anal_reactor

I wouldn't care about giving out real intel in exchange for a passionate romance because that's something you cannot buy with money.

> So if you work for some of these critical companies and your perfect man or woman shows up, you should be on your guard.

TBH if I was higher up the chain of command, I'd actually give less fucks. If I have a mortgage I cannot afford to lose job or money so I'm on guard because I'm one failed marriage away from homelessness. But if I have ten million dollars to my name, and a Chinese spy shows up then what exactly do I have to lose? If the company kicks me out then good riddance, I can already retire to perfect comfort and nobody can take away the memory of spending a year with a 10/10 partner.

It's extremely difficult to find, hire, and then put into the right position a competent security engineer. Meanwhile competent hackers grow on trees. I understand that mistakes here were silly, but that's not the point. The point is, security is fucking difficult.

IMO the practical solution to this problem - because telling companies "just do security better" works as much as telling fat people "just eat less" - would be some kind of central registry of car parts. This was already implemented in iPhones back in the day that if a repair wasn't signed off by Apple, you couldn't install a new part to your iPhone. I imagine that if the government had a similar thing but for cars, then thieves would stop stealing cars because each stolen part would eventually be flagged somewhere and the end customer would be upset, never coming back.

I say "government" because companies cannot be trusted to make a simple interface "log in -> enter part number and car license plate -> ready to install". I assume that outside of the US the "log into government website" part is already solved in one way or another. On the privacy side, it really shouldn't be controversial, assuming that people are already used to the VIN having a repair history tied to it.

On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.

Yes, Google Maps is becoming so frustrating:

1. Navigation makes pointless detours.

2. The "rotate the map back to north-up" button doesn't work.

3. "You're looking at Barcelona and asked for restaurants? I know a few, in Tokyo"

4. Half of navigation window is useless UI elements I cannot hide.

I've been trying mapy.cz for a while because they were fantastic for tourism purposes, but they're locking more and more features behind a paywall and I'm not sure I want to pay for that. The killer features of Google Maps are the POIs, reviews, photos, Street View, and public transport planning. I cannot really switch to another map app without having those.

I remember that when Paint started being funky I found a Windows XP exe and used that. I want Paint to be the graphical equivalent of hexedit.

Now that I'm on Linux, I use jspaint.app.

That's true. We all die someday and there's nothing we can do about it. Youth is fleeting, we peak and then we slowly decline until one day we find ourselves unable to walk nor remember our relatives' names.

This critique makes zero sense.

1. Most companies release their most expensive models first, and then follow up with cheaper ones. Like, that's business 101. Nvidia does it, Lego does it.

2. You're comparing a new flagship to a three-year old phone, bought second-hand. Like, those two serve completely different markets.

1. Aren't... all phones manufactured in China?

2. I know it's whataboutism, but from the perspective of a non-US consumer, it doesn't exactly make a difference which country exactly spies on me. I use a Chinese web browser because it covers all my use cases and I don't see a problem with that.

Heeeeeeee Macarena

Well, I was moving away from Windows so it's natural I wanted to replace things I had working on Windows.

Lossless WMA is an ancient exotic format so yeah, fair to push back. But Xbox controllers are the standard gaming controllers so there's no excuse. The rest of my complaints are Linux fuckery.

BTW my keyboard is also from Microsoft and someone did all the difficult things in the driver except one simple last step, which is like two extra lines of code. There are like ten forks of this driver on GitHub, each of them adding the same two lines.

The driving wheel is NOT Microsoft. The whole software stack had a critical bug that made the wheel unusable after a few minutes of gameplay. People worked on this for a long time. It finally got fixed, a few months after I joined the Linux party. BTW the Linux driver/userland tool implemented correctly LEDs on the wheel EXCEPT they were missing a parser of a file format that took me a day to manually implement and connect. It would take me at least a week though to make it a quality contribution. If I need to redo this for a new game, I'll publish my code.

I feel like there's a common theme that Linux usually almost works and for every functionality you need to spend a day fixing it because the developers did do all the difficult work, but then either botched UI, failed to implement non-core functionalities, or didn't test less common use cases. When my Fedora refused to update until I removed Wine, the official response was along "your program your problem".

I remember that when I was a student everyone called Mathematical Analysis "anal" and then there's one guy whose Facebook profile pic was from a church and he said "the correct shortened term is MA".

Office 97 already had exactly the same icons for cut-copy-paste. Rename icon is from Windows 8.1 (2013). Share icon is present in Windows XP. Trash can appears in Windows 95, although the meaning "to delete" was indeed introduced in Windows 11, previously it was the trash itself.

In other words, people who were born alongside with four of these icons are already sending their own kids to schools.

Firefox is already on life support anyway. No normies no Firefox.

That's a very good question. I wish them the best of luck, but "we're not Trump" isn't exactly a complete political program. Also, they risk reversing the few things that Trump did right, mainly convincing Europe to get their (our?) shit together.

> What if traffic signs had text for many years and then suddenly a bunch were replaced by new ones with only a new icon and no visible explanation of what the icon means?

