An experimental category for Megatopics that grew from the Sidebar
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
The ICQ instant messaging service is shutting down for good on June 26
ICQ, an instant messaging service that launched in 1996 and was very popular at one time in the US, is officially shutting down operations on June 24, nearly 28 years after it launched.
That was still a thing?!
Some of my older forum accounts still list my ICQ number as a way to contact me, along with AIM and MSN and others. It's been at least a decade since I've run Trillian, though.
My ICQ number was six digits, as was my Slashdot one. That was probably cool at some point, and lame before (and after) that. :)
Code Snippet of the Day - self-submissions for code snippets that shouldn't really exist.
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@izzion said in Visual Studio WTfs:
I wouldn't want to be on either side of the bet that Framework 4.8 is going to be available in Windows 12.
I can fairly confidently bet that it won’t be; if it ships with the OS it’ll be 4.8.1 or later.
(It will be… interesting… if they put .NET Framework 4.x on the standalone-component train like 3.5 but not the VB6 runtime.)
Error'd - features fun error messages and other visual oddities from the world of IT.
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@TimeBandit office workers don't use Linux, obvs, they all use corporate Windows with corporate subscriptions to Office, why would they need a Linux version of anything?
(I jest of course but I have had a similar conversation not that long ago where it wasn't tongue in cheek, and I was told basically that.)
Side Bar: Because more things make us ask WTF than just code.
Post your own WTFs that used to also briefly appear in the side bar on The Daily WTF website.
@DogsB said in I, ChatGPT:
Generative AI may be creating more work than it saves
Addressing a problem or opportunity with generative AI might be overkill.
Generally what I've been thinking.
...about the entire industry.
@DogsB said in I hate printers, with a passion:
@HardwareGeek said in I hate printers, with a passion:
@Arantor There is a photo of me wearing a kilt. In fact, I'm wearing a kilt right now.
Filed under: Scotsman, or something
What the hell is with you and directing us to pictures of you in a dress?
Testing the waters.
@topspin said in Scientific Science:
Elson, Malte / May 21
Pay researchers to spot errors in published papers
Nature - Borrowing the idea of ‘bug bounties’ from the technology industry could provide a systematic way to detect and correct the errors that litter the scientific literature.
‘bug bounty’ programmes
In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.
That sounds like a good idea on the face of it. I'll call it Paid Post-Publication Peer-Review, P4R for short.
Will it work to improve peer review? Probably not. Is it worth trying? Anything, at this point.
Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences
I'm going to order a new Ferrari right now ...
Scientists that are discovered to publish shitty or outright doctored and false papers should be sent on a world tour and put in stocks at the largest universities where people can throw rotten eggs at them, ending with a month in stocks at the university where they published the most falsehoods. And all the universities should have a small town square with a collection of shame stocks for this purpose.
And also fine the publications that publish the most shit.
@dkf said in Travel WTFs:
@sockpuppet7 said in Travel WTFs:
@HardwareGeek train is good when it's a 30min commute
An hour of train commute isn't too awful provided you can get a seat and have a coffee (plus newspaper and/or Internet).
Other relevant factors are how often you need to do it and the number and length of the layovers. My usual train commute includes a 80 minute stretch and a 5 minute stretch, with a 10min layover and a 10min walk at each end. That's only doable because I only need to do it once every two weeks (home the rest of the time) and my manager lets me deduct part of it from my work day.
In theory I do check slack and email on the train, but it's vanishingly rare for that to turn up anything that's actionable on my phone and I'm not gonna hassle with the laptop on board.
The Star Control kickstarter finished and hit every stretch goal! I'm so glad it hit the last one, "English voice-over" (by a mere $10k out of $670k!), because it means I can comfortably play it with my wife. I read faster than she does, so reading text in games is always a small point of friction.
@Gern_Blaanston said in Just how incompetent is Elon Musk?:
Jonathan M. Gitlin / May 13 / Cars
Elon Musk laid off the Tesla Supercharger team; now he’s rehiring them
Last week the CEO said Tesla will spend $500 million expanding the charger network.
