again) they’ll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.

What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer’s recommendation).

It makes some sense contextually.

Purple and light purple are “NFP (left)” and “not NFP (left)”. Socialists are traditionally red.

The two blues are “LR (right)” and “not LR (right)”. Liberals are traditionally blue.

Yellow are center-right neolibs.

The independent left/right seats don’t matter much because they will vote predictably with their political side on most issues, so since this will be a coalition Parliament there is not much point in outlining individual party affiliation (anyways the NFP is already a coalition of several parties).

Oh you poor things, the lack of attention we give you is what allows you to thrive. I’d almost shed a tear if there was an inkling of truth in those ramblings.

People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.