AnAmericanPotato

joined 5 months ago
[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.

See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

everyone and their mother uses VS Code

This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.

This doesn't seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The solution to the whitespace gripe is strictly enforced formatting standards with a git hook running a manually invokable script.

Throwing a linter into the pipeline just hardcodes the formatting at that point in the pipeline. That doesn't really solve the issue, which is that style is not a one-size-fits-all concept, and displaying text appropriately is really the job of a text editor. To quote PEP 8, "default wrapping in most tools disrupts the visual structure of the code". In other words, "most tools" suck at displaying code, because they are not language-aware. That's the real problem. Hardcoding style is a workaround, not a solution.

That said, I wouldn't consider intelligent editors to be a replacement for formatting standards, either. Ideally my text editor would display my Python code the way I like it, and then save to disk in accordance to PEP 8.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

4 is sheer madness. 1 is common sense. 2 is just the cooler version of 1.

I've always found hardcoded style to be an obnoxious and counterproductive paradigm. It's the text editor's job to handle line wrapping, and there's no reason a coding editor shouldn't be able to format code intelligently. I hate hard line breaks that do not have meaning. Not everybody is using the same size windows! It's 2024! We have the technology!

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Honestly, I don't find this very creepy. This is information you are already putting out there for everyone to see. If I post a video of myself speaking, I am not concerned about people seeing how my skin vibrates in that video.

As video generation tools become more advanced, we will need better algorithms to validate videos. The bar for "fooling the vast majority of humans" is much, much lower than the bar for "being literally indistinguishable from a real video". The main problem I see is that it's going to be a cat-and-mouse game, and I don't think any method you publish will remain valid for very long in practice. The same method will be used to improve the next version of video generators.

Also, lots of real videos use post-processing that might wash out some of the details they are looking for. Video producers might re-record lines so they don't perfectly match the video to begin with. It's been a long time since I used a Samsung phone, but on my old S6, I remember that it always had a beauty filter applied to the selfie camera that made me me look like a creepy porcelain doll. I could probably make a deepfake of myself that looks more "real" than those real videos and photos.

If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I’m going to either assume you run a bot network, you’re trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.

Or you are unfortunate enough to share a subnet with someone who got on Cloudflare's bad side, in which case there is basically no recourse.

There are a million legitimate reasons to use a VPN, for example, but Cloudflare doesn't care.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You're right, but I think there's a lot of overlap here. Large businesses are not laser-focused and are not rational actors.

Someone pitched this as a way to make money. Someone believed that was plausible and approved it. But the motivation for even pitching it was likely a step or two removed from that.

Executives and middle managers are not above bullshitting to justify their salaries.

[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The "problem" of having more people than we have meaningful work for. This is not a new problem, but it is increasingly exacerbated by automation. So we manufacture bullshit work just to keep busy, because we've decided people shouldn't have food or shelter if they're not doing work, bullshit or not.

The world would be better off if whoever got paid to plan and implement this instead got paid to just stay in bed. The economy is fundamentally broken.

view more: ‹ prev next ›