@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@tharpa except greater-than isn't transitive for games.
In terms of ratings, it is. You can still have comments, but the actual rating is conventionally a numerical value.
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@tharpa except greater-than isn't transitive for games.
In terms of ratings, it is. You can still have comments, but the actual rating is conventionally a numerical value.
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
@tharpa said in Random thought of the day:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska Not to mention that even currently, a 7/10 is a horrible score, an 8/10 is a bad score, and a 9/10 is normal. Same goes for 5-star ratings: anything that's not 4.5+ is bad. And the distribution is bimodal: lots of 5's and 1's, few in between. And a 5-point scale is much better than a 10-point scale.
This is why I'm in favor of a binary rating system. You compare two items (such as two games) to each other. So all you're saying is that one game is overall better or worse than the other one.
As long as there's only two games in existence.
No. You can use the transitive property of greater than and worse than to rate items among multiple raters.
@Benjamin-Hall said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska Not to mention that even currently, a 7/10 is a horrible score, an 8/10 is a bad score, and a 9/10 is normal. Same goes for 5-star ratings: anything that's not 4.5+ is bad. And the distribution is bimodal: lots of 5's and 1's, few in between. And a 5-point scale is much better than a 10-point scale.
This is why I'm in favor of a binary rating system. You compare two items (such as two games) to each other. So all you're saying is that one game is overall better or worse than the other one.
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
I've reached the conclusion that the classic "x/10" rating system for movies and games is bad. Because it assumes there's an "absolute bad" (0/10) and an "absolute good" (10/10).
Even if that was theoretically true, in practice almost nothing approaches those points (absolute bad would be a blank screen I guess?). They're more of an unbounded normal distribution, where 99.9% of the values are in a small range, but the outliers can be much more far away.So: a better rating system would be x/10, where 0 is terrible, 10 is fantastic, but the values can into the negatives and over 10, so you can actually give a game 11/10 if it's even better than a 10/10 game.
Of course the potential for abuse is big and people would be rating games "9000/10 zomg lol", but oh well.
It's even worse when they ask for self-ratings in job applications or performance reviews. Like, what scale are they using? Logarithmic, or flat? If it's a flat scale, then all a ten would mean is that it's better than 90% of the others. A 1 would mean that it's worse than at least 90% of the others.
@brie said in In other news today...:
@sweaty_gammon Don't forget it's a whole lot more puritanical in some parts of the world (i.e. in the US) than it is over there. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition would probably qualify as NSFW in some workplaces.
Yes. Yes it would. You might not get fired for a single offense, but it's something you shouldn't be viewing at work.
@Polygeekery said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@loopback0 no. Ukuleles are a crime against humanity.
I can't listen to this at work, but assuming this is the one I'm thinking of, this may change your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z26BvHOD_sg
@bb36e said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
This is why Outlook Express was the forum software of the gods. The twisties made it trivial to see the context tree.
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Millennials are using the same practice with their employer as they do with dating
Two types of "ghosting" are mentioned. One is where the employee has not yet been hired. This seems like simple bad manners, like when an employer doesn't tell the candidate that they're no longer under consideration. The other type seems to go beyond bad manners. An employee simply stops going to work without telling their employer because they've accepted another job.
@Gurth said in Petty crime in London? NYT wants to know about it...:
@PJH said in Petty crime in London? NYT wants to know about it...:
@DogsB said in Petty crime in London? NYT wants to know about it...:
Cockburn is actually the name of the writer... Maybe it's one of Elfwick's alts?
Given it's not pronounced with the
ck
in the middle...Yes, I wonder why they changed the pronunciation …
Well, England (and also New England, FWIW) frequently simplifies the pronunciation of place names to the point where it's barely recognizable. So it's not certain that it's for the obvious reason.
@loopback0 said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Also, what does the front bumper have to be insecure about? Does it think it's fat or something?
My favorite line from The Hulk was, "Angry Man is unsecure!" I guess it was correct, but I chose to hear it as synonymous with, "Angry Man is insecure".
@boomzilla said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Sometimes the secret is that it's better than the word he's thinking.
@El_Heffe said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Although if Hal has a daughter like Kelly Bundy, she might manage to get an A anyway.
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
@tharpa said in In other news today...:
She undoubtedly assumed that giving the caller the information from the cards was not the same as giving them the actual cards.