Fred Lambert / May 1 / News
Elon Musk is throwing his weight around Tesla, comes in like a wrecking ball
We are getting more information on the ongoing layoffs at Tesla. Several employees describe the situation as Elon Musk “throwing...
I guess he found a new designer drug to do?
So I'm trying to rebuild the test environment for this application to a newer standard more closely matching the production one. This involves spinning up Azure Kubernetes (aks) and connecting it to a subnet that has VPN to intranet to access internal docker registry (artifactory) to avoid having to copy images over.
So I spin it up, install an ingress controller and the load balancer does not work. The way it is supposed to work is that—since I'm using the kubelet network to save IP addresses—the service is exposed on random ports on the nodes and then the load-balancer is configured to route to those ports. Except … the system configures the correct ports for health checks, but not the actual routes. So the load-balancer indicates it's fine, but can't actually route anything.
And to top it off, I can't create a support ticket directly, I have to go through our ICT and our “cloud service provider”.
@Carnage said in Hacking News:
Yes. TOR exit nodes are mainly controlled by state actors, and have been for at least about a decade now.
Isn't TOR design supposed to be somewhat resistant to the effects of that?
(At least if you're not foolish enough to use unencrypted data)
@Steve_The_Cynic I can't speak for the others but I've seen how much internal bullshit MSF has going on and frankly I would never encourage anyone to donate to them.
I know that such orgs all have some internal bullshit but... fuck me... theirs is more internal bullshit than usual by quite a margin.
DeAngelo Marquise Vaxter / Apr 24
Video released: Assault on Embark bus driver leads to crash into Oklahoma City business
Video has been released from inside of the bus that crashed over the weekend in Oklahoma City, causing damages to a business and injuries.On Saturday, police ar
@Atazhaia said in Linux on the Desktop? A long way off... :
@Watson said in Linux on the Desktop? A long way off... :
@LaoC said in Linux on the Desktop? A long way off... :
Nah, just kidding, it's over 7100 pages,
...which Microsoft Word doesn't fully comply with, giving us
Wait... Microsoft doesn't follow their own standard?
Well, Microsoft's first submission to ISO had a lot of Windows-specific stuff (for supporting all their different versions of Word), and ISO naturally said that such stuff wasn't appropriate for a vendor-neutral industrial standard. Microsoft went away and split their backward compatibility out those 600 pages of "Legacy" @LaoC referred to, and resubmitted the "Strict" part as the standard, with the optional "Legacy" extension. ISO accepted this on the condition that all new OOXML documents adhere to the "Strict" part, with the extension only used as required for backward compatibility. Microsoft said "Okay, sure" with its fingers crossed behind its back.
@Steve_The_Cynic said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@dkf said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
And yes, JIRA encourages this by its design.
I wouldn't necessarily say, "encourages this," but "facilitates this" or "makes this too easy" are definitely on the cards.
Atlassian absolutely encourages you to use JIRA in these ways if you can stomach any of the marketing shite they serve up.
@Parody said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
Meanwhile, I still shut my computers down when I'm done using them...
My wife's father does that. He turns on his computer long enough to check/send e-mail and do whatever he needs to do right at that minute. Then shuts it down.
@cvi said in "I swear to you, I did exactly as you told me......":
@TwelveBaud said in "I swear to you, I did exactly as you told me......":
Free beats 0.3¢ every day.
Further costs savings: measure voltage over the speaker, so it can act as a (terrible) microphone. Remove one of the buttons in favour of the user screaming at the device.
I feel like I would be willing to pay more for this feature.
@topspin said in Abode unCreative Suite (includes hoodie!):
@Atazhaia said in Abode unCreative Suite (includes hoodie!):
Called it.
@topspin said in Abode unCreative Suite (includes hoodie!):
@boomzilla said in Abode unCreative Suite (includes hoodie!):
Minus the cost of the hoodies!
From the screenshot: "I have concerns at this point".
