If anything i18n makes things way worse for everyone. Ever tried to diagnose a semi-obscure Windows or Android error on a non-English locale? Pretty sure that’s one of the activities in the inner circles of Hell. Bonus points if the error message is obviously machine-translated and therefore semantically meaningless.
Unique error codes fix this if they remain visible to the user, which they usually don’t because Mr Project Manager thinks it looks untidy.
We can argue on whether it’s a “bug” outright (since it is technically a correct implementation of a faulty design), but Boeing’s MCAS pitching the plane based on the input of a singular faulty sensor has probably caused billions in direct damages, and billions more in reputational damage.
NULL references (which Crowdstrike is an instance of) are often referred to as “the billion dollar mistake”, but the actual cost of “historical” languages skimping out on optionally-nullable types is certainly in the trillions.
I looked into it after this year’s massive price hike… There’s no meaningful alternative. We’re on the FOSS version of GitLab now (GitLab-CE), but the lack of code ownership / multiple reviewers / etc. is a real pain and poses problems with accountability.
Honestly there are not that many features in Gitlab EE that are truly necessary for a corporate environment, so a GitLab-CE fork may be able to set itself apart by providing those. To me there are two hurdles:
Honestly I think I’d be happy if forgejo supported gitlab-runner, that seems like a much more reasonable ask given the clean interface between runner and server. Maybe I should experiment with that…
All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we’ll have to have it at some point. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn’t make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company’s part.
There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike’s. Instead we’re happy to shrug and move on when management doesn’t even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn’t sound particularly outlandish to me.
But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.
Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.
Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they’re buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is “Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials”.
Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.
If the dev is “the guy who presses the ‘go live’ button” then he’s an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that “go live” button.
As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything… If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we’d be surprised).
I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but “blame” is not the same as “consequences” and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that “low likelihood, big impact” corner.
Because likely when the problem happens (again) they’ll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.
What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer’s recommendation).
Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).
However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.
Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.
The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down
I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).
So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
I would be very surprised if it wasn’t voluntary, as far as I know each Wiki is maintained independently with very little oversight.
I remember when “new” Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.
My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.
You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.
This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.
Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.
City with a metropolitan area of 600k:
Yesterday I went to IKEA (i.e. suburb-to-suburb). Google Maps said:
So… Technically it is possible. However no-one does this unless they are forced to by their circumstances. We’ve begun building one tram line and the construction process has gone so catastrophically the entire country knows about it. At this rate the urban transition away from the car will be done by 2250.
I’ve read the exact same comment a year ago, and the year before, and probably the year before that tbh.
So I’ll say what I always say; I’ll believe it when I see it.
“Color terminal” isn’t a thing. Applications can choose to output ANSI escape codes which most terminal emulators will render as color changes. Whether and which colors get used depends on the value of $TERM, which informs the application of the capabilities of the terminal emulator.
So if your remote servers don’t have color, either $TERM isn’t being set or its value is unknown to the server. Most modern terminal emulators support at least the same escape codes as xterm-256color though so you can always try to export that.
I’m just surprised the purists aren’t all up in arms that this isn’t KISS and that it doesn’t fit in their 80x24 teletype.
… sorry, guess I’m not over that whole systemd “debate”.
That statement ITSELF is American cultural Imperialism. There are a bunch of languages other than English on Wikipedia…
Also [citation needed].
Anyone can fork at any time. The US gov could theoretically hold Wikipedia’s brand and servers hostage, but the actually valuable stuff is already mirrored in a decentralized fashion that is completely unrestricted under US and international law.
EDIT: Maybe you meant that the US could covertly vandalize Wikipedia? Maybe, if they keep it very low-key. Editors are used to this kind of stuff though, it happens all the time from all governments since they can just, y’know, edit it. Anything actually impactful will be noticed by the editors which will just cause a fork.
… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.
Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated.
thisengineiswoke.jpg.Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.
The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.