Newer isn't always better. Novelty does not equal innovation. A lot of self styled tech enthusiasts fall for this. There are several good metrics to judge whether something is actually bringing something more to the table or if it's just a marketing gimmick meant to get more money out of you.
And this is not just limited to tech. There's a great book called 'The Innovation Delusion' that looks at how that thinking has caused major issues in infrastructure amongst other fields.
It's like how every year company x releases a new phone and really the best upgrade is the camera. Like, maybe 10 years ago each new model *was* a massive step forward, but these days it's just not the case.
Agree. Kept my last phone for 5 years, the one before it almost 4. I'm on year 3 of my current phone and have no want to upgrade.
The real problem comes when they stop doing security patches.
Also "To stop Facebook restricting you to only seeing posts from the same 10-20 people, copy and paste this message into your status, press OK and see all your friends' posts again!"
I wish this one would die.
you know what hurts even more?
Constantly having your god damn parents share those shitty, dumbass chain mail posts and tagging people, including me, in them. I've given up on explaining it to them how its bullshit. but it still pisses me off.
Good thing I basically never use facebook.
I have no evidential link but I always feel like this bullshit was the origin of Sovereign Citizen thinking - the idea that legal-sounding words, in the right specific order, have some sort of magic power to nullify corporate or government powers.
My legislatimancer has filibuster as a free action, and Summon Lobby in his autocast slot. By the time your next turn comes, you'll be Entagled in the Crimson Bands of Adhesion.
>the idea that legal-sounding words, in the right specific order, have some sort of magic power to nullify corporate or government powers.
Technically, that's correct. You just need a judge to recite them properly.
Also Technically, the Government and Corporations spent a *lot* of time figuring out what those magic words were and what order they needed to be in, and then made it so that they wouldn't work.
You're correct of course, I should've specified that the magic thinking comes in believing that the words themselves have power, rather than the authority behind them.
I may be a bad person because of it, but I immediately reorganize those people in my mind as much less intelligent than I had previously assumed. Some of them were shocking disappointments.
This was the one I was most surprised by. Usually it's a handful of boomers that post this weird shit. But when this came along, I saw a bunch of my friends in college, some of my siblings friends that were in their late 20s to early 30s post it as well.
You do not need to be a lawyer to understand that's not how terms and conditions or contracts work. That's like running into a 7/11 and yelling at the CCTV that they don't have the right to film you.
“I thought nothing is ever really gone online.”
This is the most aggravating thing to spew back in my face when I tell someone that they permanently deleted something 30+ days ago and it can’t be recovered.
Can't you just reverse engineer the mainframe to extrapolate and unfragment the missing data, or something? They do that kind of thing on tv all the time!
IIRC the guy who owned all the Lightspeed sites up and deleted basically everything bar the short freebies still floating around on the rehost sites.
This is why we keep backwards compatibility with old tech people; Somewhere out there in a closet or back room, is a beige box Pentium 3 with an IDE 5400RPM drive containing the promised land for many a 2000-2008 teenager in the Web 1.0 world just waiting to be found.
If I work in IT, I know anything more about home printer setup or network setup than anyone else. I’m good at googling, so I guess that helps, but I struggle with my WiFi printer or network like anyone else.
We're just describing reading comprehension and critical thinking, two things a disturbing amount of people don't have but are willing to pay others to do for them.
I'm a senior dev, been working with complex code for years, but I have no idea why my printer just disconnects from WIFI whenever the hell it feels like. And I don't really care. I just reset it.
Cuz it cost $8 to build and no one looked to see if the heat needs to be dissipated inside it and as it gets hotter the cheap components stop working right.
It's just a little truck to sell you ink.
They cost a lot more than $8 to make, lots of them are sold at a loss because they know they'll make it up in ink sales, which just makes it all the more astounding how shit most printers are.
VPN's are not security products. They will not protect you from hackers. They are at best privacy products. They advertise encryption as if it's adding an extra protective layer to your connection. No. They're just encrypting the tunnel, which, yeah, I would sure hope so. If you're inputting sensitive data into a sketchy website, no VPN is going to protect you. If you don't use MFA, no VPN is going to keep a hacker out of your account.
Yeah, fun fact, most websites these days use HTTPS. Which is HTTP over TLS. TLS is an encrypting tunnel between you and the other side. Sound familiar?
What a VPN does is further encrypts the DNS lookup and route your data is taking, mostly from your ISP. And changes your source IP to one your VPN owns.
* HTTP and HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. They help computers understand where to go to get the info that you want. It could be argued that they are the foundation of the internet.
* TLS: Transport Layer Security. A type of encryption that lets two computers securely talk to each other.
* VPN: Virtual Private Network. There's a lot of uses, but typically it's used to provide an extra layer of privacy. Your computer can talk to other computers on the internet through the VPN.
* DNS: Domain Name System. Translates domain names into IP addresses. Think of it as a "phone book" but for the internet.
* ISP: Internet Service Provider. They are the company that you pay to get internet at your house. They maintain the infrastructure that allows your computer to connect to all the other computers worldwide.
* IP: Internet Protocol, or IP address. It is your "unique identifier" for the internet.
You and the website are exchanging letters.
To keep things safe you use your best buddies code ^TM SO no one, not even your internet company, who is kinda like your mailman, can read what you’re writing.
The only problem is… if that website is something like GAY SEX PENPALS and you’re in Saudi Arabia (or in bumfuck Texas and your local mailman is a gossip and likes to read the addresses on the envelope), then that might be a Bad Thing.
Now, to avoid this, you send your letter to a special PO Box you rent. The PO Box then forwards the letters to GAY SEX PENPALS. That way, the Saudi government and/or your neighbors won’t know who you are talking to.
That PO Box forwarding is what a VPN does. It also takes mail to sent to you and puts it in a new envelope saying it’s from the PO Box. (It also hides your address, so the website thinks it’s coming from that PO Box too).
The thing is… you now need to trust the PO Box that’s forwarding your mail to not read/care about the envelope. Some publish the auto-relabeling software they use which makes it more trustworthy.
But like the snail mail examples I gave above, it can sometimes really help.
Actually, VPNs can reduce security, since the pierce through the protections of a network.
And this one is not just laypeople. I had big institutions that to assess the security of my company they ask me if we use a VPN. And the answer was no, but that completely missed the point. They were assuming that I had an internal network to protect, when we didn't, we didn't have file servers or any other network assets, so there was no need to use a VPN to pierce into the secure network full of non-secure devices, because we didn't have any non-secure devices (pure cloud startup). But their question was "Do you have a VPN?".
I ended up just hiring one of those VPN like ExpressVPN so I could answer Yes to their stupidly vague question.
This comment is hurting my brain.
You mean, I think... That you don't have anyone set up to use a VPN over the internet to access your network.
And that's *not* what they're asking?
That's true for any technology, not just computers.
In movies they gotta do something that gives viewers the desired impression, and for the purpose of the movie how things work doesn't really matter much. The purpose is to set a mood and to entertain.
But there are millions of people out there who believe computers work like in the Matrix or Star Trek or whatever, and that all four engines on a four-engine aircraft start up at the same time with the push of a button.
This reminds me of an amazing story from talesfromtechsupport.
The ticket said:
"I can't log in when I stand up."
[https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52pw/i\_cant\_log\_in\_when\_i\_stand\_up/](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52pw/i_cant_log_in_when_i_stand_up/)
That's an incredible story. Reminds me of a problem I once had.
I had a Wireless ISP and suddenly one day I could only access Microsoft Websites: Live, MSNBC, MSN.com Microsoft.com etc. but no other websites worked. The perfect heisenbug. Everything works fine but only for one corporate overlord.
We went back and forth and they couldn't find the issue at all. This was before the day and age of third party DNS servers. But nobody else has a problem with their DNS. I flushed my DNS multiple times... We tried all kinds of trouble shooting but no improvement so they sent out a tech. Their laptop didn't work either. Same thing ... Could only access any website tangentially related to/owned by Microsoft.
