UweSchmidt

I understand that you describe the status quo in many systems today.

However, besides the technical aspect you talked about the "absolute best you could expect when asking for a delete in the UI^".

I think this where I, other posters in the thread, most people, and probably the GDPR and other legislature, would disagree. We expect significantly more effort to clean up deleted data.

This includes, for example, the ability to delete datasets from backups, as well as a general accountability of how often and where all the data is stored and if, and when a deletion process is complete.

Imagine the data that was deleted is of the highest level of illegality you can imagine. Under no circumstance can your service be associated with that content.

- What was your "definition of delete" again?

- You mentioned some of the convenient technical defaults your frameworks and tools provide out-of-the-box, can you think of ways to improve the situation?

(You might re-run delete requests after restoring a backup; transaction should resolve in a timely fashion, failed deletes can be communicated to the user quickly etc.)

Because security experts seem to have this slight dismissive attitude about companies' and individuals' attempts to do security, while not usually having answers or providing secure systems.

So how do you actually cybersecure a company in a compliant and practical way?

Have you considered Brave? It's fresh and a litte different in varous ways.

Can no one in this thread grasp the possiblity a neutral, non-prescriptive way to tell an inspirational story set in the far future that is not a vehicle for anything?

I do think post-war Scifi was optimistic as it reflected the general sentiment of the times, with increasing prosperity, scientific and social progress, and tangible examples of the ability to unite for a common cause and accomplish megaprojects in general. Environmental issues were beyond the horizon, and today's societal divisiveness even further out. Civilization succumbing to technological addiction and stagnating scientific progress were considered as disappointing and unlikely timelines.

The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.

"...but as far as themes go, I’m more inspired by [authors who are] usually clearly anti-capitalist, criticizing scenarios used in Golden Age science fiction — such as building cities on Mars or expanding beyond the Solar System — by portraying them as capitalist hellscapes."

The golden-age optimistic science fiction placed humans on a stage in the future with aliens, and confronted both with challenges on a far greater scale than earth. The implication that today's problems would surely be solved, was not only a nice escapism but also helped to form a fundamental mindset for the solution of said problems. From terraforming other planets to thinking about carbon dioxide globally, from a war with aliens to seeing the futility of wars on earth. From the absense of actual capitalism or communism on that distant colony in space that lived in harmony, to being open minded about new solutions in everyday politics.

It does not seem clear if pessimistic science fiction, from an author not from the "ivory tower" but the trenches of education in community college, written with an educational message front and center, can have the reach and cultural impact as the stories from the past. Will the classroom in space convince where the daytime job didn't?

If you look at the resumes of engineering or automotive company leadership, you'll see people going through stages of ever expanding responsibilities of part, component and product design, or management of production facilities of increasing size and importance. The CEO will still emphasize their technical knowledge, non-technical staff will at least try and fake it.

In agile software development on the other hand, technical competence usually ends at the lowest tier. A scrum team has folks on it who make software, that's it. Then, lots of scrum masters, business analysts have probably never coded much; the first actual boss in the hierarchy has mostly secretarial and managerial work and will hardly look at code at all.

Point is, it's not just that software development is done in ticket-sized portions which does not invite philosophical considerations about the numbers of abstraction layers that one builds and maintains. It's that software developers don't even have a seat at the table(); they get babysat by scrum masters, make compromises during code review, are discouraged from thinking beyond the ticket, and are then of course not usually promoted into leadership roles to which they would bring their technical competence.

It appears therefore that any movements to bring awareness to the "software crisis" will be relegated to hobbyists, as the article states at the end: to "Handmade, Permacomputing, and various retro-computing circles".

() I partly blame Hollywood and their incessant humiliation of software/IT people, while creating endless leading roles for doctors and lawyers, effortlessly weaving their complicated terminologies into fascinating storylines, which is aparently not possible to do for us? Maybe the scriptwriting AIs can come up with something here soon.

> These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl.

> whipupitude

Historical roots and original intentions aside, the verbosity of Powershell syntax and the clumsiness of the shell place Perl and Powershell on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of "looks" and the ability to quickly whip up something.

Could you illustrate how any other language inspired Powershell in any way, beyond the most basic concept that it is a scripting language?

In bash/unix, I feel -l often stands for list, -a for all, -f for force, -q quiet or slient, -r recursive, -d debug. A modern approach could have been for Microsoft to clean it up and make it more consistent. But no.

