Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
Im just glad you got that reference
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.
Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah
Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.
Truth
The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.
INB4 “It always has been.”
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.
Do you have any examples of problems currently lacking a (plausible) software solution?
I think it started with registry cleaners.
Those weren’t really pushed as a get-rich-quick scheme, which a lot of the hustle seems to be currently.
Oh, you’re thinking of crypto to junk. Nah, Fudge That.
It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.
I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)
I’d say the difference is that every single part of an airline is carefully rated though. Everything that’s supplied for use on an airline is expensive because of all the regulations.
A ladder may be rated for 1200 pounds, but nobody inspects every single use-case for that ladder and ensures that the entire system always has 4x safety. Once you buy the ladder it’s up to you what you lean it up against, etc.
Regulations and quality checks on aerospace parts is no joke. More so on stuff that goes out into space and on military hardware, but every single nut and bolt and everything in between can be traced back to a supplier and that supplier will be able to tell you when it was made, by who and even where the raw material came from and show you the certs. Regular airplanes not nearly as strict or as much paperwork, but it isn’t that far behind, quite honestly.
Also, you might be surprised by the testing that ladders go through. Not so much the cheapo Chinesium stuff, but safety in all fields is no joke. It is too costly to skimp on testing.
I used to believe this, but recent incidents have exposed systemic issues in engineering and QA at at least one major US aerospace manufacturer.
When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has “come down with the flu”, that’s industry code for “got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform”.
I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn’t provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might’ve purchased from our local street dealers lol.
The next day in the papers, the headline says “[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak” 🙃 Yes, of course
I always wondered why Paul Westerberg caught the flu so much. When I finally got to see him live a few years ago he definitely was coming down with the flu on stage.
Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”
Psst, that’s another secret
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.
I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.
No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.
Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.
Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.
It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.
It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.
I’m with the above commenter. I’ve worked at many companies of various sizes, from small local shops up to international corporations, including at least one contractor for the US military.
Every one of them had rules and policies and training on security, to varying degrees. But at every one of them, I’d find some vulnerability, or instance where someone was neglecting security. Each time, I’d bring it to the attention of someone in management. Each time (with one company as exception), those warnings would be “heard” and “passed up the chain”, and then nothing would happen. Only one company in 20 years of work actually fixed a security issue I found. And no company I’ve ever worked for was leak proof.
In my experience, until it threatens to cost a company much more money in losses than it would cost to fix the problem, but said problem will not get fixed. That’s profit motive. And often it seems they’d rather roll the dice until a loss occurs, and then (maybe) fix the issue.
I’ve worked at plenty of companies with exfil protection and people still did this. One has 100 devs and 500 total employees
After the staff are done drinking coffee for the night, we only brew decaf. If you want caffeinated coffee close to closing time at a restaurant, ask for an Americano or other espresso drink.
Teacher - school districts are so afraid of getting sued that unless a kid is physically assaulting another student we have absolutely nothing we can do about it (even then, no guarantees). If your kid goes to a public school, all of your kids classes have one or two students that are allowed to do essentially whatever they want with no consequences.
Cell phone addiction is also huge. A lot of the “learning loss” being blamed on Covid is in part just the fact that students spend class watching TikTok’s or bullying each other in group chats. Don’t fucking text your kid during class. Vaping is as predominant as smoking was in the 80s.
Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.
For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.
Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won’t cover them.
Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they’re worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they’re getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.
Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren’t properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.
Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven’t realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn’t call you out on your bullshit, let’s you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.
Magazines are routinely reprinting articles from the last year every year again, slightly changed. Especially timeless stuff like “Why is tick season so bad this year?” or “This is how you bake the perfect apple pie”.
There are stock news site that churn out “why did $STOCK move in $DIRECTION” filled with bullshit speculation. I bet it was mostly automated even before chatGPT and has gotten much worse now.
Yeah ad sites. Usually they steal blog posts on the topic. Or just copy paste the top SEO spot. Then they highjack the spot and rake in the clicks.
Like 60% of the first page results in an engine are often these types of sites. They add nothing but noise.
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
Technically not my industry anymore, but: companies that sell human-generated AI training data to other companies most often are selling data that a) isn’t 100% human generated or b) was generated by a group of people pretending to belong to a different demographic to save money.
To give an example, let’s say a company wants a training set of 50,000 text utterances of US English for chatbot training. More often than not, this data will be generated using contract workers in a non-US locale who have been told to try and sound as American as possible. The Philippines is a common choice at the moment, where workers are often paid between $1-2 an hour: more than an order of magnitude less what it would generally cost to use real US English speakers.
In the last year or so, it’s also become common to generate all of the utterances using a language model, like ChatGPT. Then, you use the same worker pool to perform a post-edit task (look at what ChatGPT came up with, edit it if it’s weird, and then approve it). This reduces the time that the worker needs to spend on the project while also ensuring that each datapoint has “seen a set of eyes”.
Obviously, this makes for bad training data – for one, workers from the wrong locale will not be generating the locale-specific nuance that is desired by this kind of training data. It’s much worse when it’s actually generated by ChatGPT, since it ends up being a kind of AI feedback loop. But every company I’ve worked for in that space has done it, and most of them would not be profitable at all if they actually produced the product as intended. The clients know this – which is perhaps why it ends up being this strange facade of “yep, US English wink wink” on every project.
Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we’re just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.
Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe.
That’s why you never live nearby a freeway or major highway.
People brake less often on highways?
Have you seen a highway in Los Angeles during rush hour?
…Have you seen almost any other highway in the U.S. ever?