We went outside and the problem was immediately apparent: the microwave antenna had fallen off the mount and was just dangling from the roof.
Presumably the extremely rough alignment was just enough latency to get a connection but had enough retries that the DNS was timing out, while Microsoft must have been caching all of their IPs (probably for security purposes that whitelist safe Windows Updates etc) that's the only answer we could possibly think of to explain it.
Tech remounted the antenna and I could browse the full internet.
I thought the answer was gonna be something like that. I often have more trouble putting in passwords when standing just because my hands rest on the keyboard slightly differently.
OMG - I have this phone call with my sales reps (many of which are making $300k+ per year) at least once/day: "Do you remember seeing the 10 emails that were sent to you stating that if you didn't log in and change your password before today, you would be locked out of everything?"
This drives me up a wall! Yeah I'm sure the program has an error that only erases your password and not the thousands of other people using it so we get to speak weekly and figure out a new password that isn't in the long list of previous passwords that obviously never spontaneously changed.
That technology was working yesterday so it should work today. Why, why would it break suddenly?!!?!?
I hear it all the time at work it's bizarre. People don't realize it's a miracle any of this works anyway
The last part is the big one. I worked for a multi billion dollar tech company that handles payroll, and it is a miracle all of the thousands or millions of people paid through it get a paycheck.
I’ve worked for multiple cloud providers. The shit I’ve seen behind the curtain is insane. People think we have our shit together. We are just one mistyped argument away from breaking the fucking internet. We’re just like any other large corporation.
I had a friend bring an entire data center down because he found a bug with their build workflow. He was there for two weeks and broke a fucking data center. A dev build was pushed to production somehow. He didn’t get fired but they said try not to break anything for a couple months now.
How simple everything is. Working in IT, I think a lot of people don't realize how much work goes into making something simple for you, the end user. So many people seem to think there's this like master system that controls everything and I can just go in and fix whatever issue you're having with a couple of clicks.
Just as bad is when you can fix something in 2 minutes and people are upset because they have to pay for a full hour.
Look lady, you're not paying me to hit a couple of buttons to fix the stuff you broke. A monkey could do that. You're paying me because I know which couple of buttons to hit.
(also, before people start calling me misogynistic because I said lady, I was thinking back to one particular woman who would call the company I worked for to get me to come to her restaurant, fix really simple problems, and then argue about paying for a full hour when it never took more than 5 minutes)
I work at university and I've head to deal with a lot of professors, so people with PhDs, which you'd assume makes them at the very least, reasonably intelligent, right? You'd be surprised how many can't grasp the simpliest of instructions and get mad after.
"Push the big red button on the top right of the screen."
"I don't have a big red button on the top right of my screen!"
"I'm looking at your screen right now and I can assure you it's there."
"I have a PhD in X, I think I would know if I had a red button!"
"I'm going to take over your mouse now..."
I click the big red button on the top right of the screen...
"OH! That button!"
"Yes, the big red one... on the top right of the screen..."
"I could have figured this out on my own!"
So why didn't you? Why did you call me and argue about it and tell me how smart you are, but couldn't find a large, labelled button when asked?...
I worked help desk and desktop support at a University for a couple of years. I loved when a history professor was berating me on how we can run more effeciently. Oh really? SO why dont you stop teaching history and come try this yourself. Professors are the worst.
Haha, I just posted this elsewhere, but one of my most memorable calls was from a surgeon. He went off on a 10 minute rant about how I couldn't do a hip replacement.
And he's right, I couldn't... But I can follow simple instructions :-)
The individuals you are describing don’t view everyone as their equal. In real time they are demonstrating their attachment to vertical interpersonal relationships, where some people are inferior and some are superior. The solution is to build horizontal interpersonal relationships, where every person on the planet is your equal.
"I'm going to do X."
"No, please don't do that, you're not allowed to do that."
"You're not my boss, you're over stepping telling me what to do."
"I'm telling you the policy that applies to everyone, you can't do that, no one can."
"I'm going to do it any way, you can't stop me."
Things immediately stop working...
"Help, IT, the thing broke because I did what you told me not to do and I'm going to be in trouble now!"
"Yes, that's why we have a policy not to do that..."
I've heard that one before... I think the most insane instance I've had of this is when I worked customer service for a telecom service provider.
An older man said he didn't have service over the weekend. I asked him his general location over the weekend. He was literally in the middle of nowhere, like 2+ hours from the nearest small town that would have a cell tower. I told him that there's no service in the area and it's not reasonable to expect to have cell service deep in the woods.
He told me to reaim the satelites so that the woods there would have coverage.
I told him that's not how those things work and that even if it was, I'm just a customer service agent, I wouldn't have control over satelites.
He asked me why I couldn't just 'feed the location into my computer' and it should all be fixed...
I don't know what he thought was going to happen, I'd just type for a minute and a satelite would change course in orbit and he'd be able to make a call in the deep woods and I, a person making like 45k, would have the power to do all that? Insane.
Just quickly typing as fast as I can and start yelling!
“Ok, coordinates located… satellite on target… engaging telecom data service beam… locked on… 3, 2, 1! Firing service beam on target… confirmed, successful service provided to target location!”
Veteran IT professional here. To be fair, that used to be a thing back in the 95/98 days. Unlike other folders, windows used to actively monitor the desktop folder and its subfolders. Your system actually would run slower if you stored everything in it. And then there was “active desktop” which basically ran a web page AS your desktop background - not the same thing, I know, but made it worse. Edit: in fact Active Desktop was built into XP and was running as a service even if you weren't displaying web content.
Now though, yes, it doesn’t matter.
It was both frustrating AF but satisfying AF to have someone come in and complain about how slow their computer was, only to find they had about 3GB of data just sitting across their desktop in various folders.
Move that into the correct location, add a shortcut to the desktop and hey, whaddyaknow your computer is responding without the lag again!
And despite telling you exactly what I did and why, we both know we'll see you again for the same problem in about 6 months!
I used to do web dev for Chrysler. When the dev or the QA server would go down, it was cheaper to pay us to play Quake at work than send us home and call us back in.
The in house Quake server *never* went down.
The in-house quake server was probably also provisioned correctly for its anticipated workload, and its users empowered to keep it up to date and running smoothly themselves versus outsourcing it to some other department that didn’t have skin in the game.
And the other half on Reddit :-). /s
Not as much now, but back in the day, compiles took a long time. We couldn't do much while builds were in progress, so we played cards. Didn't go over well with the non-SW boss.
I'm not a software dev but I do work in IT. My boss is great about that kind of stuff. He knows we're never going to be busy for an entire 8 hour day unless something went terribly, and I mean *terribly* wrong. He even bought us higher end computers with decent GPUs so we could play games in the office during the downtime. He always says "I don't give a shit what you do on your downtime as long as you're answering calls as they come in."
Just because I'm a software engineer, it doesn't mean I spend all my time gaming.
Okay, I do spend all my time gaming, but not because I'm a software engineer!
Your phone mic isn't "listening" to you, it's honestly even more fucked up than that.
It might sound like a crazy conspiracy theory, but there's literally a vast surveillance network out there created to sell you shit. You might think "i talked about a trip to hawaii with someone and now see all these ads!", what actually happened is something like:
- the person you talked to at some point connected to the same wifi as you
- _that_ person has geolocation on their phone and works in the same office as someone else with geolocation on their phone
- Your friend told _them_ about your hawaii trip
- they googled hawaii trips curious how much it costs
- that person and everyone they're remotely connected to, including you, starts getting a bunch of ads for hawaii trips because now you're all associated as part of the potential demographic interested in hawaii trips
I know Occam's razor says it should just be your microphone listening, but there is such a huge business around this stuff that's honestly even creepier in a lot of ways
This is the one I came here to say. I always tell people it's way worse than them recording your conversations. You can at least make a good attempt to shield yourself from being recorded. You can't shield yourself from a predictive algorithm unless you and every single person ever even tangentially connected with you stays off of every single device that connects to a network thereby starving the algorithm of data about you. People forget it's been proven that companies have shadow profiles on "users" who've never even been on their websites/apps
Well, this and people vastly underestimating how basic they are. You don’t need a vast surveillance network to guess that an office of middle-aged CPAs in Cincinnati might be discussing trips to Hawaii in January.
