• 2 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: January 31st, 2025

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  • "It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain. We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation.”

    Translation: “We have no information whatsoever. Based on our complete lack of information, we feel confident is saying this isn’t our fault. This sort of leak could not have been foreseen by anyone, it’s not our fault. While we ‘investigate’, we’ll continue business as usual – taking in large sums of money, demanding all customer private information for even the most trivial service, store that PII insecurely, paying our C-Suite insane amounts of money for failing to keep customer data securely and claiming that there is nothing else we can do. Regards, Customer Service.”





  • You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

    • “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
    • “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
    • “No, you don’t want to do that.”
    • “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
    • etc.

    I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.





  • Honest question: I haven’t used AI much. Are there any AIs or IDEs that can reliably rename a variable across all instances in a medium sized Python project? I don’t mean easy stuff that an editor can do (e.g. rename QQQ in all instances and get lucky that there are no conflicts). I mean be able to differentiate between local and/or library variables so it doesn’t change them, only the correct versions.



  • That sounds like a good plan, except for the cautionary tale of the Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

    Golgafrincham was a planet, once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The descendants of these poets made up tales of impending doom about the planet. The tales varied; some said it was going to crash into the sun, or the moon was going to crash into the planet. Others said the planet was to be invaded by twelve-foot piranha bees and still others said it was in danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat.

    These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

    /s






  • I think C-suite’s maniacal push to be early adopters of an unproven technology reveals just how bereft they are of good ideas.

    Any leader with business sense would say, “Ok, we’re doing good now. Let’s investigate AI and see if/how it can help our business. Also, fuck no I’m not gonna go online to tell everyone what we’re doing because that would only tip off our competition.”

    Instead, what we’re seeing is a large number of C-suites thinking AI is fullfilling their wet-dream of firing everyone else and driving their stock prices to infinity by verbally masturbating in public media.