Anyone who is overly zealous about anything is always wrong in the end. Including testing.
"Why would people mock everything? Why not stand up a real test db and test on it?" Because the test zealous have explicitly declared that EACH test should be atomic. Yes you can find these people at major tech conferences. Each test should mock its own db, web service, etc. Every single time. And it should do that in no more than a few milliseconds, so that the entire project compiles in no more than 2mins, even for the largest and most complex corporate projects. And these tests should be fully end-to-end, even for complex microservices across complex networking architecture.
Some of you may be rolling on the floor laughing at how naive and time-consuming such a project would be.
We all agree such testing is a noble goal. But you need a team of absolute geniuses who do nothing but write "clever" code all day to get there in any sizeable project.
My organization won't hire or pay those people, no matter what they say about having 100% coverage. We just do the best we can, cheat, and lower the targets as necessary.
Lets not forget how long it would take to spin up an enterprise database, even in memory, there are hundreds (or thousands) of tables. Also there can be multiple databases with their own schema, and each require a fair amount of data in some of those tables just to do anything..
This is true of literally everything in the new economy.
Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
I had T-Mobile starting in ~2003 and it included unlimited tethering.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
For anyone who might not be aware, this is true for most companies. Any changes to your plan will usually require the removal of any grandfathered features, regardless of what the tier 1 CSR tells you.
Why accept oral promises when a contract with the term is definitely available? I guess you didn't record the conversation so why not giving the papers a look?
"Your call may be recorded for quality assurance," is ubiquitous when calling the official sales/support number for any US company.
However, every single one of those call centers _also_ instructs their employees to hang up immediately if they are told (or have good reason to suspect) that the _customer_ is recording the conversation. It sounds hypocritical (and it is), but this rule comes from the company's legal department, whose sole job is to shield the company from legal liability.
When I’m recording (usually using the Rev app on iPhone if its not particularly sensitive or legally confidential information) I always start the human conversation with something like “hey so this call is recorded right? Thats what the message told me when I picked up. Just double-checking that we should consider this call to be recorded?”
I figure that it is completely legally unnecessary but it guarantees there’s an understanding between all human participants to expect a recording, which brings it in line with my own personality morality when conversing with an “innocent / relatively powerless human” (my morality exceeds the ethical and legal framework we operate in).
> You don't have to tell them. You're dealing with the company, not the individual employee. If the company is recording the call, so can you.
The whole point of "this call may be recorded" is to establish consent between both parties. In two-party consent states (caller or recipient), you still have to establish consent to record.
If you're calling from a 1-party consent state to a 1-party consent state, you don't have to tell them, although I don't know how that works legally with call center routing.
If they’ve already told you that they’re recording, hasn’t consent already been established? You don’t need to ask again. It’s not like they’ve gotten consent for themselves to record, but not you.
My understanding is that intent needs to be established for any recording. If you establish consent and the second party records without consent I'm not sure where that stands but the spirit of the law seems to suggest every party must consent to every recording.
> They don't specify that it may not be you that records it. They are consenting.
My - not a lawyer - understanding of consent laws is they're tied somewhat to privacy expectation laws.
If I tell you I am recording you, your expectation of privacy is lessened. But mine isn't, necessarily, because I control the recording and its potential dissemination.
Right but that's less important than telling the other party that anyone might be recorded. Because, again, spirit of the law, it loosens expectations of privacy.
Given there are only two parties on the call, only one needs their consent solicited anyway.
Many states in the US do not allow calls to be recorded unless all parties on the call consent to being recorded. There is no distinction (that I am aware of) between companies and natural persons in those laws. In those states, you can _technically_ record a call without consent, but my guess is that if you try to use it as evidence, you open yourself up to being prosecuted for wire fraud or somesuch.
I can't find an app that lets me record both sides of the conversation on Android. Only my side. When I looked into, it seems that Google has disabled that part of the API that apps cannot record both sides of a conversation.
Does anyone know of a reliable way to record conversations?
I got around this by paying for a VoIP line and running 3cx to utilize it, 3cx can record calls. I've never actually done it - not even to test - because right around the time i got it set up covid hit and the people i used to spend 1-2 hours a day talking to on the phone about tech and other interesting things stopped having to drive to work so my phone usage is now down to maybe 4 hours a month on private calls that no one else would be interested in.
Technically i've been paying for a voip line for 20 years, and shoehorning it into 3cx was mostly to allow my young kid to be able to call his aunt or someone who isn't on our PBX (grandma and grandpa and his siblings are, already).
believe me i was really annoyed when android stopped being able to reliably record calls. Another alternative that i did actually use is a 3 channel breakout connector on my cellphone, a DAC/ADC, PC microphone and headphones. You could tell the OS to "monitor" the microphone, and record mix (remember those days?). Or now-a-days you'd have to use VAC(virtual audio cable) or something to manage the routing. Speaker out goes to mic in on phone, and vice versa, hit record on your PC, and both the remote side and your side will be recorded. I never got too deep into this because it's a huge hassle unless you have a phone just for this; but multi-channel recordings would let you have synchronous audio, for, say, correct transcriptions.