Yeah, that's why you shouldn't be afraid of giving me your credit card number
No problem:
3566002020360505
CC numbers are like Belgium, right?
@mott555 said in In other news today...:
There's a funny juxtaposition of details here:
"They said that they were from Publisher's Clearing House and that I had won one of the top prizes. I was going to be getting 1.5 million dollars," she said.
The woman said the caller told her, in order to receive the prize, she simply needed to go to Walmart, purchase three $300 gift cards and read back the numbers and pin on the cards. The woman said the caller told her the gift cards would be used as a way to verify her identity when they showed up to her home with the prize.
And then
"Just the way it was presented, it was very polished. It was very professional," she explained.
The woman said she is vigilant, and often times warns her own family and friends of fraud and schemes she reads about.
I'm not surprised that a non-techie could be caught by this. She undoubtedly assumed that giving the caller the information from the cards was not the same as giving them the actual cards. You can tell someone the serial numbers from twenty dollar bills and that's not the same as giving them the money. Just because she was caught by this one doesn't mean that there weren't other scams she dodged, and warned others about.
@mott555 said in Emotional Support Peacock:
@PJH said in Emotional Support Peacock:
The ESA must be either a dog or a cat.
Now I want an emotional support mountain lion.
I want an emotional support hyena. I identify as a hyena, and thus deserve to have an animal companion of my own kind accompany me everywhere.
I thought this was interesting, because in the U.S. medical establishment fax machines are still a staple. Just today, my wife's pharmacy at an internationally held grocery chain sent a fax to her doctor to get a renewal of a prescription.
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@tharpa said in In other news today...:
these views that you detest.
Now I think you're projecting a bit there.
Right. You don't detest those views at all. Not at all. No minimization there.
@PJH said in In other news today...:
@tharpa said in In other news today...:
The word "prude" comes from the word "prudence",
Yeah, no.
meaning level-headedness, well-consideredness, sobriety, etc
Yeah, no.
Brought to you by the letters 'Theresa May,' 'Humpty Dumpty,' and the number 'Brexit means Brexit.'
Right, those definitions are in no way synonyms for level-headedness, well-consideredness, sobriety, etc. Absolutely not. Not at all.
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@tharpa said in In other news today...:
@PJH said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Why is sex education so avoided?
Generally, either religious prudery, parental embarrassment, or both.
The word "prude" comes from the word "prudence", meaning level-headedness, well-consideredness, sobriety, etc. I think it says a lot about modern times that these commendable qualities are now considered an insult.
What a word is rooted in has rather little to do with what it currently means though. Prude, for me, has absolutely no connotation of levelheadedness or well considered-ness.
I understand that you absolutely do not recognize the foundation of levelheadedness and well considered-ness that is the foundation of these views that you detest.
@PJH said in In other news today...:
@Tsaukpaetra said in In other news today...:
Why is sex education so avoided?
Generally, either religious prudery, parental embarrassment, or both.
The word "prude" comes from the word "prudence", meaning level-headedness, well-consideredness, sobriety, etc. I think it says a lot about modern times that these commendable qualities are now considered an insult.
@kazitor said in Quotes Out of Context:
@tharpa Is there a particular artwork you have in mind? Too many share the title.
The one by Giorgio de Chirico.
@Gribnit said in Forbidden Characters:
he's you.
Hmm. Sock Rock upvoted that. You might be onto something.
@Karla said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Atazhaia said in Quotes Out of Context:
@Karla Green dragons are very pretty~
Some are.
The one in "St. George Killing the Dragon" certainly was. (My condolences to the dragon's family.)
@obeselymorbid said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Might belong in another topic:
There was a young man who joined a cloistered monastery. The rule of this particular monastery was that he could only say two words every ten years.
After ten years, the time came for his interview with the abbot. He said, "Room cold."
Ten years later, he again had an interview. "Bed hard."
Ten years later, "Food poor."
And then ten years later, "Want out." The abbot replied, "I'm not surprised. You've done nothing but complain since you got here."
@TimeBandit said in Internet of shit:
I guess 8 figures of users is technically "a limited number of customers".
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
PSA: Don't cook your dick.
