When your favorite band cancels their gig because the lead singer has “come down with the flu”, that’s industry code for “got too wasted, and is currently too busy getting alcohol and possibly drugs out of their system to perform”.
I even worked one show that had to end after 20 minutes because one guy in the band was visibly under the influence, refused to play, talked to his hallucinations, then spent a few minutes talking to the audience about how his foot was evil and wanted to kill him, before the tour manager could drag him off stage. Then he tried to assault several backstage staff for not allowing him to cut off his foot. This was on a tour that promoted alcohol free rockshows btw, so we didn’t provide alcohol to the artists backstage. God knows what he might’ve purchased from our local street dealers lol.
The next day in the papers, the headline says “[the band] cancels first week of reunion tour after flu outbreak” 🙃 Yes, of course
I always wondered why Paul Westerberg caught the flu so much. When I finally got to see him live a few years ago he definitely was coming down with the flu on stage.
I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.
I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.
No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.
Sounds like they didn’t spend any money on Cyber security’s team to properly implement it then…data exfil %100 would have been picked up by any real DLP solution and even barebones heuristics based EDR would have thrown a red flag as well.
Haha, please. You’re talking about machine learning when the best any business is using is antivirus. You forget, Boomers are still running big business and IT departments are running security.
It’s perfect world vs. real world my dude, and real world puts out tender for the cheapest solution.
It sounds like you’ve been working for Mom and pop shops then, and they’re not having audits done. Companies with millions of customers will usually either have in house secops or an mssp handle everything. Point being is, without audits then insurance usually will not be approved for PII loss or they flat out will not work with the company at all. It even more so with HIPAA laws.
I’m with the above commenter. I’ve worked at many companies of various sizes, from small local shops up to international corporations, including at least one contractor for the US military.
Every one of them had rules and policies and training on security, to varying degrees. But at every one of them, I’d find some vulnerability, or instance where someone was neglecting security. Each time, I’d bring it to the attention of someone in management. Each time (with one company as exception), those warnings would be “heard” and “passed up the chain”, and then nothing would happen. Only one company in 20 years of work actually fixed a security issue I found. And no company I’ve ever worked for was leak proof.
In my experience, until it threatens to cost a company much more money in losses than it would cost to fix the problem, but said problem will not get fixed. That’s profit motive. And often it seems they’d rather roll the dice until a loss occurs, and then (maybe) fix the issue.
I’ve worked at plenty of companies with exfil protection and people still did this. One has 100 devs and 500 total employees
[in the US] your insurance dictates your healthcare, not your disease, deformity, symptoms etc. If your insurance pays for an allergy test, you’re getting an allergy test (even if you came in for a broken arm). If insurance pays for custom orthotics, you’re getting custom orthotics (even if you came in for a wart removal). We will bill your insurance thousands of dollars for things you don’t need. We’re forced to do it by the private equity firms that have purchased almost all of American healthcare systems. It’s insane, it’s wasteful. The best part is the person who needs the allergy test or the custom orthotics can’t afford it, so they don’t get the shit we give away to people who don’t need it.
I would gladly kill myself if it meant we got universal healthcare, but private equity firms can’t monitize a martyr so it would be pointless.
Fuck everything about the current US healthcare system. The US can be so much more, can be so much better, if we could somehow just make a single percent stop fucking over the other 99%
Truth
The past decade of the tech industry has felt very snakeoil-y.
INB4 “It always has been.”
What’s sad is there are plenty of actual problems out there that could be solved with software. Most of the time they’re not that ‘sexy’ and management is so blinded by greed that they throw away all the good opportunities.
Do you have any examples of problems currently lacking a (plausible) software solution?
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
I think it started with registry cleaners.
Those weren’t really pushed as a get-rich-quick scheme, which a lot of the hustle seems to be currently.
Oh, you’re thinking of crypto to junk. Nah, Fudge That.
It is kind of hilarious that airplanes are seen as being safe and reliable, when if they were given the same factor of safety as most other consumer goods, they’d never get off the ground from being too heavy.
I do NOT recommend you do this, but if a ladder says it is designed for 300 lbs, then it should carry 1200 lbs. 4X is a fairly common factor of safety for things like ladders where people’s lives are in jeopardy. Most other items are usually 2X. (I want to point out that there are qualifications to this… static loading and dynamic loading are totally different things. Also a simple point load is not the same as a cantilevered loading condition. A new piece of equipment is not the same as one abused on the job for the last 10 years. All these things will dramatically affect safety ratings for things)
I’d say the difference is that every single part of an airline is carefully rated though. Everything that’s supplied for use on an airline is expensive because of all the regulations.
A ladder may be rated for 1200 pounds, but nobody inspects every single use-case for that ladder and ensures that the entire system always has 4x safety. Once you buy the ladder it’s up to you what you lean it up against, etc.