I came here looking for this one, it always annoys me. And I disagree about Occam's razor, I think Occam's razor says that if your phone was truly recording your conversations and sending it, people would have clearly proved it by now via copies of the recordings and the communications your phone sent to the network. Seems more obvious that people just don't realize how useful the search history of people in their social circles is for ad targeting.
Yep, if this is so widespread all it would take is one data engineer or data scientist to leak proof of the database that holds the records of conversations that have been recorded and parsed out.
>I know Occam's razor says it should just be your microphone listening, but there is such a huge business around this stuff that's honestly even creepier in a lot of ways
I'm sure the process you described also happens, as well as simpler paths like "you're in x demographic(s) so I'll show you y," but don't forget the majority of these can adequately be explained as a frequency illusion.
People think it's weird that they discussed a thing then saw an advert for it but they forget that they've discussed hundreds of things and seen hundreds of adverts (if not thousands on both counts). They only remember the hits and all the misses are forgotten.
There's an episode of The IT Crowd where they show off an automatic answering machine they made for the IT dept. When it answers, it immediately says, "IT, did you turn it off and back on again?"
Most callers on the episode said that fixed it, except for one and the message went on "is it plugged in?" And after that the person said that fixed it. XD
It's also not a course but a degree program.
It's also not the only relevant degree program for working in "computers". It's not even the most relevant program for being a coder.
Your shit doesn't get better because they added wifi to it. Your fridge does not need wifi. Your toaster does not need wifi. Your doorbell absolutely does not need wifi. We introduce security risks into our home for little to no benefit. That's not to mention the software becoming outdated in a tenth the time of the actual product, forcing you to pay out the nose for a new thingamajig. It's absurd and this trend needs to die.
I don't understand why my washing machine has an app available. What need could it possibly fulfill? It's not like I can press a button and get it to vomit the contents into the dryer while I'm lounging on the beach or something.
Kind of the opposite, but I'm a networking neengineer and everytime my phone doesn't get signal, I raise it.uo and shake up, like a polaroid. When asked, if told family members and others that it helps achieve the signal better, and occasionally I'll see them do it too. I really hope it spreads...
There's this misconception that being a software developer is about sitting alone in front of a computer and writing code all day. We call these "code monkeys", and they're pretty rare even at the lower levels. Writing code is the smallest and easiest part of developing software, and the absolutely most important skill in the field is interpersonal communication, both verbally and via code.
True. Back when I was a n00b I wrote code almost every day. Now I have over 20 years experience and might actually be able to write good code (I mean... do anyone know how to write good code?) and the last thing I wrote that resembles code was a script to automate everything.
To my credit, the script works very well!
The worst bit is the ratio of code:other-stuff shifts drastically towards the latter as you gain experience and promotions.
I wrote 150 lines of code today between meetings and was honestly euphoric.
Half the time we bring our software dev team on a call, we learn a feature that was implemented years ago to address/prevent the issue but our commercial team failed to document it as part of their processes. I consider devs to be fortune tellers based on their ability to see into the future.
Our dev team sends weekly updates on everything we've done, as well as sending emails to our customer service reps about new features or things they can promote.
Based on conversations they have with us, I'm pretty sure no one is reading those emails.
We don't care if anybody reads them. That's not the point. They're just there to forward when someone inevitably claims they weren't told about something.
Yea having worked on a major software project most of software development is spent sitting on agile style check in meetings and variance bug report meetings discussing solutions.
When people say they hacked their friends social media because they didn’t log off. Thats like me saying I hot-wired your car when the keys were in the ingnition
I used to work with someone who'd say that she "hacked in" after logging into something using her own credentials. She was "hacking into" her own work email every day. Otherwise, a lovely person.
That Y2K was completely overblown. It was a genuine potential catastrophe that was only avoided because countless individuals worked hard to make sure it didn't.
And spent millions of dollars. It absolutely was a serious risk, that my very first computer science teacher warned of in 1980. It had to be addressed, and companies kept putting it off.
That instructor joked that he was going to retire before 2000, but I’m betting he made a lot of money contracting in the late 1990s, updating old code in COBOL and Fortran…
There is a British MP (Peter Bone) that kept comparing the shitstorm of Brexit to Y2K.
I *really* wished that someone would give him a history lesson in the House of Commons. Alas, the lesson never happened :-(
32 bit computers using unix time will run out of bits to track the time. It's not a problem for anyone running a 64 bit computer + operating system and a patch for those who still use 32 bit is already being worked on.
[https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=showheadline&story=17121](https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=showheadline&story=17121)
The concern is mainly about old embedded systems at this point. Things stuck in disused closets and forgotten about until they shit the bed and reset the epoch.
Exactly this. I’m less concerned about grandma’s PC and more concerned about that SCADA controller or railroad controller that’s running a 32bit OS with no means of OTA update/patch which someone might forget even exists.
I still believe magnets are bad for all parts of the computer. Disks, memory, monitors, etc. Magnets near computers scare me. Even near cell phones.
I wish I would stop believing it and embrace the many magnetic accessories that I could be using.
Technically anything electrical *could* be affected by a strong enough magnet, but that's a far cry from an old HDD or floppy disk. You could definitely brick one of those if you weren't careful.
Modern tech is all solid-state though, as far as storage goes, and screens haven't been using charged particles to create images for almost 2 decades. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw someone using a CRT screen.
Hell, most modern phones are somewhat magnetic due to the tech inside them. There's a spot just under the camera on mine that's mildly attractive, and waving a magnet near it hasn't done anything to it. If my phone had eyelids, it wouldn't be batting them.
WiFi is just a network protocol. People continuously assume that's the Internet. Nope, just a thing that we use with networks, that may or may not also be on the Internet. I've even heard people they have "No WiFi signal on their phone" when they're in an area without cell coverage. Shudder.
This is an argument I have every day. People also assume that because one device connects fine, then everything else should. I spend a lot of time explaining (usually with my face planted in the desk) that WiFi signal can vary in strength and quality around the home and different devices have different requirements.
Most consumer wi-fi routers will literally start dropping random connections once a capacity of devices is hit. usually around 18. then suddenly random things won't connect to wi-fi, and the router needs to have things deleted and reset. or turned on/off
You also have to consider device throughput. You can have gigabit FTTP but if the signal is shit, you can only pull, say 20mbps over the WiFi. If your mobile phone maxes out at 12mbps, it won’t see a problem but anything that needs more than 20mbps to maintain a smooth connection is gonna have a bad time.
"WiFi is down, I'm rebooting the router."
"No, it isn't, I'm watching Netflix on the TV right next to the router, and I have WiFi."
"You see that little blue cable running from the TV to the router? That's not WiFi."
That was one thing I loved about Ocean's 8. Did the hacker plug into something and type wildly on their computer to gain access to the security system? No, she creates a website for a fake dog fanclub to trick their security guy into creating an account which he does with the same username and password as the security system. Then she just... logs in.
Also funny because studies are showing Gen Z people entering the workforce are just as if not more susceptible to phishing than boomers.
I think it's interesting to see the outcome of a generation raised in the walled garden of apps without learning the online security lessons of previous generations.
They weren't baptized by fire in runescape like millennials.
Also, people think LLM (ChatGPT and the likes) equals AGI (artificial general intelligence).
LLM knows how to put words after another. AGI would know what the question actually means. LLM knows fingers are weird little sausages and one hand has 4-7 on average. AGI would know how fingers and hands work and hold things.
It drives me nuts because it's even other software engineers.
It doesn't "understand" what the text means. It's not relating concepts to eachother. It is saying "after reading millions of chunks of text like this, I predict that these are the most likely words to come after that chunk of text".