@joshmid747 said in Super Cow Powers:
Only just rediscovered this on my computer, been ages since I have done this one.
Well, well, well .... if it isn't Jo Shmid.
@dkf said in Where has all the backward compatibility gone?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Where has all the backward compatibility gone?:
@dkf said in Where has all the backward compatibility gone?:
@Benjamin-Hall Can we defend the kittens and puppies anyway? Asking for a pyromaniac friend.
I mean, I'm fine with them as long as they're not near me OR (not XOR) hypoallergenic. And not noisy, filthy, or otherwise unpleasant. I hold no ill-will towards even the ones I'm not fine with, just can't defend them while they're like that.
You find yourself able to defend them in the abstract, but the realities of fur allergies are unfortunate. Particularly as kittens tend to go 110% into purring...
Purring I'm fine with. It's dogs barking or howling that I dislike, at least if it's constant. I've got neighbors whose dog will sometimes bark like it's being murdered for an hour straight.
@JBert said in Conversations overheard:
@Yamikuronue said:"We started running a promotion on X/XX, which has now ended. We did not set it up using the Promotion Tracker. However, we now want the data. Is there some way to get the data that would have been collected by the Promotion Tracker tool had we elected to use it?"
Hmmm, there was some old quote about this. I think it went something like this:
On two occasions have I been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you fail to put any figures into the machine, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I don't think it's quite as bad as that. The former was due to not having a clear understanding of how the Promotion Tracker works. (URL's with a marker, etc.) The questioner may have wondered if it was just a data analysis tool.
The Babbage one seemed to have no understanding of the most fundamental grasp of how a computer works. What makes it most amusing is that the questioner thought it was a gotcha. The modern equivalent would be, "Then why are apes still around?"
Eric Berger / Mar 7 / Space
After Astra loses 99 percent of its value, founders take rocket firm private
First you burn the cash, then comes the crash.
If only the people getting soaked by this were venture capitalists...
@Atazhaia said in Willy's Chocolate Experience:
It is indeed amazing stuff, and meme-worthy.
Feb 27
What Was The Sad Glasgow 'Willy Wonka Experience' And Who's 'Billy Coull'? The Disastrous Event Explained
Scottish children were anticipating a world of pure imagination, and got a world of disappointment instead.
In the wake of the disastrous event, a ... group of angry Glaswegians, currently 1,200 strong,
...Now things are gonna get interesting!
In the wake of the disastrous event, a Facebook group of angry Glaswegians, currently 1,200 strong,
@sockpuppet7 said in Is Uber the *worst* .com currently?:
in my locality it was unfair laws, with most cab licenses owned by city lawmakers, and cabs being priced as a luxury, with old cars and rude drivers
the owner of the license would hire a driver to work for him, and the profit, doing nothing, was better than the average pay of an engineer like us
That's the sort of situation where I'd expect Uber to do well, cracking a market where prices were massively out of line with service levels. It is the differential between prices and service levels that provides the opportunity, the competitive edge. Markets where there isn't that dysfunction will be harder (that's why they've found the UK mostly hard going, especially outside London; not impossible but very little to gain advantage with).
Status: I'm really confused. For some reason uBlock is not keeping YouTube on the whitelist.
I click the button, it adds www.youtube.com to the whitelist (verified in settings) all is good. Open a new tab, it's gone again.
Good. I feel my hate growing.
@Bulb said in Art Wars: The AI Menace:
The muscles that do most of the work are the back ones as the arches spreads out their arms.
That's certainly how Japanese archery (Kyūdō) does it. Most western archers don't use their backs so much (though they probably should be).
@dcon said in What's an image file?:
@Arantor said in What's an image file?:
Mine says F12
Prt Scr
and in a fancy edgy tech font because it's an MSI laptop. And naturally it has the LED lightup thing, so when I press FN, the text goes orange.
Well, actually, my MS keyboard is PrtScr
SysRq
The Lenovo has a snipping image under the PrtSc.
Standards. Yup. One for every manufacturercomputer and keyboard model!