I’ve worked for those call centres and they don’t tell employees to hang up if it’s being recorded by the customer, because the company is already recording everything and trains their staff to operate as such.
“Cool you are recording too, IT will be happy we have an offsite backup”
That’s been recorded!
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
Apple devices go on sale on other platforms (I only look at Amazon, but it must be the same for any other retailer), that's how they differentiate.
As device registration and customer support still goes through Apple, it makes absolutely no difference wherever you buy it, and anyone looking for a lower price will wait for Prime day or any other bigger sales in the year.
Exactly. When I bought a pair of USB-C AirPods Pro recently they were 70 dollars cheaper from Best Buy vs Apple's website and I was able to add AppleCare with no issue.
They appear to currently be 60 dollars cheaper and have been in a sort of perma sale of varying degrees for the last 6 months (not unlike the Lenovo example).
It’s a marketing tactic way broader than the “new economy”
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose.
Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
> Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
There's no need to be worried about it. Don't just threaten, actually switch when a competitor is having a promo and stop worrying about it. I switched internet service between a few providers almost every year for quite a while. It saved a lot of money.
up until 2022 i had 2 options, dialup, or 5mbit DSL. I don't consider hughesnet workable for anything other than email (seriously, 1500ms latency on a good day?)
As siblings comment, this only works if you're not a captive audience.
Hasn't ever been an issue. I live in Canada, though, so our competition sucks and all our providers are in collusion with the regulator (CRTC) to fuck over canadians.
Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.
Baba Is You would be perfect for teaching people security, penetration testing, and so on.
Lateral thinking puzzles are underrated, and orgs mostly punish lateral thinkers. Even though the lateral thinker is going to catch way more bugs. They will also generate more bug reports by doing so, and that's bad for numbers, stop that.
Or the old FANG hiring problem. "How would you implement a binary search tree for this problem, and do it only on a Google doc, no auto complete."
Good programmer: "I would never do that. That sounds horrible. Who thought of this?"
I love a good lateral thinking puzzle, but in my experience too many of them wind up being "read the author's mind" guessing games and misleadingly-worded "gotcha" silliness instead of actual exercises in thinking about a problem.
Have you played some of the pure puzzle video games out there? Many of them involve meta layers and secrets that involve lateral thinking and epiphany to progress in.
What about Go, or Checkers, or Call of Duty, or...?
That's the issue. Yes sitting down and concentrating on difficult tasks for long periods of time is good exercise. So is jogging, which isn't sitting down. Or rowing. Or lifting weights. Or...
Chess probably has much less benefits than learning a musical instrument, for example.
DuoLingo is deceptive at best. It's made addictive at the outset so you feel good. You feel like you're learning. But long term the platform has what is now dubbed enshittification. It gets exponentially harder to keep up with reviews, there are known problems with the lesson structure that will never be addressed, etc. And if you pay money, they'll make it easier for you. Hm.
Real critique example: Duo relies on 1:1 translation. Native language learning isn't even close to 1:1. Every language learner hits a point where they can say, "I know exactly what this phrase means in the target language, and there is no direct translation in English". To finish a language in Duo, you will have to memorize dozens/hundreds+ of totally misleading and bad translations like this.
Tldr. Selling kids DuoLingo for language learning is like selling kids cigarettes to help them learn to build a fire.
Demake in modern times is often used for example with porting DOOM to (insert electronic device like a temperature sensor that shouldn't normally play games). Since the target platform has less features, it's not a re-make, it's a de-make. This could also be for more academic purposes, like "what kind of game would we make if we deleted all the guns out of DOOM".
But it comes from the old days of gaming. You could play an amazing fighting game at the arcade, but the home console had considerably less power. So the home version of that game might be very limited.
Back then we would just call that a port. Port was used to mean taking something from its native platform and putting it on something else, which was rarely an upgrade. Putting an NES/famicom game onto Genesis/master system would involve upgrades (sprite capability) and side or downgrades (sound chip differences).
Port today generally means a game has the same quality across all platforms, barring the bare facts of hardware capability. So de-make now often means a port with some intentional limitation. "I know a digital home pregnancy test can't run DOOM, but can it run enough to be playable?"
DOOM on a pregnancy test is still a port and not a demake.
A demake is not specifically on more primitive hardware but is in a morr primitive style that may run on more primitive hardware.
People naming distros like it's 4chan from 20 years ago. Redhat and Gentoo. Oh my.
Linux Mint, Pop, and more, all now provide "Windows without MS" which is what most users really want/need. Even with gaming now that Steam has multiple ways to run on Linux. You can put grandpa in front of some Linux boxes today and he won't notice the difference.
Debian, BSD, etc. I totally get you want the most stable thing going. You like to pretend that memorizing arcane spells for 20 years is the same as intuitive. I get it. I run some remote stuff on a BSD box. I don't know a single serious command without a lookup. But it's stable. I thank the guy who made a cheat sheet for common commands.