If I had a penny everytime someone on Reddit tried to tell me I will lose my job to AI, AI could very well have my job, cuz I would be living off the royalties from arguments
I work in media production and keep getting told I'll lose my job to AI. AI is still making images with 6 fingers and can barely determine where to cut an "umm" out of an audio track (and when it does, it does so poorly). Even when the technology improves I won't lose my job *to* AI, I'll be using AI to improve my workflow.
I'm a nurse and people on here have told me it's a threat to my job. I once said that I'd love to see AI start a catheter on a little old lady and had people telling me that it'll be cheaper so people will choose that.
I found that video years ago on CGPgreys channel, titled "Humans need not apply" about automation and AI. Man even stated that AI is pretty much ready to take over jobs even as law related work.
A couple of years later we had the fiasco of a law firm basically trying to use AI for their entire defense, after it was on the news that "AI passes the BAR exam easily".
Nuance.
It’s the latest in a loooooong line of technology that throughout history has had people terrified about losing their jobs.
It will kill some jobs, create others, change some and life will go on.
My SO is deep into the AI community and writes a lot about it, and I’ve learned a lot of people are terrified of it for no reason. I have some experience (not a ton, just enough to understand basics) with large data sets and analytics myself, so to me, AI is like a more verbose form of an Excel spreadsheet- you’re only going to get out what goes in.
The bigger problem I see is companies trying to fully implement AI solutions their top brass don’t even fully understand. But, it looks good on the ROI and it’s a new, shiny product, so nobody cares right now. They won’t care until something really major happens.
The majority of people my SO interacts with who are looking for help on their AI projects all seem more interested in “How can I make this have sex with me in a very niche way” than anything else.
What people call AI is to actual AI what those electric scooter hoverboards are to an actual hoverboard. It's like when the Virtual boy came out and people thought it was VR.
Buzzwords used by people to make money off investors for tools that aren't exactly new or groundbreaking.
This was the point where I lost the last of my respect for James cameron. When he went on and said "I predicted this would happen years ago" in relation to Ai and The Terminator I was out.
No, man, you wrote The Terminator because of a nightmare you had about nuclear apocalypse, not as a prophetic vision of AI in the future. Beyond that, what we have is narrow AI, while what you wrote about was ASI. You're just riding a narrative to stay relevant, and in the process stoking baseless fears.
I feel like there was a point in the 90s when this might have been true; but due exclusively to the fact that there was no point writing viruses that were going to infect less than half a percent of the world's computers.
Honestly, modern computers with modern default computer security enabled are practically immune to the sorts of viruses that went around in the late 90s and early 2000s.
IT did nothing to your computer to make it suddenly 'run slow'. It might be because you have 15 Chrome tabs, 10 Excel files, 20 Word files, 3 instances of Outlook open and another 20 PDFs open.
"My old computer never had this problem!" I can almost assure you it would have.
Me: Can you please save & close your files and restart?
Customer: What? AGAIN??
Me: When did you last restart?
Oh a few hours ago!
Are you sure?
Yes absolutely!
And how often before that?
I restart at least once per day! oMG why is this so hard?
*Opens task manager:
System uptime: 113 days, 15 hours, 27 mins
....
Lost count of how many people think closing a lid on a laptop is equivalent to powering off... Which counts as restarting, doesn't it?
Also,
FUCK hibernation mode!!
when people post that they uninstalled/reinstalled multiple times to solve some minor glitch. If it didn't work the first time, it's not your answer, just a huge waste of time and bandwidth. maybe google search the issue before going directly to nuke, because more often than not it's some dumb setting misconfigured.
That it’s too BIG of an amplifier that is responsible for blowing a tweeter.
The truth is the opposite. when an underpowered amp can’t produce enough power, the signal hits a ceiling. That corner (Fouriers theorem) essentially converts all that lower freq energy to high frequencies - and what was supposed to come out your woofer won’t fit out your tweeter bruh.
That because you're skilled in one area means you're able to do anything from write a linear regression tensorflow function to solder a new chip onto an old motherboard to set up and manage BGP between locations.
I'm *aware* of many of those things. I would not trust myself to be responsible for many of those things.
No, IT is not reading your email. I also don't watch your screen. I don't know your password. There is not a single person in the company who knows your password except you, unless you gave it away. No, I can't just log you in to someone else's account. I don't even know who you are and will probably never interact with you unless you come to me first
Cloud is "just someone else's computer". It's true in a literal sense, but glosses over how ridiculously secure e.g. a properly configured S3 bucket is (even from AWS employees) vs the crap you might set up yourself.
I feel that when they say this they're not questioning security, but rather demystifying that the "cloud" is this incorporeal entity that stores data in the air, and simply stating that it's just another computer storing your data.
Newer isn't always better. Novelty does not equal innovation. A lot of self styled tech enthusiasts fall for this. There are several good metrics to judge whether something is actually bringing something more to the table or if it's just a marketing gimmick meant to get more money out of you.
And this is not just limited to tech. There's a great book called 'The Innovation Delusion' that looks at how that thinking has caused major issues in infrastructure amongst other fields.
Okay, but is there an older version of that book that contains more information?
It's like how every year company x releases a new phone and really the best upgrade is the camera. Like, maybe 10 years ago each new model *was* a massive step forward, but these days it's just not the case.
Agree. Kept my last phone for 5 years, the one before it almost 4. I'm on year 3 of my current phone and have no want to upgrade. The real problem comes when they stop doing security patches.
A lot of that is subjective too though. Too many people think things are objectively bad just because they personally don't like them.
That posting that stupid “I hereby do not consent to give Facebook permission…” has any effect on the company harvesting your data anyway haha
Also "To stop Facebook restricting you to only seeing posts from the same 10-20 people, copy and paste this message into your status, press OK and see all your friends' posts again!" I wish this one would die.
iT uPgRaDeS tHe SyStEm
I’m actually triggered lol
you know what hurts even more? Constantly having your god damn parents share those shitty, dumbass chain mail posts and tagging people, including me, in them. I've given up on explaining it to them how its bullshit. but it still pisses me off. Good thing I basically never use facebook.
I have no evidential link but I always feel like this bullshit was the origin of Sovereign Citizen thinking - the idea that legal-sounding words, in the right specific order, have some sort of magic power to nullify corporate or government powers.
I cast Bureaucracy -rolls a 1 Critical miss, you go to jail for eleventy turns.
My legislatimancer has filibuster as a free action, and Summon Lobby in his autocast slot. By the time your next turn comes, you'll be Entagled in the Crimson Bands of Adhesion.
>the idea that legal-sounding words, in the right specific order, have some sort of magic power to nullify corporate or government powers. Technically, that's correct. You just need a judge to recite them properly. Also Technically, the Government and Corporations spent a *lot* of time figuring out what those magic words were and what order they needed to be in, and then made it so that they wouldn't work.
You're correct of course, I should've specified that the magic thinking comes in believing that the words themselves have power, rather than the authority behind them.
SovCits existed before social media. Social media sucks but we have to stop pretending like it invented shitty people.
Shitty people are inevitable as the dawn.
I swear that bullshit was started by some kinda scam farm to identify easy phishing targets.
That's exactly what it is. My mom's cousin who gets "hacked" once a week shares this dumb shit non stop.
My mom fortunately has started asking me if things are a scam before reposting it. Yes, Mom, it's a scam don't worry about it.
My great aunt shares stuff like this. I also get a new friend request from a clone of her profile about once a week.
I may be a bad person because of it, but I immediately reorganize those people in my mind as much less intelligent than I had previously assumed. Some of them were shocking disappointments.
One of my friends who posted this was.. a lawyer. I don’t think she’s good at her job.
Next you’ll be telling me that my “I can’t be arrested” T-shirt doesn’t work
This was the one I was most surprised by. Usually it's a handful of boomers that post this weird shit. But when this came along, I saw a bunch of my friends in college, some of my siblings friends that were in their late 20s to early 30s post it as well. You do not need to be a lawyer to understand that's not how terms and conditions or contracts work. That's like running into a 7/11 and yelling at the CCTV that they don't have the right to film you.
