Posts by tatatata

From Microsoft's website:

"Contoso Corporation is a fictional but representative global manufacturing conglomerate"

"Every project the company runs with Microsoft products and partners finishes on time, within budget, and delivers amazing return on investment."

Can someone explain to me how that can be representative?

[...] due to the blessing and curse of Windows's obsession with backward compatibility.

All those who jumped on the Silverlight bandwagon will question this statement. Many scanners and other devices have prematurely been thrown away because the lack of backwards compatibility. And of course, the stance on backward compatibility with hardware has led to enormous landfill of perfectly good PCs and laptops.

Ok. So now you Brits have rules that require mainstream porn sites to create large databases of personal information to make sure that a lot of people will be embarrassed when those sites have data leaks. All that to prevent children from accidentally stumbling across harmful material.About 93% of all porn sites seems to leak personal information to Google, Facebook and the likes. So users of mainstream porn are already open to that embarrassment with there Google bulb or Facebook suggestions.

But what about sites that actually have content with child abuse? They're illegal anyway, so why would they bother to conform to this act? Perhaps to create an opportunity for blackmail, but that's it. The same goes for other sites with illegal content.

But the luckily, we have VPNs. A child that is using a VPN to access porn is not likely to stumble on porn by accident. In that, the stated purpose of the act is not undermined. So what's the problem? Anyway, at some time in the future, Great Britain will introduce a law for key escrow, so VPNs will then no longer be a problem.

"Until now, kids could easily stumble across porn and other online content that’s harmful to them without even looking for it."

Well, that has now been remediated. The installation and use of a VPN will ensure that the children will only see the porn when they are looking for it. So, we might be complaining, but in the end, the rules do what they ought t do.

Unless the children stumble across some non-mainstream porn site, ofcourse.

"This PC is slow because it's used for gaming," he pronounced.

How did he know? Is that a clue about who installed the game?

Well, it is clear that is was quite a few years back. To put things in perspective, it is around the time that only half of the population had Internet, not every schoolboy with a phone. Amazon was then still a technical company, as I understood it.

If you take down Amazon now, you won't get a second chance anymore.

Yes. AI is the new all encompassing rationale to do everything. At the moment, I do not see that AI will actually reduce the need for real people. We've had an article showing that programming with AI makes it slower. We've seen AI invent court-cases etc.

But Amazon is clearly a believer and goes all-in. We'll see in a couple of years. Then Amazon will be known as the Big Visionary Company, who had made the right choice at the right moment, or as the stupid company that lost it all betting on a hype.

Context?

"The study involved 16 experienced developers who work on large, open source projects. "

That is hardly representative for the developer community. The number of 16 is very low. And most developers have low- to mid-level experience. They work on small parts of projects, in general fulfilling their scrum-ticket only. They do that as their job, 9-5 and do not have the passion of people working on open source projects. I would even suggest, that those kind of developers can be replaced by AI, eventually (but not yet).

Where AI programming helps me is when I need to code in a language that I do not master sufficiently. I won't use AI for bash or Perl, but I used it for javascript, and specifically because I'm not an experienced programmer in that language.

I once had to review the security of a physical security system made by a reputable firm in that domain.

In the morning, we had presentations on how safe the badges were, how everything was encrypted, and how people could see their own entry times etcetera.

Lunch, and then demo.

The salesperson logged in and showed his access times. The URL was https://some.name/something?p=1234321. Asked what that number was; it was his personnel number. Asked the personnel number of the other salesperson and filled that in and had instantly access to the other's access times without new login. Scared white faces from sales persons. 10 seconds to break the system, without f12.

And that was made by a reputable firm, not a car salesman. Granted: end of the previous century, but still.

"This practice is contrary to Dalhousie University's Scholarly Misconduct Policy"

Congratulations to Dalhousie University who, to my knowledge, is the first to include anti LLM-spoofing rules in their Scholarly Misconduct Policy.

But I find it strange that a policy should explicitly forbid smoking-out lazy scholars who don't do their work.

Always, when the transition to the Linux desktop is suggested, I see reactions that explain why it won't be done, because a certain application does not work under Linux. Here it is Fusion 3D. Often it is photoshop. And always, there is an alternative under Linux, but the alternative is not as well developed as the WIndows software.