My Logitech keyboard dumbed it down even more:
(with wooden table for extra pointz)
@Steve_The_Cynic I can’t even claim that, since I had a break of breaking it around 2008-2010, but the underlying point is +3 Immunity to Bad Headlines.
@dkf said in Visual Basic for Quantum Computers:
@robo2 said in Visual Basic for Quantum Computers:
I'm allowed to WFH half the time, but I'm not allowed to do that from a different country (for tax reasons).
If you're in another country temporarily but still resident in then I'd expect the tax authorities to be relaxed about where you're physically located.
I actually had the need to check the laws due to my cross-country situation, and the answer is that it all depends on the specific tax treaty between the countries involved. The usual - but not universal - rule is that your tax residency is the country you spent more than half of a year (183 days), and if there wasn't one, then your home country. In particular, this rule applies across all of EU. So it would be fine for @robo2 to work abroad, as long as they don't do it too much.
Please don't tell anyone I only spend 165 days in USA in 2020.
@Tsaukpaetra It's the needful-don't-doers. There's going to be someone in a small group insulated from all users who has the power to press the Button and make everything work... but they don't want to (and definitely don't want anyone who might qualify as a user near them!) and nobody outside their coterie really knows who to pester in person to make it happen despite their passive-aggressive resistance.
@Mason_Wheeler said in Oh, the stupidity of Firefox:
@Gern_Blaanston Serious question. If you're going to use ambiguous acronyms, you need to explain them, because that's the only ESR I know of, so I have no idea what you're talking about here.
This is perhaps the funniest thing you've ever posted after getting upset that people don't know obscure shit you post about.
@dkf said in Guy brings down thousands of npm builds:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Guy brings down thousands of npm builds:
I'm amazed that there was a systemically enforced policy to disallow deletion of a package if it so happens that some other package happens to reference it.
I'm more surprised that there isn't a check to see whether the dependency graph is a DAG.
There probably is at the point of resolution in npm itself.
But note that “everything” is really a meta package that points to half a dozen other packages that just hard-list everything else, built by scraping the npm registry.
Which means it must be doing something DAG like somewhere because everything-registry/everything -> everything-registry/chunk0 -> list of dependencies, such that everything itself only has 5 dependencies (chunk0 through chunk4) and those individually have all the dependencies.
@loopback0 said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Who the fuck is buying this?
Like with most of the other IoT garbage, idiots. Idiots are buying it.
Also, that if day > 20 && month > 10? It's false now. The train that broke on December 21 is fine now.
Noworoczny cud. Zepsuty Impuls sam się naprawił 1 stycznia
Należący do województwa lubuskiego pociąg Impuls, który przestał się uruchamiać 21 grudnia, od 1 stycznia ponownie działa bez żadnej zewnętrznej ingerencji. Dokładnie taki przebieg wydarzeń przewidzieli hakerzy z Dragon Sector, którzy analizowali jego oprogramowanie.
I like that one of the theories about why some setups were still working and others were not is that the related spec says you need to check the certificate's validity relative to a date. What date? The spec doesn't specify, so some systems might check that it was valid when everything was generated (still works) and others check vs. the current date (fails).
@Gern_Blaanston
Almost 20 years back? Not everything was remote accessible, or accessible remotely for external consultants. The software required dedicated hardware cards. This often resulted in different servers being used and general hands off from IT. Sometimes because they where marked simply as Telco.
The times I walked around with a borrowed IT badge, got left in a room I didn't have access to or IT blocked a door from shutting are countless.
Sometimes, in small companies, they didn't give a flying fuck. Other times, in banks or international institutions, it was lawful good rule breaking. Like, here have my badge because we are still battling internal why my colleagues don't have access.
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!:
@hungrier said in PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!:
@dkf said in PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!:
@MrL said in PANTONE® dictates the colour of 2022!:
Disgusting
Makes you wonder if Pantone are based in Boston.
New Jersey, the Boston of states
Posted from Boston, the New Jersey of cities.