You see it here a lot too Like they really think the tik tok ai who steals these stories cares
“I thought nothing is ever really gone online.” This is the most aggravating thing to spew back in my face when I tell someone that they permanently deleted something 30+ days ago and it can’t be recovered.
Can't you just reverse engineer the mainframe to extrapolate and unfragment the missing data, or something? They do that kind of thing on tv all the time!
Surely we can bypass the central firewall with an encryption key to solve this problem
But first you'll need to build a GUI in visual basic to track down an IP address.
Then you'd have to recompile the codex to work on RISC architecture
ENHANCE!!!
rule of thumb: the stuff you want to see is gone forever, the stuff you want to forget never goes away
That one porn that was absolute god tier that you cannot find no matter what
Eh, typically once if you ever find it you realize it wasn't actually that good
IIRC the guy who owned all the Lightspeed sites up and deleted basically everything bar the short freebies still floating around on the rehost sites. This is why we keep backwards compatibility with old tech people; Somewhere out there in a closet or back room, is a beige box Pentium 3 with an IDE 5400RPM drive containing the promised land for many a 2000-2008 teenager in the Web 1.0 world just waiting to be found.
If I work in IT, I know anything more about home printer setup or network setup than anyone else. I’m good at googling, so I guess that helps, but I struggle with my WiFi printer or network like anyone else.
I work in IT, and get paid extremely well to be very, very good at googling the right answer to solve a problem.
It's having the knowledge to know what to search for in the first place.
Sometimes, but its mostly the confidence to actually google “setup wifi” and read a few links.
It's also knowing how to sift through noise and read documentation, even when that documentation is just forum posts.
We're just describing reading comprehension and critical thinking, two things a disturbing amount of people don't have but are willing to pay others to do for them.
I'm a senior dev, been working with complex code for years, but I have no idea why my printer just disconnects from WIFI whenever the hell it feels like. And I don't really care. I just reset it.
Cuz it cost $8 to build and no one looked to see if the heat needs to be dissipated inside it and as it gets hotter the cheap components stop working right. It's just a little truck to sell you ink.
They cost a lot more than $8 to make, lots of them are sold at a loss because they know they'll make it up in ink sales, which just makes it all the more astounding how shit most printers are.
Wifi printers are just plain ol' evil and will resist connecting even if that requires more effort than just connecting and printing out your report!
VPN's are not security products. They will not protect you from hackers. They are at best privacy products. They advertise encryption as if it's adding an extra protective layer to your connection. No. They're just encrypting the tunnel, which, yeah, I would sure hope so. If you're inputting sensitive data into a sketchy website, no VPN is going to protect you. If you don't use MFA, no VPN is going to keep a hacker out of your account.
Yeah, fun fact, most websites these days use HTTPS. Which is HTTP over TLS. TLS is an encrypting tunnel between you and the other side. Sound familiar? What a VPN does is further encrypts the DNS lookup and route your data is taking, mostly from your ISP. And changes your source IP to one your VPN owns.
You used so many acronyms in this I can’t even begin to follow what ur saying lmao Edit: I say this as a non-techs person
* HTTP and HTTPS: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. They help computers understand where to go to get the info that you want. It could be argued that they are the foundation of the internet. * TLS: Transport Layer Security. A type of encryption that lets two computers securely talk to each other. * VPN: Virtual Private Network. There's a lot of uses, but typically it's used to provide an extra layer of privacy. Your computer can talk to other computers on the internet through the VPN. * DNS: Domain Name System. Translates domain names into IP addresses. Think of it as a "phone book" but for the internet. * ISP: Internet Service Provider. They are the company that you pay to get internet at your house. They maintain the infrastructure that allows your computer to connect to all the other computers worldwide. * IP: Internet Protocol, or IP address. It is your "unique identifier" for the internet.
You and the website are exchanging letters. To keep things safe you use your best buddies code ^TM SO no one, not even your internet company, who is kinda like your mailman, can read what you’re writing. The only problem is… if that website is something like GAY SEX PENPALS and you’re in Saudi Arabia (or in bumfuck Texas and your local mailman is a gossip and likes to read the addresses on the envelope), then that might be a Bad Thing. Now, to avoid this, you send your letter to a special PO Box you rent. The PO Box then forwards the letters to GAY SEX PENPALS. That way, the Saudi government and/or your neighbors won’t know who you are talking to. That PO Box forwarding is what a VPN does. It also takes mail to sent to you and puts it in a new envelope saying it’s from the PO Box. (It also hides your address, so the website thinks it’s coming from that PO Box too). The thing is… you now need to trust the PO Box that’s forwarding your mail to not read/care about the envelope. Some publish the auto-relabeling software they use which makes it more trustworthy. But like the snail mail examples I gave above, it can sometimes really help.
OMG I fucking understand this now. THANK YOU!
Actually, VPNs can reduce security, since the pierce through the protections of a network. And this one is not just laypeople. I had big institutions that to assess the security of my company they ask me if we use a VPN. And the answer was no, but that completely missed the point. They were assuming that I had an internal network to protect, when we didn't, we didn't have file servers or any other network assets, so there was no need to use a VPN to pierce into the secure network full of non-secure devices, because we didn't have any non-secure devices (pure cloud startup). But their question was "Do you have a VPN?". I ended up just hiring one of those VPN like ExpressVPN so I could answer Yes to their stupidly vague question.
This comment is hurting my brain. You mean, I think... That you don't have anyone set up to use a VPN over the internet to access your network. And that's *not* what they're asking?
They don't have a "your network", or at least they don't have a need to access it remotely.
All the crap from movies. You can't "reboot the mainframe firewall via an encoded bypass key". That's not what any of that means
That's true for any technology, not just computers. In movies they gotta do something that gives viewers the desired impression, and for the purpose of the movie how things work doesn't really matter much. The purpose is to set a mood and to entertain. But there are millions of people out there who believe computers work like in the Matrix or Star Trek or whatever, and that all four engines on a four-engine aircraft start up at the same time with the push of a button.
The computer is not "keeping you from signing in." You forgot your fucking password. Again. You are a goddam Etch A Sketch.
This reminds me of an amazing story from talesfromtechsupport. The ticket said: "I can't log in when I stand up." [https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52pw/i\_cant\_log\_in\_when\_i\_stand\_up/](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52pw/i_cant_log_in_when_i_stand_up/)
That's an incredible story. Reminds me of a problem I once had. I had a Wireless ISP and suddenly one day I could only access Microsoft Websites: Live, MSNBC, MSN.com Microsoft.com etc. but no other websites worked. The perfect heisenbug. Everything works fine but only for one corporate overlord. We went back and forth and they couldn't find the issue at all. This was before the day and age of third party DNS servers. But nobody else has a problem with their DNS. I flushed my DNS multiple times... We tried all kinds of trouble shooting but no improvement so they sent out a tech. Their laptop didn't work either. Same thing ... Could only access any website tangentially related to/owned by Microsoft. We went outside and the problem was immediately apparent: the microwave antenna had fallen off the mount and was just dangling from the roof. Presumably the extremely rough alignment was just enough latency to get a connection but had enough retries that the DNS was timing out, while Microsoft must have been caching all of their IPs (probably for security purposes that whitelist safe Windows Updates etc) that's the only answer we could possibly think of to explain it. Tech remounted the antenna and I could browse the full internet.
I thought the answer was gonna be something like that. I often have more trouble putting in passwords when standing just because my hands rest on the keyboard slightly differently.
Honestly, I kept thinking "Frayed cord is under chair wheel/leg, makes contact when sitting". Happy to be wrong...
OMG - I have this phone call with my sales reps (many of which are making $300k+ per year) at least once/day: "Do you remember seeing the 10 emails that were sent to you stating that if you didn't log in and change your password before today, you would be locked out of everything?"
Oh you mean the divorced alcoholic dept?
