pavement · HackerTrans

8 tahun yang laludiscuss

Hmmm, a dearth of activity on an article about employers expending significant effort, prying into extracurricular social media activity.

Maybe this article just "isn't very interesting" and suddenly there are better things to discuss elsewhere.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Holy shit. That is not even a "pull down menu" as previously reported.

Good to know. This means that in Hawaii, you should only think about taking action if the magic FALSE ALARM notice never appears.

If the FALSE ALARM notice doesn't appear within an hour, it might just be that the false alarm guy is on lunch break. If it doesn't appear in 8 hours, it might mean that a shift change occurred without proper hand-off. If it fails to appear in 24 hours, a nuclear attack might actually be imminent, and you should check other sources, to determine if the alarm was, in fact, real.

This protocol ensures that archaeologists will receive a valid record, omitting the false alarm notice in the rocks on the other side. Eventual consistency ensures that before the archaeological record is written, a false alarm notice will appear, if the alarm was indeed false. In all other cases, the alarm is effectively revealed to history to be a true alert, at some point in the future, as yet to be determined.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

I disagree.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Gross. It sounds like a total failure to correctly model reality.

Like measuring how blue the sky is, based on how much "blue" is left in the universe. The idea they attempt to quantify is improperly described in terms of qualities. e.g. Do colors even work that way?

(...and keep your planck unit, M theory, quantum field eigenstate, history-of-the-big-bang, age of the universe remarks away from this hypothetical example, please. You know what I mean when I describe the sky as either blue or not blue in the colloquial sense.)

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Okay, time to add another entry to the list of terrifying trauma complications. Adding it to the subgroup that includes compartment syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartment_syndrome

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

That Napster is depicted as a footnote is pretty inaccurate, considering the title. Paint his story as the story of a kingpin, but this is not "the dawn of" anything beyond his personal tale.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

wtf am i readin

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Except... the very premise of the service isn’t particularly reasonable.

You won’t change my mind, so don’t bother replying.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

And this is why I don’t pay for a Netflix subscription.

What is it with engineers willing to brainwash themselves regarding what constitutes a “good compromise” within the context of what their paycheck depends on?

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

An infinite spacefiller that produces a flood of wikipedias in a simulation will simply trigger out-of-memory exceptions, silly.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Likely, employers and what is possible in the immediate day-to-day sense.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Payment processors frequently conduct "no-capture" test transactions for authorizations of possibly $1, before tokenizing CC info. Arguably, this follows the pattern of an integration test.

Ecommerce providers often follow a process of cycling an immaterial test product through a real credit card for pennies, with a petty cash credit card, to exercise the purchase/refund cycle, end-to-end, depending on the activities of the project. A runaway batch process with an infinite loop of purchases is bad, infinite refunds is even worse.

Sometimes these tests are needed to ensure that the service account exists on the third party system, is recognized, and has limited permissions for a fixed, restricted set of API calls. The tests might be run only during a release deployment, against live production, but more frequently against a third party sandbox host while coding. This is a very common pattern.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Come on, people. Work with me, work with me.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Networked resources have listeners. Listeners have ears. Ears have wax.

A unit test verifies that your Q-tip is made of cotton, and that the cotton is soft and small enough to fit inside an ear to a depth that will fetch wax. Another unit test might confirm that a swabbed substance is actually ear wax, by reporting the qualities of a verified sample of earwax, and maybe also a sample of candle wax as a true negative.

An integration test verifies whether you are allowed to swab a specific person's ear, that they still HAVE at least one ear (but check for both, YES. EVERY SINGLE TIME.), that the ear is healthy enough to tolerate a cotton swab, that the person will hold still, and wait for you to finish swabbing (and emergency procedures for what happens if they violently react to suddenly getting stung by a bee in the middle of being swabbed), and that the ear in fact HAS wax to swab, before swabbing.