Powershell was truly a product of Microsoft monopolistic confidence. To create a language that allows absolutely no syntactical carryover from any other langauge is wild. You couldn't guess or assume any command, parameter or flag. Even with Microsoft's ambition they should have realized that legions of admins and programmers had to learn and maintain scripts in both Powershell and bash for a few decades at least.

The extreme verbosity of the syntax may look good for a presentation to the committee, but dealing with it regularly collides with well-researched and understood limits of the human brain, where information of a certain size, and delays of a certain length break the state of flow and requires concentration, explicit memorization and double-takes. Even with practice one could never quickly execute the common shell incantation to turn a thought into reality, instead one would have to wrestle with syntax, even if it's just waiting for autocomplete to appear and deciding to accept the next word of a multipart command.

Let's try the start menu and search for "pow..", chose between 4 amazing options, Powershell or Powershell ISE, both in regular and x86 flavour. Either would take a while to load, breaking flow. The ISE shows a little splash screen that jumps to a second location. Another dialog shows up and informs you that you've closed the last session without saving the unnamed script files. But it opens them anyway, as you would expect. So why scold me for this? Because, you know damn well that saving the textfile is trouble: I can type or copy, and then execute any kind of evil code imaginable, but saving the file and then running it as a .ps Script triggers the ridiculous execution-policy song and dance. Probably trauma from Microsoft's bad security reputation of early Internet Explorers and Windows versions.

I tried to love it anyway but one day my script encountered filenames with square brackets. Powershell implicitly interpreted those [1] and [2] as iterators somehow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21008180/copy-file-with-...). Sorry but dealing with files is the one job a scripting language has, filenames are beyond the control of script authors, and the space of valid filenames on Windows should be known. This gave me some long lasting trust issues with that language.

(The Azure team aparently had enough power within Microsoft to create their own, sane and readable syntax: "az find vm", "az account show".)

A more fundamental reason is that society is no longer interested in pushing forward at all cost. It's the arrival at an economical and technological equilibrium where people are comfortable enough, along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. If you look closely, a certain kind of relaxation has replaced a quest for efficiency everywhere. Is that disappointing? Is that actually bad? Do you think there might be a rude awakening?

Consider: It was this scifi-fueled dream of an amazing high-tech, high-competency future that also implied machines doing the labour, and an enlightened future relieving people of all kinds of unpleasantries like boring work, therefore prevented them from attaining high competency. The fictional starship captain, navigating the galaxy and studying alien artifacts was always saving planets full of humans in desolate mental state...

Having a building vacant is already incredibly expensive; costs and interest add up and the building can get severely damaged (a building has to be heated in winter, ventilated properly and issues like broken pipes have to be found quickly by tenants etc.). Common reasons for vacancies are probate disputes, owners that are house rich but cash poor and can't handle maintenance, issues with building code and permits and similar. Apart from some truly dysfunct situations a scheme that involves vacancy doesn't make much sense. Why not take even a modest rent for a bit?

In general, everything you could propose that puts pressure on landlords leads to transfer of ownership from your (maybe friendly) landlord with 2-3 units, to larger, more professional companies who can handle the paperwork and regulations, with a tendency to tear down and rebuild something that is more expensive to rent or buy.

Either address the fundamental economic issues and how to solve them in a pragmatic fashion

... or pour oil in the fire of the great culture war, here in the secondary frontline of young vs. old, and accomplish nothing.

What if Facebook wanted to open up parts of the site for users without an account, would that require a major reengineering? I've wondered why Facebook (and Instagram) are so strict about not showing anything to logged-out users, could technical reasons be part of that decision?

Does Microsoft have plenty of money to do anything? Sure. Does the trillion dollar company spend an appropriate effort on the product itself? Certainly not!

The issue is this: From Windows 10 and up, almost every interaction with the UI is a little bit broken, and I could fill pages just describing things that used to work just right in Windows 7 and earlier. It appears the Windows UI is now designed and approved by the visuals only. And now we learn about a disproportionate effort to create a visual.

So it's easy to see how a comment that points out this discrepancy, resonates with everyone who is halfway through their thousand daily cuts of UI punishment.

By definition, negative side effects that can be cherry-picked are more numerous and pronunced in an Individualist society, as the very point of Collectivism is to steer the crowds away from trouble, while Individualism tolerates a wider range of individual tragedies for the potential upside.

Your examples were not well chosen anyway, as their relation to collectivism seems dubious, and US prosecutors also have high conviction rates without trial through threat of big punishment.

A shallow and superficial comment in a subthread that took the wrong turn. Casually applying nasty labels in an act of self-loathing from a fellow German. Oh no, our toxic workplaces, truly funny. Our beloved individualism that has little regard for society as a whole left, consequences of that showing up more and more, how dare the old asian guy hold on to the old ways. "Xenophobia" in the face of mass immigration that is handled terribly etc.