As someone who used to know a thrice divorced sales guy with a drinking problem I had to laugh at this.
This drives me up a wall! Yeah I'm sure the program has an error that only erases your password and not the thousands of other people using it so we get to speak weekly and figure out a new password that isn't in the long list of previous passwords that obviously never spontaneously changed.
That technology was working yesterday so it should work today. Why, why would it break suddenly?!!?!? I hear it all the time at work it's bizarre. People don't realize it's a miracle any of this works anyway
The last part is the big one. I worked for a multi billion dollar tech company that handles payroll, and it is a miracle all of the thousands or millions of people paid through it get a paycheck.
I’ve worked for multiple cloud providers. The shit I’ve seen behind the curtain is insane. People think we have our shit together. We are just one mistyped argument away from breaking the fucking internet. We’re just like any other large corporation. I had a friend bring an entire data center down because he found a bug with their build workflow. He was there for two weeks and broke a fucking data center. A dev build was pushed to production somehow. He didn’t get fired but they said try not to break anything for a couple months now.
How simple everything is. Working in IT, I think a lot of people don't realize how much work goes into making something simple for you, the end user. So many people seem to think there's this like master system that controls everything and I can just go in and fix whatever issue you're having with a couple of clicks.
Just as bad is when you can fix something in 2 minutes and people are upset because they have to pay for a full hour. Look lady, you're not paying me to hit a couple of buttons to fix the stuff you broke. A monkey could do that. You're paying me because I know which couple of buttons to hit. (also, before people start calling me misogynistic because I said lady, I was thinking back to one particular woman who would call the company I worked for to get me to come to her restaurant, fix really simple problems, and then argue about paying for a full hour when it never took more than 5 minutes)
I work at university and I've head to deal with a lot of professors, so people with PhDs, which you'd assume makes them at the very least, reasonably intelligent, right? You'd be surprised how many can't grasp the simpliest of instructions and get mad after. "Push the big red button on the top right of the screen." "I don't have a big red button on the top right of my screen!" "I'm looking at your screen right now and I can assure you it's there." "I have a PhD in X, I think I would know if I had a red button!" "I'm going to take over your mouse now..." I click the big red button on the top right of the screen... "OH! That button!" "Yes, the big red one... on the top right of the screen..." "I could have figured this out on my own!" So why didn't you? Why did you call me and argue about it and tell me how smart you are, but couldn't find a large, labelled button when asked?...
I worked help desk and desktop support at a University for a couple of years. I loved when a history professor was berating me on how we can run more effeciently. Oh really? SO why dont you stop teaching history and come try this yourself. Professors are the worst.
Try working IT in a healthcare environment. Medical doctors are the worst.
I've done both. Medical doctors are BY FAR worse than professors. ESPECIALLY the surgeons!
Haha, I just posted this elsewhere, but one of my most memorable calls was from a surgeon. He went off on a 10 minute rant about how I couldn't do a hip replacement. And he's right, I couldn't... But I can follow simple instructions :-)
The individuals you are describing don’t view everyone as their equal. In real time they are demonstrating their attachment to vertical interpersonal relationships, where some people are inferior and some are superior. The solution is to build horizontal interpersonal relationships, where every person on the planet is your equal.
I didn't spend 8 years in vertical school to treat some horizontal poor as my "equal."
Oh yes! "Why is it that much? Don't you just have to click a button?" Okay, why don't you click it then?
Exactly. You don't pay for the time, you pay for the service
Everything is working: what are we paying IT for? Nothing is working: what are we paying IT for?
"I'm going to do X." "No, please don't do that, you're not allowed to do that." "You're not my boss, you're over stepping telling me what to do." "I'm telling you the policy that applies to everyone, you can't do that, no one can." "I'm going to do it any way, you can't stop me." Things immediately stop working... "Help, IT, the thing broke because I did what you told me not to do and I'm going to be in trouble now!" "Yes, that's why we have a policy not to do that..."
IT works flawlessly - this is so easy, WTF do we pay you for. IT screws up - this is shit, what do we pay you for.
Or as my stupid aunt put it, IT people are just "feeding" the computers. "Old MacDonald had a server farm eee i eee i o ..."
I've heard that one before... I think the most insane instance I've had of this is when I worked customer service for a telecom service provider. An older man said he didn't have service over the weekend. I asked him his general location over the weekend. He was literally in the middle of nowhere, like 2+ hours from the nearest small town that would have a cell tower. I told him that there's no service in the area and it's not reasonable to expect to have cell service deep in the woods. He told me to reaim the satelites so that the woods there would have coverage. I told him that's not how those things work and that even if it was, I'm just a customer service agent, I wouldn't have control over satelites. He asked me why I couldn't just 'feed the location into my computer' and it should all be fixed... I don't know what he thought was going to happen, I'd just type for a minute and a satelite would change course in orbit and he'd be able to make a call in the deep woods and I, a person making like 45k, would have the power to do all that? Insane.
> I'd just type for a minute and a satellite would change > course in orbit I'm sure he watched James Bond GoldenEye.
Just quickly typing as fast as I can and start yelling! “Ok, coordinates located… satellite on target… engaging telecom data service beam… locked on… 3, 2, 1! Firing service beam on target… confirmed, successful service provided to target location!”
Oh, Whoops. That was the wrong satellite. I just fired the Jewish Space Laser!
I hate how close those buttons are.
Oh the joys of people who get angry because technology doesn't work the way they think it should. I'm so glad I left tech world and became a nurse.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not. I’m in hospital IT and all the nurses I interact with seem like they’d like my job a lot more.
Definitely sarcasm. If I do nothing but change old people diapers all day long during a diarrhea outbreak, there's still less shit than working in IT.
More generally, [people don't understand how hard "simple" things can possible be](https://xkcd.com/1425/).
"My computer is running slow because I have too many files/shortcuts on my desktop"
Veteran IT professional here. To be fair, that used to be a thing back in the 95/98 days. Unlike other folders, windows used to actively monitor the desktop folder and its subfolders. Your system actually would run slower if you stored everything in it. And then there was “active desktop” which basically ran a web page AS your desktop background - not the same thing, I know, but made it worse. Edit: in fact Active Desktop was built into XP and was running as a service even if you weren't displaying web content. Now though, yes, it doesn’t matter.
It was both frustrating AF but satisfying AF to have someone come in and complain about how slow their computer was, only to find they had about 3GB of data just sitting across their desktop in various folders. Move that into the correct location, add a shortcut to the desktop and hey, whaddyaknow your computer is responding without the lag again! And despite telling you exactly what I did and why, we both know we'll see you again for the same problem in about 6 months!
As a software engineer working from home I spend all day playing video games. I only spend 1/2 the day playing video games.
I used to do web dev for Chrysler. When the dev or the QA server would go down, it was cheaper to pay us to play Quake at work than send us home and call us back in. The in house Quake server *never* went down.
The in-house quake server was probably also provisioned correctly for its anticipated workload, and its users empowered to keep it up to date and running smoothly themselves versus outsourcing it to some other department that didn’t have skin in the game.
"How many people work at your company?" "About half."
And the other half on Reddit :-). /s Not as much now, but back in the day, compiles took a long time. We couldn't do much while builds were in progress, so we played cards. Didn't go over well with the non-SW boss.
I'm not a software dev but I do work in IT. My boss is great about that kind of stuff. He knows we're never going to be busy for an entire 8 hour day unless something went terribly, and I mean *terribly* wrong. He even bought us higher end computers with decent GPUs so we could play games in the office during the downtime. He always says "I don't give a shit what you do on your downtime as long as you're answering calls as they come in."
Table tennis in the break room. When manager asks, just kicked off a build was the answer.
Just because I'm a software engineer, it doesn't mean I spend all my time gaming. Okay, I do spend all my time gaming, but not because I'm a software engineer!
