The more users you have, the more expensive it is to run.
Like, compute, storage, bandwidth, none of that is free. If you’re providing a free service, like Wikipedia, and you have many millions of users, like Wikipedia, your expenses will be enormous. You can either accept donations, like Wikipedia, require payment, or sell your users.
If there’s something you like that’s free online, support them. If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.
Also when “you’re the product” that doesn’t just mean that your data is the product. A user is a person whom you can influence. “You’re the product” means this company can direct you, influence you, change your behavior. They can offer your behavioral changes, as a service to their other stakeholders.
Shit. People think they collect all that data just for fun, don’t they? Time to change how I talk about this…
This ☝️✅
Marketing can be such an immoral, insidious process.
And it takes thousands of people pushing this shit mindlessly, because hey… “It’s just a job, right? Nine to five”.
If they don’t accept donations, well, I hate to tell you, you’re the product.
A statement has never been truer than this
No, replacing your HVAC or control systems will not magically fix the engineering issues present in your home/building. You will have to compensate for poor design indefinitely unless you want to demolish and start over.
Oh fuck, improperly designed HVAC + changes made to a building that really fuck it up… There’s no fixing that folks.
“This one room is always hot!” Well, there’s no return, the door’s always closed, and oh, someone replaced the door 20 years ago and now there’s only a 1/4" gap between it and the floor. No, “turning up the fan speed” isn’t going to fix it.
Solution: install a doggy door with weak enough magnets to let the air flow.
Bead curtain, maybe? It’s both practical and groovy. /s
Solution: vibrate the air to reduce viscosity
That only works for no-newtonian fluids
Transom windows. I don’t know why they aren’t common. But they make it easy to close a door but still allow airflow through the house.
Because modern houses really don’t give any thoughts about airflow or natural cooling. Heck, even getting the AC compressor installed on a side of the house where it doesn’t get baked in the afternoon sun is too much to ask for.
Something doesn’t work in a particular piece of software. “Don’t they test their program?”. “All they need to do is X, obviously they don’t know how to code!”.
Sometimes it isn’t as easy as you think.
Though it being difficult doesn’t excuse releasing an untested program or one with known issues…
Known issues that don’t interfere with the critical user stories are usually not prioritized. They should be disclosed, and even better if workarounds are published, but fixing them usually isn’t in the budget.
Since February the Uber Driver app has had a bug where elements from the “not in a trip right now” UI state render over top of the “in a trip and navigating” UI state.
It means that the user can’t see the text for the next turn, and also can’t see the direction of the next turn.
However there’s a workaround because they can see the distance to the next turn and once they’re close they can see which way route line goes.
Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff and focus on the golden path, which means comprehensive testing has to be skipped or bugs have to be explicitly left in.
Yes it’s bad. Yes it sucks. But it’s that or nothing gets released at all.
(I wish it wasn’t that way. I try hard to make sure it isn’t that way at my job, but for now that’s how it is)
Nothing about game development is “easy”
I remember my university orientation so vividly, because I was sat next to several people that were taking the “Game Development” degree. They spent the entire orientation talking about what consoles they brought with them.
Two weeks later, they were all gone. The course was arguably harder than my CS course, based on some of the required classes they had to take. I think the dropout rate over the full degree was ~90%. CS was high, sure, but barely anyone actually graduated with the Game Development degree.
Game dev is hard, and I’m yet to meet a game dev that didn’t bemoan how utterly ruthless it was.
The 0.01 alpha fun to build test version is :-D
Yeah, the carefree mood of preproduction is definitely the best part
Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Lil’ bits of paper with representatives watching the vote counters is a pretty solid system. There’s no problem there that needs to be fixed.
I say this as a Canadian who has volunteered as an observer in federal elections. I know Americans have their thing going on, but seriously. Paper ballots all the way.
Works fine in french election abroads.
But yes vote by mail is best.
We don’t have a thing. We definitely don’t.
oh it’s a thing
Brazilian elections continue to be fine for decades, this fear mongering is precisely what the right does whenever they lose.
If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.
If code was impossible to make safe banks would still be doing manual labour and ATMs would’ve been phased out.
Financial transactions are logged and the logs maintained for a certain number of years. You can definitely use a similar system for voting when the stakes are low - local elections, for example. But an electronic voting system cannot be both secret and verifiable. In practice you make finding out how someone voted as hard as possible, and hope that a future government will not put in the effort to crack your system. All of which is completely unnecessary when paper ballots exist, and can be both secret and verifiable.
Local elections are not low stakes. Most of the services you receive are from the municipality you live in.
Just because they’re less polarizing doesn’t mean the stakes are lower.