Actually take your criteria and apply them fairly to some of the other cultures around the world. And let the old guy smoke (outside). He is not the worst human ever, that's for sure.

With a little forum experience, who has trouble scanning a thread and seeing it meander away from their interest? So I question the need.

Even if there is the need, who should be the judge for others over the quality of a subthread? I would feel presumptuous to pass judgement beyond my vote for each comment.

Aren't those diamonds all that matter anyway? Recently I increasingly find new and curious beginnings dampened and limited by intellectually lazy attitudes, by comments that start with "I mean...", that reiterate the default state rather than entertaining a new thought. Inadvertently, well-meaning soft-moderation like yours might steer even more people away from interesting topics.

I'd say, leave your vote and move on.

Does that warrant a warning? That's just a natural occuring discussion, and selecting threads to follow is basic forum-reading skill. The rare gems of surprising insight are often found in the depths of slightly off-topic discussions.

Previously I've noticed another kind of meta-comment, the top level complaint by a self-appointed moderators about the overall shape of the discussion elsewhere, instead of engaging directly with the actual posts in question.

Everything.

Clear visibility and contrast for all UI elements. Consistenty throughtout the system. Scrollbars that stay visible. Borders of windows clearly visible. Clear differentiation between buttons, checkboxes and radio buttons. No useless animations that make you miss clicks, take you out of the flow. Predictability and reliability of all UI components. Big icons designed for recognizability, not to look good on a screenshot/presentation.

In Windows we used to have themes... Wouldn't it be nice to be able to still customize window border thickness given our large resolution screens and precise mice? Now the task bar is huge, but can only be a single line, there is never enough text on task bar icons, windows explorer taskbar icons can't be reordered, yet if you try to quickly select an explorer icon in the taskbar, the entire group of windows explorer windows offers to be moved. We have rounded corners for the windows, but to resize diagonally you have to find the pixel where corner would be if the corner weren't rounded.

You know what takes the cake: In VSCode Nuget Gallery the search field is now entirely invisible in light theme. You literally have to click on the white space next to the filter button to reveal the search field. This his how it looks on my machine:

https://imgur.com/a/QPqIrod

The space of ChatGPT tricked for fun or fraud is probably just a subset of the error and confusion in which those AIs operate - generally to the confusion of the customers that they "support". I can imagine a future where humans have to deal with an uncanny valley of unreliable and confusing AIs of increasing significance that are wired up to more and more real world systems. And at the same time companies reserving the right to legally back out of any adverse outcomes through a fine-print EULA and unintelligible documentation in hard to find places.

1. Can you think of other things you would want to query an AI on that "increases global warming" (i.e. ultimately most things humans can do)? Should it be possible to learn about things that could increase global warming?

2. Do you want Google decide ethical or moral questions or should that be left to the individuals? How far should those corporate AIs interfere with human thinking and decisionmaking?

The public is asking for quite a lot of manual "fixing" for an AI that was supposed to be an entirely technical process. This has to be an impossible task, given the range of contentious issues and the difficulty of addressing them to the liking of the loud voices on social media.

This is exacerbated by the current style of articles that don't primarily report on the issue, but on the reactions to the issue and thus preventing the readers from forming their own opinions. An article like this could give the reader a little excercise for the comments to try and create a better answer for some of the problematic queries - not easy!

I hope we get to have our own AIs on our own machines, raw powertools instead of walled gardens carefully curated by scared corporations.

Didn't find this one in the list, little divaness imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3qD1jKNYaU (Huey Lewis & the News)

Hard technical limitations prevent Bitcoin from becoming a usable currency.

Winamp is a lightweight program that runs on your personal computer, loading files or folders of mp3s and other audio files that you own/control. The UI is pleasant, stable, customizable, responsive. Nothing will trigger the user's attention, no recommendations, UI changes or updates. No attempt to sell or monetize anything. No surveillance or tracking.

Until future tech allows for reformatting code to a developer's preference (which might not arrive any time soon or might introduce subtle new bugs, who knows) we could use some framework to make transparent decisions around that Pareto front, no?

(Of course there is a best way to do it that will optimize the codebase for a function of productivity, reliability and pleasure. The likelihood and the cost of changes are part of that function. Finding and advocating for it is the task of the most experienced, wisest team member. Less experienced team members may (or may not) understand the wisdom of the better decision in time. But this is just my struggle with postmodernism and relativism and besides the point)