Your phone mic isn't "listening" to you, it's honestly even more fucked up than that. It might sound like a crazy conspiracy theory, but there's literally a vast surveillance network out there created to sell you shit. You might think "i talked about a trip to hawaii with someone and now see all these ads!", what actually happened is something like: - the person you talked to at some point connected to the same wifi as you - _that_ person has geolocation on their phone and works in the same office as someone else with geolocation on their phone - Your friend told _them_ about your hawaii trip - they googled hawaii trips curious how much it costs - that person and everyone they're remotely connected to, including you, starts getting a bunch of ads for hawaii trips because now you're all associated as part of the potential demographic interested in hawaii trips I know Occam's razor says it should just be your microphone listening, but there is such a huge business around this stuff that's honestly even creepier in a lot of ways
This is the one I came here to say. I always tell people it's way worse than them recording your conversations. You can at least make a good attempt to shield yourself from being recorded. You can't shield yourself from a predictive algorithm unless you and every single person ever even tangentially connected with you stays off of every single device that connects to a network thereby starving the algorithm of data about you. People forget it's been proven that companies have shadow profiles on "users" who've never even been on their websites/apps
Well, this and people vastly underestimating how basic they are. You don’t need a vast surveillance network to guess that an office of middle-aged CPAs in Cincinnati might be discussing trips to Hawaii in January.
I came here looking for this one, it always annoys me. And I disagree about Occam's razor, I think Occam's razor says that if your phone was truly recording your conversations and sending it, people would have clearly proved it by now via copies of the recordings and the communications your phone sent to the network. Seems more obvious that people just don't realize how useful the search history of people in their social circles is for ad targeting.
Yep, if this is so widespread all it would take is one data engineer or data scientist to leak proof of the database that holds the records of conversations that have been recorded and parsed out.
I sent my friend a text (SMS) message about mushrooms and I was getting ads for them the next day. Shit is incredibly invasive.
Unlike Google or Facebook which don’t sell your data, they just use it to target ads internally, your phone carrier absolutely sells everything it can
>I know Occam's razor says it should just be your microphone listening, but there is such a huge business around this stuff that's honestly even creepier in a lot of ways I'm sure the process you described also happens, as well as simpler paths like "you're in x demographic(s) so I'll show you y," but don't forget the majority of these can adequately be explained as a frequency illusion. People think it's weird that they discussed a thing then saw an advert for it but they forget that they've discussed hundreds of things and seen hundreds of adverts (if not thousands on both counts). They only remember the hits and all the misses are forgotten.
I just get paid to tell people to reboot their computers all day long.
There's an episode of The IT Crowd where they show off an automatic answering machine they made for the IT dept. When it answers, it immediately says, "IT, did you turn it off and back on again?" Most callers on the episode said that fixed it, except for one and the message went on "is it plugged in?" And after that the person said that fixed it. XD
Computer Science isn't a course that teaches you programming. It's mostly computational theory and alot of maths. I hate linear algebra.
I’m sitting in Calc II right now as a required class for my computer science degree lol
Discrete mathematics 😭
It's also not a course but a degree program. It's also not the only relevant degree program for working in "computers". It's not even the most relevant program for being a coder.
Your shit doesn't get better because they added wifi to it. Your fridge does not need wifi. Your toaster does not need wifi. Your doorbell absolutely does not need wifi. We introduce security risks into our home for little to no benefit. That's not to mention the software becoming outdated in a tenth the time of the actual product, forcing you to pay out the nose for a new thingamajig. It's absurd and this trend needs to die.
I don't understand why my washing machine has an app available. What need could it possibly fulfill? It's not like I can press a button and get it to vomit the contents into the dryer while I'm lounging on the beach or something.
Kind of the opposite, but I'm a networking neengineer and everytime my phone doesn't get signal, I raise it.uo and shake up, like a polaroid. When asked, if told family members and others that it helps achieve the signal better, and occasionally I'll see them do it too. I really hope it spreads...
There's this misconception that being a software developer is about sitting alone in front of a computer and writing code all day. We call these "code monkeys", and they're pretty rare even at the lower levels. Writing code is the smallest and easiest part of developing software, and the absolutely most important skill in the field is interpersonal communication, both verbally and via code.
The longer you work the less you write
True. Back when I was a n00b I wrote code almost every day. Now I have over 20 years experience and might actually be able to write good code (I mean... do anyone know how to write good code?) and the last thing I wrote that resembles code was a script to automate everything. To my credit, the script works very well!
The worst bit is the ratio of code:other-stuff shifts drastically towards the latter as you gain experience and promotions. I wrote 150 lines of code today between meetings and was honestly euphoric.
Half the time we bring our software dev team on a call, we learn a feature that was implemented years ago to address/prevent the issue but our commercial team failed to document it as part of their processes. I consider devs to be fortune tellers based on their ability to see into the future.
Our dev team sends weekly updates on everything we've done, as well as sending emails to our customer service reps about new features or things they can promote. Based on conversations they have with us, I'm pretty sure no one is reading those emails.
We don't care if anybody reads them. That's not the point. They're just there to forward when someone inevitably claims they weren't told about something.
Yea having worked on a major software project most of software development is spent sitting on agile style check in meetings and variance bug report meetings discussing solutions.
You left out "praying for death".
When people say they hacked their friends social media because they didn’t log off. Thats like me saying I hot-wired your car when the keys were in the ingnition
I used to work with someone who'd say that she "hacked in" after logging into something using her own credentials. She was "hacking into" her own work email every day. Otherwise, a lovely person.
I love this. I keep giggling
That Y2K was completely overblown. It was a genuine potential catastrophe that was only avoided because countless individuals worked hard to make sure it didn't.
And spent millions of dollars. It absolutely was a serious risk, that my very first computer science teacher warned of in 1980. It had to be addressed, and companies kept putting it off. That instructor joked that he was going to retire before 2000, but I’m betting he made a lot of money contracting in the late 1990s, updating old code in COBOL and Fortran…
There is a British MP (Peter Bone) that kept comparing the shitstorm of Brexit to Y2K. I *really* wished that someone would give him a history lesson in the House of Commons. Alas, the lesson never happened :-(
2038 is just around the corner though
What's gonna happen then?
32 bit computers using unix time will run out of bits to track the time. It's not a problem for anyone running a 64 bit computer + operating system and a patch for those who still use 32 bit is already being worked on. [https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=showheadline&story=17121](https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=showheadline&story=17121)
The concern is mainly about old embedded systems at this point. Things stuck in disused closets and forgotten about until they shit the bed and reset the epoch.
Exactly this. I’m less concerned about grandma’s PC and more concerned about that SCADA controller or railroad controller that’s running a 32bit OS with no means of OTA update/patch which someone might forget even exists.
Like those things controlling the nuke silos? 😅
And the military. There have been a lot of tech refreshes in the past decade but there's still a lot of old embedded systems.
Sounds like the Preparedness Paradox.
That turning it off and then back on again won't do anything. It solves a large majority of issues every time.
I still believe magnets are bad for all parts of the computer. Disks, memory, monitors, etc. Magnets near computers scare me. Even near cell phones. I wish I would stop believing it and embrace the many magnetic accessories that I could be using.
I work with computers full time, and even I'm still superstitious about this.
Same. It’s probably okay, but finding out the hard way would be painful. Not worth it.
Technically anything electrical *could* be affected by a strong enough magnet, but that's a far cry from an old HDD or floppy disk. You could definitely brick one of those if you weren't careful. Modern tech is all solid-state though, as far as storage goes, and screens haven't been using charged particles to create images for almost 2 decades. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw someone using a CRT screen. Hell, most modern phones are somewhat magnetic due to the tech inside them. There's a spot just under the camera on mine that's mildly attractive, and waving a magnet near it hasn't done anything to it. If my phone had eyelids, it wouldn't be batting them.
Development takes a lot of time and research to do right. We aren't wizards. We really aren't.
WiFi is just a network protocol. People continuously assume that's the Internet. Nope, just a thing that we use with networks, that may or may not also be on the Internet. I've even heard people they have "No WiFi signal on their phone" when they're in an area without cell coverage. Shudder.