Regulations and quality checks on aerospace parts is no joke. More so on stuff that goes out into space and on military hardware, but every single nut and bolt and everything in between can be traced back to a supplier and that supplier will be able to tell you when it was made, by who and even where the raw material came from and show you the certs. Regular airplanes not nearly as strict or as much paperwork, but it isn’t that far behind, quite honestly.
Also, you might be surprised by the testing that ladders go through. Not so much the cheapo Chinesium stuff, but safety in all fields is no joke. It is too costly to skimp on testing.
I used to believe this, but recent incidents have exposed systemic issues in engineering and QA at at least one major US aerospace manufacturer.
The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.
Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.
I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.
Yeah but most people aren’t Alexander the Great or Mozart. And even if you are, you’re probably not working in congress, hah
Alexander had Aristotle to tutor him. If you find yourself young and in power, you better hope your elder advisors are that good.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
Im just glad you got that reference
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
Accounting is a goddamn mess. There’s lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we’re supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world’s audit, tax, and consulting needs. They’re supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You’re worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.
And the only reason it continues to work is society’s social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don’t have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we’re all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It’s bonkers.
I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I’m in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.
So basically, everyone is full of bullshit and lying to keep the system working.
Why am I not surprised?
Social security would be a ponzi scheme if it wasn’t done by the government. System only works because new younger people are “convinced” to put in money to pay the old in hopes that new younger people will pay them in the future.
The social security liability is currently 23 trillion. If no new people started paying in and everyone wanted to cash out, they couldn’t get a dime.
We are 33 trillion dollars in debt. 33 trillion.
If we as a country ever tried to cut spending and save money to pay that down, our economy would collapse so fast.
Social security was designed to be that way, it’s not a secret or anything. It’s how the system was set up and it’s how it is supposed to work. Today’s workers fund today’s retirees.
Except it was built with the assumption that everyone would continue to have 2.5 kids, and skilled immigrants would keep making the US home, and the economy would keep growing and growing forever, and retirees would die off a couple of years after they retired.
All the base assumptions on which the system were built were shaky. People are having fewer kids, so there’s less money coming in. Retirees are living longer so they need more benefits. People who paid hundreds of thousands into the system during their lifetimes are requiring millions in benefits at the end of their lives. But, people are having fewer kids and so the bottom of the pyramid is shrinking.
More immigration would help, but we’re just too damn racist
Accounting, just like economics, likes to pretend it is a hard science when in reality is it close to reading tea leaves.
Inside almost every arcade cabinet is a Dell Optiplex running Windows 7, or 10 if its really recent. There’s no such thing as an arcade board anymore, they’re all Dells, or sometimes those HP mini PCs, usually with the protective plastic still on.
Daytona even uses a Raspberry Pi to control the second screen. SEGA intentionally ships those with no-brand SD cards that consistently fail after 3 months. It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
The Mario Kart arcade cabinet uses a webcam called the “Nam-Cam” that is mounted in a chamber with no ventilation, which causes it to overheat and die every few months, so of course you’ll have to replace those too. The game will refuse to boot without a working camera.
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
It’s in their agreement that you’ll buy another card from them instead of just flashing the image onto an SD card that won’t break.
Sounds like it’d be pretty simple to just replace it and not tell them. If they tell you they know it should’ve broken down by now, just ask, “Why, did you intentionally sell me something defective?”
Psst, that’s another secret
Oh yeah also all arcade games with prizes are rigged. All of them. We literally have a setting that determines how often the game will allow wins.
One time on vacation, my little sister and I found a crane game in the game room of our hotel that was clearly over tuned - basically every button press was another win, it was great. We still remember it fondly. A stupid thing, but even at that age we knew these are usually scams and we we’re stoked to just basically get cheap toys.
If I was to open up a classic video.game arcade and run it entirely on downloaded roms is someone coming to take me down?
Yes. You have to have a license to charge people money to play those games.
Otherwise you would have seen a ton of arcades open already
Edit: I only know this because I asked a guy who ran one. His machines were in pretty bad shape and I inquired why he didn’t just do as you thought.
Restaurant manager here, been doing this for a few decades. You do not want to know just how much leeway we get with basic sanitation. Seriously, be very thankful that you have an immune system.
Not a restaurant manger, but I worked for Sbarro’s back in college. The one on campus wasn’t bad, but the one in the mall? We had pizzas sitting under heat lamps for 6 hours or more before they were bought, tossed in the oven for a second, and then handed to the customer. They had to search for gloves because I was the only one who wanted to wear them.
At one point, I needed to put pepperoni on a pizza.i told my manger I couldn’t because the pepperoni was moldy. My manger reached into the bag, pulled a small handful of moldy pepperoni out, threw it out, and declared that rest of the bag perfectly good (without even looking at it).