‘Low stakes’ as in ‘the new mayor isn’t sending everyone who didn’t vote for their party to jail’.
I’ve been there too. It’s works pretty good. Voting machines don’t always for whatever reason, even though it’s a simple problem.
I don’t really buy the conspiracy theories, but it should be waaay down the list of things that need automation, since it’s only occasional.
This is naive me, but having a robust, online voting system would make it a lot easier for direct democracy.
But we would also have to pressure politicians into using that system.
I actually question if direct democracy would be good, after the amount of exposure to typical voters I’ve had, lol. Representatives can be questionable, but at least they know what they’re deciding on.
Autocracy is just completely awful and depressing, though. No doubt about that.
As a software development expert, I take issue with
“our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.”
That’s way off base.
She under-stated the hell out of that.
Our average practitioner is bad at both their own job, and at the jobs of those whose lives their shoddy work complicates.
Anyone trusting us with their lives or livelihood should be very very alarmed.
We’re also now producing artificial intelligence tools that allow us to do equally shoddy work, but now in dramatically greater quantity.
this Lemmite is, indeed, a software development expert
Lemmite? I was always figured Lemmings seemed the most appropriate name for Lemmy users.
I have never volunteered to count or observe elections. However I am a professional programmer, and I absolutely agree, electronic voting opens up tons of new attacks, whereas paper voting “security” is basically a solved problem at this point
Radioactive contamination: things don’t transfer the property of radioactivity to everything they touch and/or irradiate. If that were the case, the entire
Earthuniverse would have become radioactive gray goo long, long ago.When radiation workers talk about “contamination,” we mean radioactive compounds have physically transferred from one object onto/into another. For example, tools becoming contaminated with radioactive metal dust from equipment they touch, or clothing absorbing radioactive iodine gas from the air.
There is a form of radiation called neutron radiation that does make some formerly stable things (mainly metals) radioactive. This isn’t something you’re likely to encounter unless you’re a specific type of radiation worker, however.
This is mainly gear-grindy to me because the reason we don’t have gamma-sterilized produce in the US is completely unfounded fear that gamma irradiation “contaminates” everything it touches. So we could be having lovely fresh strawberries and peppers that last weeks longer than they usually do, but no, we can’t because rAdIaTiOn ScArY 🙄
I was about to go hold up, but neutrons … And then you covered it.
What about contamination in disaster sites like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Is that also mainly radioactive substances that we’re spread around the area by air/water making the whole place dangerous to live or are other previously-non-radioactive objects radioactive now?
Yea basically the main contamination issue is that radioactive substances were spread around. Contamination of the surrounding area isn’t the only issue we have to deal with, nor is it the most serious, but it is generally is the most costly remediate.
The contamination problem is caused by radioactive matter spewed into the air and settling on the trees, buildings, ground etc… in the surrounding area.
The main remediation strategy is to remove everything in the surrounding area including the top ~3 ft or so of soil of the and haul it off to an underground landfill to slowly decay for at least a few hundred years safely separated from humans.
Physics/nuclear literacy in the general public around the world is lower than bad, even many scientists from other fields seem to be genuinely uninformed or misinformed, then posting wrong and often alarming interpretations in social media, which laymen give weight to because “it’s coming from a scientist”, never mind that their expertise may be in areas of biology or astronomy, nothing to do with the subject they are posting about. And they themselves might have gotten their bad info/interpretation from other figures in academia.
Now that you mention it, it does make sense but I never t thought that you could sterilize food with radioactivity.
It is called cold pasteurization, seen some things labeled as such before.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_pasteurization
That will inturn lead to, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
Building genuinely secure computer systems is incredibly difficult. You might even be in systems/software and be thinking “yeah it is hard”, but to be really secure it’s 1000x harder than that. So everything you use off the shelf from any vendor is a massive compromise and has holes in it. But on the other hand most people don’t need really secure systems.
Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?
Allow me to drop a bunch of innocuous looking storage devices in the area, maybe some power cables with hidden microchips, or perform another supply chain attack. What if your computer is probing for wireless devices without your knowledge? Can one be snuck in?
It’s a good step, a major one, but even an air gapped computer can be infected if you have a well-funded, advanced, and persistent adversary.
You are correct.
The uncomfortable part is what I’ve learned about the challenges to gain physical access.
Most physical security is equally appalling to most Cybersecurity.
Edit: Incredibly unfun exercise: pick a physical security device you rely on, personally, and do a YouTube search for “device name break in test”. I’ve rarely been able to find a video more than 3 minutes long, for any product, at all. And the actual breaking is usually mere seconds in the middle bit.