Even on the security front though, the tinfoils are doing weird containerized OSes and stuff now. Opening a browser tab can spawn a whole sandboxed OS in seconds. Your pitifully out of date Debian repo doesn't really stack up anymore.
Basically. You can run a modern OS that doesn't suck to use. And that OS can be Linux. With Windows 10+ poised to drive many away from MS, distros need to get with the times and be ready for the masses.
Or. "Serious users will move to X" is a bad argument from the 1990s. Newbies have an OS that pros can enjoy. And if I want to run Debian, I can fire it up in a sandbox or whatever. It's the 21st century. It's not like I have to wait for physical media to spin up to install a live copy.
ALL interfaces are learned, CLI or UI makes no difference.
What's intuitive is how much previously learned interactions are reusable.
This is a big reason why macos sucks for example - it does everything its own way. The keyboard, the dock, the app structure, the apis, the menu bar. It's all non-transferable.
I agree that "Windows without MS" is generally the desired state of a UI
BUT
which Windows? XP style? 7? 10? 11?
Windows itself isn't consistent with the Windows UI.
How's the goal of using a UI that re-uses learned behaviors going? UI changes far more than CLI. X11 to Wayland, KDE3 to 4 to 6. Gnome 2 to 3 to 40... it's a real struggle to keep your UI the way you like it. You will be forced by external pressures to adopt a new UI at some point. As much as I loved Firefox 3 and Opera 11, they're impossible to use on the modern web and so I must use the new and worse UI of modern firefox or vivaldi.
But through this entire history I just presented, has "cp" changed? "ls"?
Yes, they aren't intuitive. But none of the above is. Yet, they did not change, so they are learned once and reused until the end of time.
Yet, in the CLI world, what did change? init to systemd, alsa to pulse to pipewire, and more.
That stuff is just as annoying, and it's nice that debian does not stagnate but does not advance too quickly here either.
> Debian, BSD, etc. I totally get you want the most stable thing going. You like to pretend that memorizing arcane spells for 20 years is the same as intuitive.
Or you could just... use the graphical frontends that have been available for decades now? I wasn't daily-driving 20 years ago, but I can personally tell you that 15 years ago Ubuntu was perfectly good as a Windows replacement, including being able to use it through the GUI. Successive iterations may well have improved things, but even then Mint and pop-os are built on top of Ubuntu, which is in turn on top of Debian, and every year more of their improvements move upstream.
It's both. Especially the out of context tinfoil rage response. They always existed. But now it's so common to see some totally benign article about pizza, and the top comment is "don't let them tell you not to remember in 1995 when US implanted radios in Syrian babies".
The algorithm is being trained solely for engagement. It is horrifying.
This sounds completely unrelated. If someone is really leaving a comment like that, it has nothing to do with the article and everything to do with the way weirdos engage with the internet.
The Slop is the wordy vapid garbage that maximizes SEO.
Parent is right though: AI slop in an article is to maximize SEO. AI slop in a comment is a weird jumble of implausible claims to maximize engagement. I see both on a daily basis now.
Agree. Content was the OG slop. Buzzfeed with monkeys on typewriters.
The problem is that dopamine addicts generate outsized engagement. I know a literal crack mom who spends a solid 90+ hours a week watching accident videos to keep her brain triggered. The algorithm caters to her. Send promotional emails daily or more, constant notifications, recommend the same few videos over and over. Gotta get in there before she clicks another car crash video.
IMHO: Marketing is a top societal evil right now. If the media machine wasn't so desperate for content, AI wouldn't be a fraction of the problem it is. But with everyone obsessing over the next piece of content, fake AI presentations are mandatory.
Hmm. An AI trained to maximize dopamine could be a very bad thing. (It won't be stated that way. It will be trained to "maximize engagement", but it amounts to the same thing.)
> An AI trained to maximize dopamine could be a very bad thing.
Spelled "profitable". This is definitely something that's already happened/happening; see algorithmic timelines and the widespread sudden legalization and acceptance of gambling.
Our brains have been under attack for years. Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and company have already spent decades and billions doing just that. With capabilities already in the AI realm.
"Why would people mock everything? Why not stand up a real test db and test on it?" Because the test zealous have explicitly declared that EACH test should be atomic. Yes you can find these people at major tech conferences. Each test should mock its own db, web service, etc. Every single time. And it should do that in no more than a few milliseconds, so that the entire project compiles in no more than 2mins, even for the largest and most complex corporate projects. And these tests should be fully end-to-end, even for complex microservices across complex networking architecture.
Some of you may be rolling on the floor laughing at how naive and time-consuming such a project would be.
We all agree such testing is a noble goal. But you need a team of absolute geniuses who do nothing but write "clever" code all day to get there in any sizeable project.
My organization won't hire or pay those people, no matter what they say about having 100% coverage. We just do the best we can, cheat, and lower the targets as necessary.