That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.

Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?

> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.

Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".

Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.

Payment terminals have green-yellow-red buttons at the bottom. No text, just icons and colors.

Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.

Halfway through writing a response I've realized that Americans have a completely different approach to icons compared to the rest of the world. In the US most traffic signs have text information on them, while in most other countries most signs are icon-only. Text is usually reserved for exceptional situations that cannot easily be represented with an icon. So we're going to be talking past each other because you'll insist that a "yield" sign absolutely needs the "yield" word, while I'll insist that it should not.

Linux is the "normie" open source system, while hobbyists who want to have things done their way use things like Haiku. Gatekeeping Linux is like gatekeeping Toyota Corolla.

Linux users who ignore critique and claim "yeah bro but have you tried MY distro" are like potheads "yeah bro but have you tried MY strain".

TBH while the menu has glaring issues (half of it is basically an ad for cloud storage), your complaints boil down to "I don't like it because I'm not familiar with it" which is not valid critique, and especially shouldn't be coming from a Linux user if you want Windows users to switch - they don't like Linux because they're not familiar with it.

Linux day 1: whole day looking up which distro is usable.

Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.

Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.

Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.

Day 44: $DEVICE works.

Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.

In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.

Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.

I simply don't care. As a student I thought that the mythical production code is perfect and error-free, but in reality 99% of systems are a hot potato game sprinkled with politics where you don't want the grenade to explode in your hands.

I mean, if the management doesn't see value in decent engineering, then who am I to butt myself into the conversation?

It's an asset because it's a demonstration that their technology works. It would be stupid for them not to tokenmaxx even if that was more efficient. Kinda like you don't want an Apple salesman to be using an Android device.

This thing aside... IDK, I used to think that there's no way to manage such a mess but apparently there is. Or rather, it starts to seem plausible that models will evolve faster than this mess, and once it becomes unmanageable, you can simply ask AI "make it better, no bugs please" and it'll mostly work.

It's becoming harder and harder to justify my own existence as a software engineer. It's surreal that that I dedicated years of study to prepare myself for a job that's being automated away.

Of course the demand for human developers won't drop to 0 but it'll be limited to a handful of industries where even small mistakes are costly, like aerospace. But then let's be real - what percentage of currently employed devs are competent enough to write such code?

I've been walking around Dealer's Den and I noticed that there's a sizeable amount of AliExpress items but then I thought that presentation is part of the service. I mean sure, it's bad if it's all AliExpress, but if it's just a bit then it's not exactly a problem, because the merchant is doing the work of discovering interesting items and then presenting them nicely. I bought a few things that I could as well order on Amazon but I never did because I didn't know it's actually that nice.

In a healthy community people will notice crap and simply won't buy it, which discourages merchants from selling crap. If that's not the case, then it's quite likely that the community has bigger issues because they cannot distinguish crap from good items.

I mean, if someone shows up with hand-made crap then the community should also push it out, whether it's hand-made or mass-produced is pretty much besides the point.

Regarding the cons themselves, of course there are good ones and bad ones. That's how it is with everything.

I think we're back to IRL interaction. Things I could ask my friends about are unfindable on the internet. Meanwhile travel is much more accessible than before the internet, so "but the person I want to talk to lives in another country" isn't as much of a deal as it used to be.

Case in point: the proliferation of furcons.

You're assuming that understanding it was his priority in the first place. It wasn't.

Imagine a painter saying "these software engineers are profoundly stupid, I spent a whole day explaining to one how different color combinations are differently interpreted by different cultures and he still wouldn't get it".

You cannot win US presidency twice while being dumb.

I don't care about my skills because employers won't request me to do anything that violates the terms of service of $CURRENT_LLM. At the same time, it's a reminder not to outsource thinking to someone's computer.

> love things more than people

Society hated techies until we started getting ridiculous amounts of money and women figured out that they could marry a techie and instantly go up the social hierarchy. Now that this isn't happening anymore, society is back to hating techies. Tech always attracted people who were in some ways social outcasts - I've spent my formative years being bullied and now I'm supposed to love the society? I pay taxes to maintain public infrastructure while normies vandalize and misuse it when bored and I'm supposed to love that? Truly baffling.

> low empathy

Blatantly false. Name one industry where a huge chunk of experts spend their time doing volunteer work, because that's what open source is (Linux, GCC, etc.). Have you ever seen a baker just giving out free bread on weekends and calling it a hobby? I haven't.

> "bootstraps" mentality

The expectation that everyone could just vibe through life and be perfectly happy is unrealistic. There will always be winners and losers, there will always be inherent unfairness, deal with that to your best ability.

Hard disagree. Obfuscated code is code that does something different from what it seems to be doing at first glance. This backwards loop does exactly the thing you'd expect it to do - in code review I'd only double-check whether it's actually correct - I can see someone making a mistake here and creating an infinite loop.

> I'm also honestly surprised that wraparound on unsigned types is not undefined behavior.

I consider it common knowledge TBH