ohgr

I think it’s malicious incompetence.

They probably rolled this out so fast and fired everyone who could manage it at the same time that it’s running at the stage of “how do we not starve these people” levels of chaos.

What a shit show though.

What microservice did Musk delete this time?

Most of it is done and really none of us using it want a moving target.

Your point was the irrelevance of LaTeX which has the momentum of a neutron star.

It’s not really though. I haven’t heard it mentioned once in my academic contacts and involvement and we write a lot of LaTeX.

Don’t forget the F35s we all have.

Statistically speaking though if you leave guns lying around everywhere or introduce guns as a service for only $10/month and tell everyone that guns will solve all your problems, then you’re going to end up with fuckwits with guns.

Dumb stuff is what I want. Classifiers and denoise are really useful.

What I don’t want is a shitty chat bot that barely understands what you ask it and generates shitty code by sticking a corpus of shitty code together then leaving me with the unconstrained job of working out if it has any land mines in it. Then multiply that by 50 engineers. Then tell me that’s the future. Because if it is we are totally fucked. Our decline will be noted by the general decline in capacity to do anything.

My trick is saying no to redis full stop. Every project where it was used as a cache only it developed retention ans backup requirements and every project where it was a key value store someone built a relational database on top of it.

There’s nothing worse than when someone does the latter. I had to write a tool to remove deletes from the AOF log because someone fucked up ordering of operations big time trying to pretend they had proper transactions.

Yeah did the last year. Accidentally left Lightroom mobile uploading RAW images over it and now it blew 50 gig in an hour.

There was sports betting going on far far before Jesus showed up. The Romans allowed it and the Holy Roman Empire and the catholics let it carry on.

Also dice games were popular for private betting.

Sounds easier than getting work done in a corporate who got an agile consultancy in.

Having watched two entirely fucked up Rust projects get written off I think you need to get out more.

Yeah. I have a list of things I won’t work with. That’s what experience looks like.

(Mostly .Net, PHP and Ruby)

We have those! Turn up, make some micro-services or AWS crap pile we don’t need to solve a simple problem, then fuck off somewhere else and leave everyone else to clean it up.

Worst one is the data pipeline we have. It’s some AWS lambda mess which uses curl to download a file from somewhere and put it into S3. Then another lambda turns up at some point and parses that out and pokes it into DynamoDB. This fucks up at least once a month because the guy who wrote the parser uses 80s BASIC style string manipulation and luck. Then another thing reads that out of DynamoDB and makes a CSV (sometimes escaped improperly) and puts that into another bucket.

I of course entirely ignore this and use one entire line of R to do the same job

Along comes a senior spider and says “maybe we can fix all these problems with AI”. No you can stop hiring acronym collectors.

Yeah that. My daughter has an M2 air and doesn’t take the charger with her any more. Doesn’t need it.

Machines have 64 gig of memory. vmmem uses only 8. That process just jams at 100% and kills it. You can’t terminate it as it’s not actually a process as such. WSL shutdown does not work.

Standard PC experience these days. The very high end dell precision are just as bad. Getting an hour of battery life doing basic tasks after only 9 months.

Using a 2021 MBP M1 Pro MBP instead of the $3000 turd my outfit said I needed to use. It’s faster and doesn’t fuck up.

Until it breaks. I watched a colleague have to reinstall his laptop the other day because whenever he opened a WSL terminal, nothing happened and it banged the CPU at 100% and wouldn’t even shut down.

Have seen that a few times from different people.

I take this to extremes. When I was contracting I wouldn’t do anything Microsoft unless I was paid by the hour.

It's a bit difficult when you use the technology to run groups of unsolicited people. There is inevitably an inclusion boundary there.

Technical reasons don't trump social and human reasons. There's a compromise somewhere.

From experience, most engineers can do neither.

I don't. I've got a 256 gig M4 mini with a 2TB disk hanging off it.

I'll settle with a much lower bar: an engineer that can tell the code the model generates is shit.

The point is if you want to report someone for it for sexual harassment, which is exactly what it is, then the disappearing message is a problem.

You don't just ignore it. You deal with it.

The principal reason “normal non tech” people use this is for nefarious reasons from experience. Nefarious being sending photos of their dick or threats or being horrible.

Fortunately you can turn it off on WhatsApp but it’s per contact which is usually too late.

My partner and numerous female friends get this all the time.

So please don’t add it to iMessage. If you don’t want someone to see something or retain it, don’t send it. There isn’t a magic solution. They can just screenshot it anyway.

At the same time they don’t tend to blow holes in the victim here.

Yes it’s more critical staff. And it’s more a cultural thing. I know a couple of Apple folk and they will definitely not relocate to retain the job. Especially in the current political climate.

You don’t actually need as much money to survive in the UK as the US for example. So there isn’t the motivator to retain high level salaries other than luxury.

It would be “no thanks” and take a 30% cut to go and work somewhere else.

I don't backup my phone anyway. There's nothing I can't replace in about 30 minutes work.

First time I was arrested for being next to a fight until I was cleared of any involvement. This required some explaining and the policeman was an idiot.

Second time some busybody reported to the police that I was carrying a knife. This was a Santoku knife that I'd literally bought and was still in the plastic packaging but you could see it through the plastic bag I was carrying it in. We had a bit of a laugh about it and they apologised for wasting my time. They did however arrest me so that they could do a formal search and had right to as they had reasonable suspicion I was carrying it as a weapon. I'm not bothered they were very reasonable and so was I.