I do not think you could make it without cooking it. Though frying it is
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/25987/amazon-vs-bear-repellent
I need to take a 2 year vacation to catch up with this place
I am unceasingly amazed that the heavy posters here are able to hold a full-time job as well, in at least one case, a prestigious job.
@sweaty_gammon said in Re: In other news today...:
@pie_flavor the only thing I know right now is that I hate NGRX and the guy that mandated we use it. He is also a vegan because his girlfriend showed him a video of a cow getting killed. He is a complete pussy. I hate him.
He sounds like a good guy. (Though that could change if I knew more about him.)
@Tsaukpaetra said in Forbidden Characters:
@Carnage said in Forbidden Characters:
How many millions of lines of code are you looking at?
Hmmm, just under 1, I think.
Is it decently designed so you at least have a data access layer where all the databasey stuff lives, or is it spread all over the place?
Somewhat decently, if you consider ODBC "decent".
The really annoying thing is that you may have bespoke code using whatever character as a delimiter or flow control character somewhere that just slightly breaks things, so without looking through all of the code, getting a decent grasp of how it works and what it does, any additional character may break something. Spaces are particularly annoying, if the original designers knew that they shouldn't be in the in the input, since there may be things doing stringy things that has spaces as significant characters, such as splitting up concatenated strings by spaces and grabbing individual strings by index.
Luckily all the db calls are in on long file! and non-strings are typically not treated as strings.
The database bits is easy. The rest is the annoying stuff that comes back and bites you in a few months time. The best way to handle it is to get to know the code properly. Hopefully, it's fairly well designed.
Yeah, just recently it was "discovered" that single apostrophes will break things. 'course I knew about it, but I haven't had time to redesign everything to actually support parameterizing all the things. Soon™ though.
Hmm. Carnage was asking me the questions, but you answered. So the only conclusion I can draw is that you work here. And there aren't many people who know enough about the code to give those answers, so that narrows down the possibilities.
@Gribnit said in Forbidden Characters:
@tharpa said in Forbidden Characters:
The issues seem to more subtle and complicated than I initially anticipated.
you don't say
I think I'm perfectly qualified to be a manager.
@sweaty_gammon said in Forbidden Characters:
@tharpa said in Forbidden Characters:
@sweaty_gammon said in Forbidden Characters:
In the application are they using prepared statements?
Generally, yes, they're using hibernate. But the problem is that, like many applications, it was developed over a number of years by different people. I think there are probably places that SQL is being concatenated directly. Thus the belt and suspenders approach.
Is auditing the code base out of question?
Depending on how formally you mean auditing, yes. I'm relatively new there and pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order.
@sweaty_gammon said in Forbidden Characters:
In the application are they using prepared statements?
Generally, yes, they're using hibernate. But the problem is that, like many applications, it was developed over a number of years by different people. I think there are probably places that SQL is being concatenated directly. Thus the belt and suspenders approach.
@Gąska said in Forbidden Characters:
@tharpa ban parentheses, whitespaces and semicolons, allow everything else. If you can't audit the whole application and evaluate whether they do stupid shit anywhere, that sounds like the safest approach.
Thanks. The users specifically asked in the ticket to allow spaces, though. What about single and double-quotes?
@Carnage said in Forbidden Characters:
Read up on SQL injection, and make sure your code is not vulnerable, then you can allow everything. Things may break for viewers of data that are doing it wrong however.
Yes, and that's the idea. It's a large application, not one I'm writing from scratch. "Belt and suspenders" means to assume the worst, that there is code hiding in there somewhere that was done wrong.
@mikehurley said in Forbidden Characters:
In your dev environment you could remove the restrictions. Run tests that you have control over. Let it be used for a while to see what other sorts of garbage get added.
You'll be able to make a better final decision once you know what's currently going on.
I could do that. The problem is that it's a fairly large application and has a lot of functionality, and I don't know it all that well. What I'm trying to avoid is the possibility of is finding out six months from now, "I didn't know that this column was later used in that way, so I didn't do a test on it." Are there specific characters that are necessary for a SQL injection attack?
I'm relatively new in this place working on a moderately large application that's been around for ~10 years. There is a place where the users enter a name for something. Up until this point, the naming was overly strict, allowing only letters, digits and hyphens. My job is to loosen the unnecessary strictness. I am tempted to allow any characters, but I want to make sure I know what I'm doing.
