100÷. I used to work for a bank and the lending team didn’t even know how to calculate loan repayments. They just deferred to what the core banking system did.

The core banking system was written in a proprietary language in the 70’s and machine translated into another (slightly newer) proprietary language in the 90’s. At the time I wouldnt be surprised if management was patting themselves on the back for a modernisation job well done. Just get the computer to do the conversion, right? The sales guys of the new platform assured us they could migrate everything automatically and we always trust a sales guy!

Of course the machine translation is like reading machine code so very difficult to understand / follow / change. The developers working on it were in maintenance mode and everyone was afraid to touch it incase some calculation broke.

The point is that it’s exactly what you described - the users were trained to push buttons and trust the system output without actually knowing what they were doing and if it was correct.

Pretty sure the bank recently got fined for compliance breaches as well. It’s not because anyone there was bad, they just had no idea how anything was meant to work

France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable

TIL there is a country that sees reason about software patents

If I was a bot author intent on causing misery I’d just use the user agent from the latest version of Firefox/Chrome/Edge that legitimate users would use.

It’s just a string controlled by the client at the end of the day and I’m surprised the GPT and OpenAI bots announce themselves in it. Associating meaning on the server side is always going to be problematic if the client can control the value

TIL Cert Warden is a thing. Looks awesome!

Ah, I misread. I thought they were saying acetone = acetic acid but actually they were just saying there was something worse

I believe you’re mixing up acetone with acetic acid

In NZ, churches don’t have to pay tax. This makes them extremely attractive to people with no skills who want to obtain wealth

Yeah, but, like, how many hours will it take for you to deliver 5 complexity points?

Purebred and inbred are synonyms

even Valve told Ubuntu users to use the Flatpak for Steam instead of the Snap

Hahaha really? That’s awesome. I wonder if Canonical will ever take the hint that nobody wants Snap when better, more open alternatives exist

Yeah, package manager is a big one. Many of us got burned by rpm’s early on and just avoided all rpm-based distros since then.

Of course as you say that hasn’t been a problem for over 10 years but the scars haven’t gone away.

I’d only recommend Ubuntu to someone if I knew they knew some else using Ubuntu (so I could tell them to hassle that person instead of me when they have problems).

Otherwise, I’d absolutely recommend Fedora, because it’s actually up to date unlike Debian. I use it myself because it tends to have the best of what the open source community has to offer while not needing constant tweaking

And then managers go “why does shadow IT exist?”

…you have my condolences

Yep, being familiar with the data model is 98% of the effort.

The remaining 2% is the query

But it’s genuinely what we were all doing not so long ago

Jokes on you, my first job was editing files directly in production. It was for a webapp written in Classic ASP. To add a new feature, you made a copy of the current version of the page (eg index2_new.asp became index2_new_v2.asp) and developed your feature there by hitting the live page with your web browser.

When you were ready to deploy, you modified all the other pages to link to your new page

Good times!

It’s more like android apps from early versions of Android before the permissions became user-managable.

It won’t prompt you to give the application access to certain permissions, all the permissions are predefined in the manifest by whoever published the application to flathub. When you run the application you just hope it won’t cause too much havoc (you can of course verify the permissions before running it, but I guarantee most people won’t)

Flatpak supports sandboxing but due to how most desktop applications want access to your home folder, network etc many apps simply disable it.

Regardless of the level of sandboxing applied to the app, Flatpak is a great way for a developer to package once run anywhere. Prior to Flatpak, if you wanted to support multiple distros, you had to build a package for each distro or hope somebody working on that distro would do it for you.

Inb4 AppImage was here first. And if you mention Snap then GTFO

Is the joke that the main river in Paris is so polluted that swimmers would need to wear protection?

Never mind that the swimming events would be held in a pool instead

“Fuck off Jesus” memes (or equivalent) are the best

Me too. 2000 seemed… Slow compared to XP on the same hardware, but to be fair the hardware I had was cobbled together from parts that my father’s employer was going to throw out

I was there, 3000 years ago…