It’s been 30 years and I still can’t eat at Sbarro.
IMO, for the average, healthy customer, the sanitation requirements are overkill. But not every customer is, so the rules help protect the less healthy customers.
The biggest thing about food, is most of it is pasteurized by the cooking. Raw foods like salads are the ones that need a much higher standard.
I can guarantee you that many of the rules keep even healthy guests with solid immune systems from getting sick or even dying. The FDA Food Code is like 700 pages. There are A LOT of rules. Many seem overkill from a layman’s perspective, but they protect against unlikely but serious consequences. There are a ton of ways that contamination can occur, even after the food has already been cooked.
That you don’t notice is just a good sign that you’re eating at safe places.
The worms in those strawberries are just some extra protein.
And that is why the Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!
Not worried about that as much as things that scurry. Barf.
If you want to feel the thrill of hunting some scurrying critters for extra protein, you can get the protein activity package. It’s normally only 17.99 €, but if you also bring a friend, you get a -50% discount.
Wow on sale! Sign me u— waitaminit…
Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.
It really doesn’t matter which one unless it’s like super high end. And you’ve almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.
After the staff are done drinking coffee for the night, we only brew decaf. If you want caffeinated coffee close to closing time at a restaurant, ask for an Americano or other espresso drink.
There was not a single Intel / X86-64 “unibody” Macbook in the entire history of Apple that didn’t have a heat stress issue 😂. First unibody was released in 2009, the first w/ “M” chip fixing the problem in 2020 🤦♂️
Outsourced IT provider here:
90% of businesses have basically zero IT security. Leaked passwords in regular use and no process or verification for password resets. As soon as someone complains that 2FA or password rotation is difficult it gets dropped. Virtually all company data is stored on USB keys, plaintext hard drives and on staff’s personal home devices.
The reason they’re not constantly having their data stolen is because no-one cares about the companies either.
Private mental health providers in the US are pretty unsupervised and have a conflict of interest in that they make more money by keeping their patients/clients unwell, which can lead to negligence and abuse. The only thing keeping in line is the possibility of someone informed and insightful enough to report them to the licensing board or pressing a lawsuit.
For example, if a provider has poor integrity, it is in their best interest to not treat depression, but rather help the patient/client feel good for the moment. What the patient/client experiences is that they feel better when they see their provider, so they become dependent on their provider. This ensures the provider a reliable source of revenue.
Another issue is that masters level therapists, while capable of providing treatment for simple cases such as a clear depressive episode, are not properly trained to conduct thorough assessments for complex cases, meaning they can misdiagnose quite easily. Complex cases would be better treated by a well-trained psychologist that can conduct thorough psychometric assessments that are quite sophisticated and take lots of time to analyze. These services are costly and the vast majority of insurance policies won’t cover them.
Relevantly, yet another issue is insurance for mental health. Most insurance policies that pay for mental health services pay low, so the care you receive can be substandard since the more effective providers are charging what they’re worth in a market economy. One example that comes to mind is Better Help. They pay providers insultingly low, like around $30/hour, while effective providers are charging ~$150/hr out-of-pocket. That means that when someone uses Better Help to obtain care, they’re getting the bottom of the barrel therapist.
Lastly, the majority of family and marriage therapists aren’t properly trained in narcissistic emotional abuse. This can mean that therapy would not only be a waste of time, but can make things much worse as they can help the narcissist abuse the victim even further. Narcissistic abuse is quite complicated and requires a relationship therapist that specializes in that to properly assess and help the victim escape.
Tips: If you have been seeing a therapist for 12 sessions, and you haven’t realized any considerable long-term changes, find another therapist. Also, if your therapist doesn’t call you out on your bullshit, let’s you ramble about tangential matters, or focuses on helping you overcome specific weekly struggles, rather than helping you develop skills and restructure deep cognitive matters to address them yourself, find another therapist. An effective therapist would develop a clear treatment plan with you that aims to meet objectively measurable goals within a certain time frame.
Note: I am not a therapist. I have just worked in the mental health field and have friends that are therapists.
Many European language versions of anime and games are being localized not by translating the original Japanese, but the English.
Lots of translators also seem to use Google or DeepL, which makes the issue even worse.
The English language version often don’t even translate, they write their own version, calling it “creative liberty”. This leads to a completely different version than what was intended, with others, such as the German or Spanish version, being even further from the original.
That’s why claims of people of having “learnt Japanese from anime” are dubious in the best of cases.
Source: Am Japanese, working in game translation in Tokyo. I’m also trilingual, which makes it even worse to watch this. Ignorance is bliss.
The flip side of this is the Samurai Pizza Cats, where they completely rewrote the dialogue to make the English version way more entertaining.