The lockpicking lawyer scares me.
That guy is an exceptional picker/exploiter, and he isn’t even the best.
However, I’ve casually picked locks and always have a set of picks with me for the past 20 years. LPL makes me look like a 10 year old kid trying to open a lock with a pair of chopsticks.
In other words, probably less than 5% of the population have ever picked a lock. Of them, I’m probably better than 90% and I still suck at it. So running across an LPL level skilled person, who’s also a criminal is going to be like a list of names on a single piece of paper. Just by a lock complicated enough that you can’t scrub it open and everyone will be fine.
Imagine you wake up in the night, you hear your front door rattling. Someone is trying to break in. “No problem” you think to yourself, “I have a good lock on my front door”. Then you hear the five most terrifying words you could possibly hear in that moment:
“This is the Lockpicking Lawyer”
Air gap is a useful strategy. But what is that system? You don’t really know anything about its origin or what any of its processors actually do. You know really nothing about any of the firmware or software you run on it. Just getting software on to it securely is a huge challenge to prove its origin and the whole supply chain. And then getting data out is a whole other problem. A general purpose computer is not a great choice if you want the best in security. And having it just in your house isn’t that secure. Obviously as I say, most people don’t need the best security.
Most online services would struggle to provide their service to their users if all of their servers were air gapped.
Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly
If any state entity is in your threat model then this would be major concern. If you’re of any interest to the state, first thing they’ll do is raid your home and seize your electronics. Your threat model shouldn’t depend on assuming an attacker can’t physically access your device (I know you never said an air gap should be the only defence, I’m just saying in general).
Everyone gets older. Everyones body breaks down eventually. The amount of elderly who have said “I never thought something like this would happen to me”. Look around Edna! What made you think you were going to avoid what happens to everyone else!?
“Everything that happens happens to someone else”
Also the reason people don’t buy even the most basic insurance, or take even to most basic disaster preparedness steps.
At least personally, the idea is that I will die before I get old.
I dunno that seems awful c-c-cold. Are you just trying to cause a big s-s-sensation?
Factors of safety are defined to deal with the probability of things going wrong in a manner that is acceptable to society based on a body of knowledge and experimentation. You can’t just define your own.
Also, just because something is designed for a specific load doesn’t mean it will fail at that load.
The scientific method
At most corporate pizza places only a fraction of the delivery charge goes to the driver. My job, for example, charges $4.99 for delivery and gives the drivers $0.60.
To play devil’s advocate, it’s not just the delivery that’s included in those costs. It’s also the development and maintenance of the ordering platform, vehicle maintenance, etc.
The pizza place doesn’t pay for the vehicle’s maintenance, usually.
Vehicles are generally owned and maintained by the driver. Also, these charges long predate the digital age. They pass them off as paying for maintaining a shitty app for ordering, but it is just a convenience fee, extra money they can make off those of us who are too busy, tired, stuck, or lazy to go pick it up. Always has been, always will be. Proof: if I go the old school way and call in to order it directly they still charge it.
Exactly one pizza place I’ve worked at (pre online ordering) had an adjustable delivery charge based on mileage that went entirely to the driver. However that was a Mom and Pop shop so it doesn’t count for this conversation about corporate pizza.
So young. So naive.
I once interviewed to be a delivery driver for Domino’s and my Dad was adamant it was a bad idea and I should find different work and then insisted that I ask them about insurance if I was going to do it.
It felt super awkward because I was pretty young and people just don’t ask those kinds of questions for minimum wage. He wanted me to ask them if they provided insurance to their drivers when they’re driving cars for them on the clock and explained to me that if there’s an accident while using the car for work then my insurance wouldn’t cover it which I checked and indeed they wouldn’t.
The interviewer said they didn’t provide insurance but asked if I was insured and if I was, wouldn’t I be fine anyway? I said the insurance was not going to cover me while using the car for the job and the guy had this answer in a different tone like a kind of I’ve got this super clever scam that no one’s ever thought of but I’ll let you in on it vibe and leant forward and said “oh yeh, we know what to do here in that situation, what you do is you just say you weren’t working at the time”. I was incredulous but still a nervous teen and kind of meekly protested “but like what about the several pizzas in a bag and the uniform?” And he’s like “oh you just tell them you were on your way home from work and that’s your dinner”. That, along with many other fucked up things that occurred in the brief space of time this interview occupied convinced me to nope out of there.
