Yeah as I expected you’re projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.

I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).

Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.

You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.

(Of course that’s not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)

Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn’t mean it’s an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.

I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.

It’s not about the bindings. It’s, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.

Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina’s breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.

IMO the proper thing to do is to answer the question and make damn sure the poster isn’t falling for the XY Problem.

Sometimes the weird solution is justified by a weird context, and we gotta treat people like adults. But also, you’re probably asking the wrong question.

Like, I can tell you how to disconnect your bike’s brake lines, but if you’re asking how to do that with no context I would most definitely like to know what problem you think you’re solving.

Socialists have been the go-to vote of the proletariat in Europe since the early 1900s, and most of these parties were in power at some point or another since 2000.

However these parties have fallen off a cliff in popularity, and the reason why will depend heavily on who you ask but it boils down to “workers don’t feel represented by socialists”.

• The socio-economic landscape moved on since 1917, but the left-end of socialists did not. Orthodox Marxism says tertiary sector workers are basically part of the bourgeoisie (I’ve had Extremely Online Marxists explain that one to me with a straight face, so as an IT worker I’m afraid to say I am not allowed to partake in any True Socialism because I do not sell my Labor).
• Conversely the “center-left” socialists are hardcore neoliberals (who just happen to think that some social programs serve the neoliberal agenda) and their policies have therefore failed to meaningfully curb the degradation of public services and standards of living.
• The Left™ got stuck in the trap of being pigeonholed as “pro-immigration” during what most people felt like was immigration crisis. Doesn’t matter how you feel about it, this culture war bullshit has profoundly hurt their polling scores and benefited bigots.
• Parties with an internally democratic governance have been dreadfully slow to react to changes in the political landscape in the past 25 years. Retirees are voting in the primaries whereas extremist parties are led by autocrats who fully understand how to capitalize on online media attention (hence the better polling numbers of the far-right with thr youth).

Fighting fascists with “but socialists good for proletariat” is worse-than-useless. Voters know what socialists stand for, and that’s kind of the problem because they feel it hasn’t helped. People don’t have hope in traditional European socialist policies, and only vote red out of tradition or as a barrage vote against the far-right.

ls -l /proc/xxx/{fd,syscall}

Camera pans down to resource locks hiding under the floorboards

Good news: where I live we don’t build our houses out of paper and spit and I’d find it very entertaining to see a critter eat through a solid 40 cm of bricks and mortar.

Bad news: Where I live there are no porcupines :(

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.

Fascists don’t win on facts and logic, they win on affect.

He says one thing about guns, but means something about hurting minorities. His electorate only cares about the second part. Literally anything you could argue about the first part is worse than useless, because through sheer power of denial they’ll revert to affect on this well-practiced talking point (”Trump love guns, Trump hate [insert slur here], Trump just like me"). You can’t win on this battlefield, no matter how objectively and obviously right you are.

That’s why “Trump is weird” is so unbelievably more effective than “Trump is a rapist”, “Trump is a fascist”, “Trump is a criminal” or “Trump is a traitor”. Pointing out his weirdness directly undermines his affect. “We’re not going back” calls back to the constant feeling of dread of his presidency. Ironically when dealing with humans, but especially when dealing with fascists, affect and core values are more important and less malleable than facts.

You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.

IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.

There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on https://teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

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:

• Legal uncertainties (do we need a clean room implementation to make sure Gitlab Inc doesn’t sue for re-implementing the EE-only features into a Gitlab fork?)
• The enormous complexity of the GitLab codebase will make any fork, to put it mildly, a major PITA to maintain. 2,264 people work for GitLab FFS (with hundreds in dev/ops), it’s indecent.

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…

Just live in a country which refuses to acknowledge cell broadcast exists, then you’ll die in peaceful silence in the next national emergency while operators take several hours to to send 11 million unicast SMS.

Taps forehead

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).