rlamacraft @rlamacraft@social.cleverlibre.org
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
rlamacraft
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On post-mortems:
It’s fine to say “who did what” to understand the context, but any system that catastrophically failed due to a human mistake, is a brittle system.
The blame sits with the system, not the human.
rlamacraft
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XKCD cartoon.
WE FIGURED OUT THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT CLOSER To THE START OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTiON THAN To TODAY.
rlamacraft
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"Engineers hate writing tests". I don't know who you're talking about, but they ain't software engineers.
How is introducing a smoke free generation not straight up age discrimination? The way that this isn’t even getting a robust debate makes me feel like a radical libertarian.
"The use of the Gregorian calendar as the wire format in this specification is an arbitrary choice resulting from the cultural biases of those involved in the decision." -- https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/common-microsyntaxes.html#dates-and-times
I’m yet to form an opinion on HTMX, but one thing it does make clear is how neglected HTML has been by the standards people compared to CSS and JS.
rlamacraft
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TIL Girl Scout cookies are manufactured by multi-billion dollar conglomerates, with American girls simply acting as middle-men. No wonder MLMs and franchisees are so common in the States when girls are taught that entrepreneurship is just reselling…
rlamacraft
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“Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day. Teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime.” – David Leinweber, Mathematician and Berkeley Computer Science Professor
#computerscience #programming
rlamacraft
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@simon_brooke Not sure about that. If #Fujitsu represented to #PostOffice that its system was accurate (knowing that it was flawed) and it was aware that people were being prosecuted based on that representation (hard to believe they were not aware), then it seems like Fujitsu is also at least partly responsible for the prosecutions.
rlamacraft
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The lesson from the post office scandal that nobody seems to be talking about is that it's about time that the software industry faced proper regulations akin to other engineering disciplines. Software fails all the time and yet despite that people feel a sense of trust in a machine founded on logic. Software needs to be held to the standard that people expect from computers, or else more lives will be ruined.
I hate it. Just so over engineered, and doesn’t even solve the actual problem of wild animals being killed, but rather just hides the problem… Just hang a bell around their neck, it’s not hard… https://www.engadget.com/the-flappie-ai-cat-door-stops-your-pet-from-gifting-you-dead-mice-033237654.html
rlamacraft
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The last 10 years or so of tech:
2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!
With all the talk of promoting browser diversity, I thought I’d try using Firefox when doing development work in 2024. Within just a few hours I found a bug in the dev tools that caused me to waste more than half an hour chasing a non-existent fault in my webpage. I’m sorry but Chromium has won; it’s over.
rlamacraft
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British politics at the moment:
Conservatives: We’re going to do X!
Labour: We oppose doing X. It harms the most vulnerable in society, damages the economy and the environment, and violates our international treaty obligations.
Conservatives: We have a huge majority, so we’ve done X!
Journalists: Will Labour reverse X if it wins the next election?
Labour: No.
rlamacraft
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Can we please stop calling them "ecosystems" (which implies complexity and mutualism and competition between a diversity of living things)
How about "software prisons"
rlamacraft
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1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.
So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.
10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.
She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"
Software engineer by trade. Programmer by hobby too (in addition to basketry and spoon carving). Personal website: https://rlamacraft.uk/. Gemini capsule: gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk
Joined Jan 2020
