* Posts by FlaSheridn

10 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2020

Foursquare to close, but Swarm game will live on

FlaSheridn

Re: How did the company manage to last this long?

> Did anyone use it seriously for a sustained period of time?

Yes, I still use it when I want to record my presence somewhere quickly; it has a vastly simpler UI than, for instance, Yelp’s check-in. Until a few years ago, check-ins were available in the Mac Calendar app; since then I’ve been downloading my data and asking ChatGPT to convert to a calendar file (which is does badly).

Linus Torvalds to kernel devs: Grow up and stop pulling all-nighters just before deadline

FlaSheridn

Re: late in the day & all-nighters

Yes, and anyone who has done static analysis will have seen lots of bad code written by bright developers with too little sleep.

Musk says Starlink will ask for exemption to US sanctions on Iran

FlaSheridn

Re: Ground stations and licenses

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1433123220643717120

Richard Stallman says he has returned to the Free Software Foundation board of directors and won't be resigning again

FlaSheridn

Glad to hear it. Regardless of Mr Stallman’s opinions (many of which I disagree with), the late Mr Epstein’s reprehensible conduct, and the late Professor Minsky’s involvement with him (far from clear), the pedantic comment that got Stallman cancelled was simply mischaracterized or misunderstood by the mob doing the cancelling.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

FlaSheridn

Re: The whole point of continuous delivery is to deliver continuously

> In that sense moving to Stream would provide more access to new stuff

Yes, which is bad. The point to CentOS, and the reason it’s used by a lot of financial companies (which was why I tested our stuff on it) is that it’s stable, while still getting security updates. This has a downside—in my case having to tweak our build system to use vintage versions of CMake and LLVM, but that’s part of the tradeoff.

> "The whole point of continuous delivery is to make each release as stable as the one before."

No, the only point to continuous delivery is to deliver continuously. It may be possible to make each release as stable as the one before—the easiest way is if the previous release wasn’t well tested either. But if you properly tested the last real release, which generally involves some manual high-level testing that only humans can do (such as ensuring that your claims to customers still match the deliverable), then your continuous deliverable will have gone through fewer tests.

Coding unit tests is boring. Wouldn't it be cool if an AI could do it for you? That's where Diffblue comes in

FlaSheridn

Re: Nice

Good point, though it’s kind of in the name—but deserves to be in the article.

Single-line software bug causes fledgling YAM cryptocurrency to implode just two days after launch

FlaSheridn
Black Helicopters

Not Quite That Simple

> A simple unit test or a code review should have caught it.

Blockchain updating may require an integration test, not a unit test—at least ours did when I tested it for my former employer. (Ours isn’t shipping anytime soon—testing always takes more time than you expect.)

Apple to hand out limited-edition iPhones among 1337 h4x0rs because it wants more bug-hunters

FlaSheridn

The More the Merrier

> employ people to work at testing and improving their product

I have been employed by Apple as a tester, but I also think that this is a good idea.

Apple and Google, take note: Newly enacted EU law aims to protect developers from arbitrary decisions of tech giants

FlaSheridn

Happened to me

Indeed, it happened to my little iOS app (http://pobox.com/~flash/EncycloClip), in violation of Apple’s stated App Review Guidelines, and I’m a former Apple employee.

Complexities:

• I did get about thirty days’ notice, and it seemed obvious that the rep just wanted me to re-post the app so that the mod time was updated (which I couldn’t do for unrelated reasons).

• I had previously appealed successfully several times, even once through the official appeal process after a little chat with the executive who suggested a cartoonist “consider resubmitting” his rejected app after he won the Pulitzer prize.

Apple chucks $3 at iPhone users after killing FaceTime on iOS 6 because it didn't want to pay connectivity charges

FlaSheridn

Expense of testing, not innovation

> keep old things working, but it would be at the expense of innovation

Not breaking existing customers does not prevent innovation, but it does require testing old products as well as new—whereas breaking old products encourages new sales.