Yeh dude, I’m going to try and commit insurance fraud… very poorly… for Dominos… who can’t simply provide the necessary protection to allow people to do the job they’re asking them to do. If I have to get my own insurance, if it has to be a special kind of more expensive insurance that’s going to cover me driving for work, then I’m a contractor, not an employee and I’m going to set my own rates and they’re going to be a lot higher then what they were offering considering I also have to maintain my own vehicle and pay for fuel and insurance, to a certain extent I even arguably have to use the skill of knowing how and also being licensed to drive in the first place which makes it not exactly “unskilled” labour in this first place.
Former pizza driver here: Yeah it really does work like that, the cops never ask nor do they report it unless you say “Well there I was, delivering a pizza…” and your insurance company doesn’t send reps to accidents. We had people get in accidents, including me twice, every one was covered by the person’s insurance without question. Nobody cares but the insurance company and everyone from the store to the cops seems to agree “fuck them.” Sure it’s kind of insurance fraud but they deserve it and I never saw anyone get caught in the 10+yr I worked for multiple stores/companies.
Now, your rates going up? That’s a different story. That’ll happen just like any other accident, and for that reason it’s better if the store pays, but that just isn’t how it works at any store nor for Uber/Ubereats, etc.
Yes I figured that that was how it worked when Dad insisted I asked because, although, of course, logically what he was saying made sense, I knew intuitively that that isn’t the world I live in, and that unlike a white collar career, the minimum wage world does not care about making conditions or contracts that would attract or retain employees because they have 100% of the bargaining power and will find a different wage slave if you ask weird and inconvenient questions. That was why it was so awkward and I was reluctant to ask in the first place.
The thing is, while I’m all for a “fuck them” attitude towards insurance companies, if I’m going to commit insurance fraud, even if I think the risks are exceedingly low, I’m not doing it for Dominos, and doing it for them is indeed what’s happening there because in a just world this should obviously be the cost of offering a delivery service and by taking on this legal risk myself (and the burden of the increased premiums in the case of an accident) I’m gifting Dominos, the multinational megacorp, the opportunity to shirk what should definitely be their responsibility.
The insurance issue and terrible amateur legal advice alone wasn’t actually what made me pass on that job, despite really needing it at the time. The rest of the interview was a train wreck in terms of me evaluating them as employers and though they seemed keen to hire me anyway on the basis of me apparently having a pulse, I was fortunate enough not to actually be destitute at the time and so wasn’t obliged to accept the offer.
Medicine is not an exact sience. Every human body is different and will react different to treatment or show different symptoms.
That your doctor couldn’t diagnose you right away or a treatment is not working for you as wanted (or as it did for your neighbor) has most often nothing to do with the competence of the medical personel but with the fact, that your body is not a massproduced machine but 100% unique a änd individual biological mass.
that is only partly true, health system (here) also proposes to make false diagnoses for making money while the really needed treatment is underpayed or not payed at all or - in some cases - not payed at all if some facts change “after” the diagnosis so that the involved doctors spent time and money while afterwards not beeing payed at all. doctors doing false diagnoses (here) are mainly following the systems suggestion to skip real treatment but instead abuse patients.
I feel like you’d have a better conspiracy statement if you at least spelled paid correctly.
That is a pretty big accusation you are putting on health care professionals.
Of course the cost often is a deciding factor on what treatment is possible. I’ve seen this in european hospitals as well, that we couldn’t run certain diagnostics or give certain medications because they were too expensive and would mean the hospital spends more than it gets for the patient.
But what you are saying is that doctors and in consequence nurses, medical technicians and all kind of medical staff are all in on a conspiracy to MISDIAGNOSE ON PURPOUS (!!) causing bodily harm (again on purpous) to their patients in order to get payed by insurance?
Please provide reliable sources and proof for this accusation of significant criminal activity that is apparently the norm in your (“here” means the US I assume?) Health care system.
I understand that your health care system is wack. But the fish stinks from the head and that’s usually not the medical staff providing your care, which you are accusing of serious crimes here.
And now I am thinking how the mrna “vaccines” must have worked for every person or else…
The speed of the conveyor belt does not impact the cycle time. No you cannot fucking slow down the conveyor belt to make it so you can work slower. You can’t speed it up to make people work faster. The speed of the fucking conveyor belt determines how long the things stay on the fucking conveyor belt. If it’s too slow things just stack up on it
Sorry, fucking line workers, managers, and executives in a factory…
Okay I hear you, but have we tried speeding up the conveyor belt?
If you could speed the conveyor belt up, that would be greeeeat.
sighs and speeds it up sure whatever vp,
Just stick a speed module into the workers. That should help. May increase their power consumption though
Expected Factorio.
I am the company IT guy. Not your IT guy.
Solvent green is… puppies