The application uses a PostGres database. It is not an HTML application, it does not have a web interface.
On security, there are times when I would use a belt and suspenders approach. Let's take the worst-case scenario, and assume that there may be places in the application where SQL is constructed in Java through concatenation. Are there any characters I should not allow the user to use?
There is no central database, even a hack would not affect anything outside their location, but I would still prefer to avoid any potential security issues.
Epilogue:
The issues seem to be more subtle and complicated than I initially anticipated. I think I'm settling on a minor adaptation of the existing method. I'm going to continue to use a short allowable characters list, just adding the underscore and a single space. (The existing code already does a trim.)
@Gribnit said in Nobody shares knowledge better than this:
@anotherusername whoa hold on. the same instant? Or both before some joining condition?
Also I think there's an auto-downvote on the thread or someone's really, really fast.
I will generally upvote a post with a negative tally.
In other news, approximately every link is dead. If you likes you some bit-rot, check out this bit-rot.
I'm familiar with webring. I used to have a couple of sites there. The bit-rot didn't just happen naturally, the new owners (some years ago) pretty much caused it by making it difficult for the ring owners. Why you would buy a site, and then go out of your way to ruin it, I don't know.
</tangent>esoteric also confuses content filters?
http://nav.webring.org/cgi-bin/navcgi?ring=esolang;list
maybe it's webring in general?
@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
Not to be confused with the Rocher limit, which is defined as how close I can get to gold-wrapped chocolates without eating them.
With or without someone watching?
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Tsaukpaetra When the Vulcans look at humans, I imagine they're thinking something like "but in their universe, all the people on the Minnow are Gilligan."
Maybe. But Gilligan, though not the brightest person on the island, might have been the sanest. The Vulcans might appreciate that Gilligan was relatively logical.
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
I have no qualms about eating vegan shit, as long as it's tasty in it's own right.
Yep. There's lots of really tasty recipes (Indian cuisine has some great options, for example) that happen to not use meat or animal-derived products.
True.
But they don't really support the Great Vegan Holy Crusade so you're not supposed to eat them; they're not Woke enough.
I don't know where you got that bizarre idea, but there's no truth to it.
@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@topspin Somehow I'm offended at all the vegetarian recipes that are actually wish-it-was-meat recipes. And I'm not even interested in eating vegetarian.
You know you've got a PR problem when the best thing you can say about your vegan product is "you'd swear you were eating meat!"
Well, yeah, you have a comprehension problem in the general public. Surprise, surprise. Logically however, it makes perfect sense:
People perform harmful action x because they're attached to pleasure y.
You provide a way of providing pleasure y without causing the harm produced by action x.
The non-sadistic will tend to switch to the method of obtaining pleasure y without performing harmful method x.
@kazitor said in In other news today...:
Somehow this seems relevant:
@kazitor said in Quotes Out of Context:Vegetarianism is basically BDSM
— me, apparently
Relevant because it embodies the level of critical thought exhibited by WTDWTF denizens regarding the subject of a vegetarian diet.
@Lorne-Kates said in The official 2018 death pool:
He helped spread the "Only fags get AIDS" message,
The problem is he forgot IV illegal drug users? (The hemophiliac problem was solved as soon as they started screening blood donors.) Sure, there are rare cases where people don't fall into one of the above categories. But then it would just be a rare disease, and would not have gotten much attention.
which
rightly
stigmatized the disease, and delayed research into treatment for years/decades.
When you see it clearly, you realize it's no different than lung cancer. The vast majority of cases are caused by a behavior. In the case of lung cancer, the right solution was found, addressing the suicidal behavior. The difference is that smokers are not a politically favored group.
@JBert said in 🔗 Quick links thread:
@dcon I'm feeling rather about that front door.
I'm feeling more like : -- |
@JBert said in In other news today...:
As for people changing it later: I don't see why it can't be done, though another solution would have been to leave it out completely from the birth certificate. It doesn't list how tall you were, your weight or the density of your hair (if any).
The birth certificates I've seen do list length and weight. To change information on there that was correct at the time is to rewrite history. Some people have no problem with that.
@Karla said in In other news today...:
And it reminded me that in college when I was a Sophomore I hooked up with a pre-frosh that ended up playing for Bills.
I trust you checked his ID to ensure that he was over 18.