Yes, there are still reasons to use Windows. But most of us do not use Fusion 3D. And, for anyone shooting in JPEG, GIMP is quite sufficient. If I look at my day-to-day work, the only reason that I use Windows is, that the organisation that I work for has sold their soul to Microsoft.

Do you want Cookies?

We've seen this behaviour already for a long time with cookies. The law makers thought, that it was a good idea that all users would be permanently annoyed by pop-ups asking you to confirm that you want cookies.

So how do we implement that?

For every web page that you visit, we'll be using cookies. We no longer do simple static web pages, because then we would not be able to use cookies. And we produce a choice: accept or determine which cookies you want: necessary cookies, functional cookies, commercial cookies, third party cookies, legitimate interest cookies, optional cookies. Why is there no "accept under duress" button?

Are any cookies necessary? No, the web developer could use alternatives, from local storage to HTML form hidden variables.

What are functional cookies? We must assume that all cookies have a function, even if it is only to share information. Do you also have dysfunctional cookies?

WTF are Legitimate Interest cookies?

Et cetera.

And now certain apps will also request your permission to use cookies. Because the current model of asking all sorts of permissions (why does Temu need to read my phone directory?) was not already annoying enough.

Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy famously quipped to reporters in 1999: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

Most people got over it. They sold their soul to Apple, Microsoft, Google and the likes. No, I don't care is an add-slinger knows my location, as long as I get the right directions from Google Maps. Yes, I could by a paper map, but why bother?

I need to replace a number of desktops, because the company I work for has sold its soul to Microsoft, and the old ones are just too old. And I need to get to get our users enthusiastic enough to let me replace their trusty old Windows 10 desktop. The only story I can tell at the moment is the fact that our policy requires them to have a fully supported version running.

AI or Real?

The question whether it is AI or real is a bit more difficult on LinkedIn. Some points to consider.

Recruiters and HR require a specific language and a specific set of incantations. Divert from that and you might not get invited for your next job. Do not write "use", but "utilize" , things like that.

"Thought leaders" are in general people with little or no actual skills. They subsists by copying each others "inspirational" quotes. It is therefore easy to confuse them with AI.

Someone else's number

I once had, as a work phone, a recycled number from some for of internal legal desk of the police. People calling me in the night blurting out specific details about police actions before I could react. It takes a few of those calls before you understand what is going on. Called the police, changed number.

Let's start coding:

While (some condition) {

<single keypress tab>do something

}

or

While (some condition) {

<pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><pres a space>do something

}

or even worse:

While (some condition) {

<pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><pres a space><press one space too many><backspace>do something

}

So for me, it is tabs.

Once again, an Agile apologist reacts to an observation about the bad side of agile. And guess what: it is not Agile's fault. Here the observation is how Agile kills innovation. Of course it does. Every engineering methodology kills, or at least maims innovation.Waterfall did, extreme programming did, and Agile too. Innovation IS locked in the frozen meat store of Agile. No engineering method is a substitute for thinking.

Ofcourse, there is the car-analogy, because everybody accepts that programming is the same as making or driving cars. "Devops can be a car crash, but car crashes are rarely the fault of the car."

The problem is "None of that will help if you’re still trying to fix old problems in the old ways. That’s been done." And Agile, dating from 2001 has become an old way of doing things.

And yes, if people understand and can work on a full stack, like security engineers that have been exempt from scrum and agile, that would help. It would make large projects harder though.

When we were young, we searched for naughty words in the dictionary. They were there. This "research" is something of the same order.

Oh, by the way, the Encyclopedia Britannica also describes in sufficient details what a Molotov cocktail is.

C-suite (including RedHat's as I read recently) will turn to mcKinsey, who states that it is fine to "unleash developer productivity with generative AI", especially in four key areas:

- Expediting manual and repetitive work

- Jump-starting the first draft of new code

- Accelerating updates to existing code

- Increasing developers’ ability to tackle new challenges

Those who code should document really good where management pushed them into using AI without all the additional checks. It may become an issue in court.