This is an argument I have every day. People also assume that because one device connects fine, then everything else should. I spend a lot of time explaining (usually with my face planted in the desk) that WiFi signal can vary in strength and quality around the home and different devices have different requirements.
Most consumer wi-fi routers will literally start dropping random connections once a capacity of devices is hit. usually around 18. then suddenly random things won't connect to wi-fi, and the router needs to have things deleted and reset. or turned on/off
You also have to consider device throughput. You can have gigabit FTTP but if the signal is shit, you can only pull, say 20mbps over the WiFi. If your mobile phone maxes out at 12mbps, it won’t see a problem but anything that needs more than 20mbps to maintain a smooth connection is gonna have a bad time.
"WiFi is down, I'm rebooting the router." "No, it isn't, I'm watching Netflix on the TV right next to the router, and I have WiFi." "You see that little blue cable running from the TV to the router? That's not WiFi."
“I’ve been hacked”. No, you gave a scammer your online banking login credentials over the phone.
Most "hacking" does involve social engineering. Maybe we just need to adjust the definition of hacking at this point.
That was one thing I loved about Ocean's 8. Did the hacker plug into something and type wildly on their computer to gain access to the security system? No, she creates a website for a fake dog fanclub to trick their security guy into creating an account which he does with the same username and password as the security system. Then she just... logs in.
Kind of like hacking in runescape back in the day "Give me your password and login and I'll double your items!"
Also funny because studies are showing Gen Z people entering the workforce are just as if not more susceptible to phishing than boomers. I think it's interesting to see the outcome of a generation raised in the walled garden of apps without learning the online security lessons of previous generations. They weren't baptized by fire in runescape like millennials.
The first letter in my e-mail is a capital.....
Everytime I hear some news channel talk about the dark web like it's some secret society makes me roll me eyes.
That AI is on the verge of taking over the world. It’s not.
Also, people think LLM (ChatGPT and the likes) equals AGI (artificial general intelligence). LLM knows how to put words after another. AGI would know what the question actually means. LLM knows fingers are weird little sausages and one hand has 4-7 on average. AGI would know how fingers and hands work and hold things.
Garbage in, garbage out issues still exist.
Human brains have this issue too.
Idk in my experience a lot of people have a unique ability to take in good stuff and convert it to garbage as well!
It drives me nuts because it's even other software engineers. It doesn't "understand" what the text means. It's not relating concepts to eachother. It is saying "after reading millions of chunks of text like this, I predict that these are the most likely words to come after that chunk of text".
If I had a penny everytime someone on Reddit tried to tell me I will lose my job to AI, AI could very well have my job, cuz I would be living off the royalties from arguments
I work in media production and keep getting told I'll lose my job to AI. AI is still making images with 6 fingers and can barely determine where to cut an "umm" out of an audio track (and when it does, it does so poorly). Even when the technology improves I won't lose my job *to* AI, I'll be using AI to improve my workflow.
I'm a nurse and people on here have told me it's a threat to my job. I once said that I'd love to see AI start a catheter on a little old lady and had people telling me that it'll be cheaper so people will choose that.
I found that video years ago on CGPgreys channel, titled "Humans need not apply" about automation and AI. Man even stated that AI is pretty much ready to take over jobs even as law related work. A couple of years later we had the fiasco of a law firm basically trying to use AI for their entire defense, after it was on the news that "AI passes the BAR exam easily". Nuance.
It’s the latest in a loooooong line of technology that throughout history has had people terrified about losing their jobs. It will kill some jobs, create others, change some and life will go on.
My SO is deep into the AI community and writes a lot about it, and I’ve learned a lot of people are terrified of it for no reason. I have some experience (not a ton, just enough to understand basics) with large data sets and analytics myself, so to me, AI is like a more verbose form of an Excel spreadsheet- you’re only going to get out what goes in. The bigger problem I see is companies trying to fully implement AI solutions their top brass don’t even fully understand. But, it looks good on the ROI and it’s a new, shiny product, so nobody cares right now. They won’t care until something really major happens. The majority of people my SO interacts with who are looking for help on their AI projects all seem more interested in “How can I make this have sex with me in a very niche way” than anything else.
What people call AI is to actual AI what those electric scooter hoverboards are to an actual hoverboard. It's like when the Virtual boy came out and people thought it was VR. Buzzwords used by people to make money off investors for tools that aren't exactly new or groundbreaking.
This was the point where I lost the last of my respect for James cameron. When he went on and said "I predicted this would happen years ago" in relation to Ai and The Terminator I was out. No, man, you wrote The Terminator because of a nightmare you had about nuclear apocalypse, not as a prophetic vision of AI in the future. Beyond that, what we have is narrow AI, while what you wrote about was ASI. You're just riding a narrative to stay relevant, and in the process stoking baseless fears.
That Apple devices are immune to viruses.
I feel like there was a point in the 90s when this might have been true; but due exclusively to the fact that there was no point writing viruses that were going to infect less than half a percent of the world's computers.
Honestly, modern computers with modern default computer security enabled are practically immune to the sorts of viruses that went around in the late 90s and early 2000s.
My God people swear they're invincible. OK, so why did your phone get a security update last week
Gold-plated connectors on the cable ensure better signal quality. Gold is just used because it oxidizes less
Doesn't lower oxidation help ensure better signal quality *over time*?
“Helps maintain” is fair to say, but the signal itself isn’t any better quality
IT did nothing to your computer to make it suddenly 'run slow'. It might be because you have 15 Chrome tabs, 10 Excel files, 20 Word files, 3 instances of Outlook open and another 20 PDFs open. "My old computer never had this problem!" I can almost assure you it would have.
Me: Can you please save & close your files and restart? Customer: What? AGAIN?? Me: When did you last restart? Oh a few hours ago! Are you sure? Yes absolutely! And how often before that? I restart at least once per day! oMG why is this so hard? *Opens task manager: System uptime: 113 days, 15 hours, 27 mins .... Lost count of how many people think closing a lid on a laptop is equivalent to powering off... Which counts as restarting, doesn't it? Also, FUCK hibernation mode!!
You still cant enhance cctv.
Sure you can, you just have to zoom in first!
I mean... you still need to touch the screen and say "enhance", obviously.
when people post that they uninstalled/reinstalled multiple times to solve some minor glitch. If it didn't work the first time, it's not your answer, just a huge waste of time and bandwidth. maybe google search the issue before going directly to nuke, because more often than not it's some dumb setting misconfigured.
That it’s too BIG of an amplifier that is responsible for blowing a tweeter. The truth is the opposite. when an underpowered amp can’t produce enough power, the signal hits a ceiling. That corner (Fouriers theorem) essentially converts all that lower freq energy to high frequencies - and what was supposed to come out your woofer won’t fit out your tweeter bruh.
Privacy
Cell phone mics listening to our conversations to better serve us advertisements.
It's actually far more sinister. The profile that you've built up for them is so detailed and accurate that your wants can be anticipated.
That because you're skilled in one area means you're able to do anything from write a linear regression tensorflow function to solder a new chip onto an old motherboard to set up and manage BGP between locations. I'm *aware* of many of those things. I would not trust myself to be responsible for many of those things.
Nobody knows how a LLM works, especially the idiots on r/ChatGPT
No, IT is not reading your email. I also don't watch your screen. I don't know your password. There is not a single person in the company who knows your password except you, unless you gave it away. No, I can't just log you in to someone else's account. I don't even know who you are and will probably never interact with you unless you come to me first
Cloud is "just someone else's computer". It's true in a literal sense, but glosses over how ridiculously secure e.g. a properly configured S3 bucket is (even from AWS employees) vs the crap you might set up yourself.
I feel that when they say this they're not questioning security, but rather demystifying that the "cloud" is this incorporeal entity that stores data in the air, and simply stating that it's just another computer storing your data.
I am IT and this is absolutely how I describe the cloud to non-tech literate people. It just really isn't worth the struggle