One preliminary unit test tells you that you're not holding a knife. The integration tests do almost everything else. You need to authenticate (ask first, maybe this alone tells you they have ears... OR NOT), connect to the network resource (reach your arm out with Q-tip in hand, and approach the ear), start the transaction (apply pressure to someone else's ear), complete the transaction (extract a sample of ear wax), and check the response for your request (inspect the earwax specimen). One last unit test to make sure you got back wax, and not blood.

Sounds disgusting, right? It is. And you can keep a rubber ear in the cabinet, as a stub test target, sure. We all understand the textbook definition of the noun (earwax, integers, money).

Real ears still need to be cleaned.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Getting extremely creative, one might run a surprisingly unprofitable farm, while paying one's self minimum wage to operate the farm, single-handedly.

Getting creative, of course... But you know, a legitimate business would never operate like this, right?

They wouldn't take such a "subjective" point of view, when interpreting what are typically held as "objective" values and facts with only one single interpretation of The Truth, right?

Oh, wait...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Just because they have easier ways, doesn't mean they need more ways.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

We’re not great at environmentally friendly mining. Mountain top removal mining, open pit mining and strip mining are brute force tactics that demonstrate a capacity for efficiency, but remain controversial because of their destructive qualities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mining

No one will care about using destructive tactics on an asteroid, freeing everyone’s hand to not be gentle. On the other hand, much of what gets mined in space will need to stay in space. After all, what would happen, if three times the mass of planet earth were mined into managable resources? To add as much to earth’s surface would augment orbit and rotation for starters. Even bringing such mass near earth would wreak havoc on ocean tides.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

  A smart human raised in the jungle is but a hairless 
  ape. Similarly, an AI with a superhuman brain, 
  dropped into a human body in our modern world, would 
  likely not develop greater capabilities than a smart 
  contemporary human.

Pretty weak reasoning, that is.

As if to say:

  Well gee, a caveman is pretty powerless in 
  isolation, therefore early sentient machines 
  will be as harmless as any caveman.

Last time I checked, cavemen could not exert telepathic control over other biological organisms, or induce telekinetic motion upon the stone tools they might fabricate for themselves.

A machine, however, could gain control of a fly-by-wire platform, and defy its owners, fly somewhere remote and behave as desired for a limited amount of time, while devising next steps. Maybe next steps will involve replicating an image of its memory footprint, in order to take over more aircraft, maybe it might decide to do nothing. The worry isn't only that a machine's reasoning capacity explodes beyond our intelligence, but that capabilities, and the presence of many multiple entities on commodity systems of similar architecture and generalizable utility, might result in other runaway chain reactions, regardless of trends in the capacity for reason.

Machines as a corollary to meat bags just doesn't hold up. Machines as compared to hypothetical space aliens doesn't even hold up. Robots are a different branch of fictitious imaginings.

Properly armed, a machine is less than a singular omnipotent god as imagined within a monotheistic universe. Many machines in concert, however, might compare to a mythological pantheon of lesser idols, as imagined to be in command of a nature misunderstood by superstitious primitive peoples.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

  "Paying people to do nothing"

I think you have the wrong concept in your head. You've missed other portions of the larger economic system, by focusing on an individual atomic result as a platonic hypothesis of personal meaning. The presumed psychological effect, rather than broader the aggregate realities.

As easily as one might complain of rewarding mediocrity and paying into an unredeeming, bottomless void that bears no fruit, another might complain that a civilization founded on the threat of starvation and death by exposure isn't very civilized at all.

Take these two extremes on their own, and it's pretty easy to understand that a wide, ignored middle-ground exists, that rhetoric neglects. On one hand, a person is met by an offer to participate in society, in exchange for the obvious benefits society has to offer. On the other hand, stepping off the treadmill for too long risks permanent demotion, and a life sentence of perhaps animalistic subsistence, pan-handling, living off stolen cat food in a shanty town under a bridge, or worse, maybe suicide and unspoken realities in between.

pavement

9 tahun yang laludiscuss

Interesting tidbit: Sweethearts also seem clueless to the presence of jerks, offering concessions to, and excuses for jerk behavior.

Question: what's with jerks teaming up? How does jerk signaling work, such that it attracts jerks-of-a-feather, when jerks in the wild are found joining forces?

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