Posts by logicalextreme 840 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2020
Well yes, the output might end up making sense of being correct. If it ended up being used for AI Overview on Google I'd then have to go back to checking actual sources for information — as it stands at the moment I can get the correct answer to my queries by scanning the AI Overview and inferring the pole opposite of whatever it says.
It irks me no end that I've now worked for (and been made redundant from) two healthcare software providers that thought they were doing God's own work WRT data security in scraping through the paltry audits that came their way, but at a previous (easy-going) employer we could regularly be in lockdown-investigative-battlestations mode because something that might have looked like a credit card number had popped up in a temp file or memory somewhere, overwhelmingly false positives.
PCI/DSS is, or was at the time, paranoid enough to get infosec at least partially correct. Healthcare in its current state from what I've seen is a free-for-all with a lot of sound and fury slapped on the top of it and labelled "secure".
Done that the once. Was my own deployment script, written and tested and safe, full ROLLBACK in case of things going amiss.
I was so confident of it I left it running and went on my lunch break. Came back to find chaos. I don't remember all the details now, but we'd been working with an offshore team whose code I'd plugged into mine as it had been peer-reviewed and approved. Turned out that it fell over because "Germany" isn't the name of a language and my code had a hard-coded list in it with no failsafe. Very much tail between legs for me, though it taught me to anticipate absolutely anything in your "sanitised" datasets. When we looked closer at the other values for language names that the outsourced team had shipped, we also found "DenMark" and "Janpanese". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh man don't get me started. I've had to field the same repetitive email queries as above — and I can't say for sure, but I suspect that automated report emails are significantly more likely to fall afoul of filters/rules, regardless of whether the recipient is the one who asked for the report in the first place. Ended up scripting something to pull all the "server accepted mail" IDs for a given report just so I could wave the bastards away quicker.
But in addition to that at one place I had to spend every single BST changeover explaining to the finance department why there was an hour's worth of sales missing from the reports and trying to explain how 0100 becomes 0200 without any seismic shift in the spacetime continuum. Also had to deal with the head of commerce at the same place throwing a wobbly with me about the fact that years don't all have 364 days with the weeks neatly numbered from 1 to 52. A week 53 was "just not acceptable" but every week had to have exactly 7 days. Literally threw something on the desk near me to express how unhelpful she thought I was being by explaining all standard week-numbering systems to her.
Aye. One that works and it used right is a good idea (though I think it should have a physical piece to it). The idea of an ID isn't the problem, it's the asinine Act that's been passed.
I'm in the process of being evicted and my local authority wants me to send proof of ID by email — if that's the only way they can accept it then they're not getting my passport but rather my provisional driving license that expired 10 years ago. In a world where a safe state-operated digital ID existed I could perhaps satisfy them with a simple key exchange.
That's what I thought but given that it's been so long and people much smarter than us haven't isolated the leak yet I suspect it's a bit more complex unfortunately :(
I'd think that the proclivity of water to expand when frozen might be a risk factor for turning an acceptably small hole into an unacceptably large hole too.
Oh I'm so absolutely fed up of the context menu key disappearing from various places the past few years. I'm already used to mapping that to something unused, though I've noticed doing so can sometimes make the resultant context menu appear in a slightly different place on-screen to where it would have otherwise. Laptops have been bad for removing the key for ages, but the keyboard that I bought recently also had nothing mapped to it and I had to poach one of the unused "option" keys to get a keycap that made any sort of sense for it.
Aye, or Instant Eyedropper as I used to use before PowerToys existed. It's crackers that you'd have it as a browser extension and give it access to various gubbins from the browser process(es). Makes you wonder if there's people installing browser extensions to tell them e.g. how much free disk space they have.
Same with Snowflake. It's like using old MySQL with the default storage engines — it'll happily let you declare all sorts of essential constraints and then promptly (and silently) ignore them. Cue reams more code if you want to do even the most basic checks on incoming data.
They do offer something called "hybrid tables" which are essentially rowstore rather than columnar and offer a smattering of RI, but they're not really the point of Snowflake AFAICT and they're mysteriously not available in Azure. Like, at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm excited for this. I have a ThinkPad that I need to get over to Mint when I get the SSD upgraded; I'd settled into Win10 under duress but its time has come. I'm expecting to like one of the desktops Mint provides more than anything else, but used to use Kubuntu as my daily driver back when Windows 8 was trying to break everything (I do love configurability and a bit of transluscence). If they play this right they could turn the tables — I got onto KDE and Linux as a desktop through word of mouth back then; if they can get this manifesto out well then I have a reasonable chance of getting off Win11 at work!
Agreed, though I think in this case there's going to be a lot of rekeying the data from the last attempt to create a single health record's project management system into the latest attempt's project management system. And the data from the last attempt was in turn rekeyed from the attempt before that, and that in turn…
No elephant icon but you get the idea.
Holy wow, I just posted this link on the M&S data leak article and this was the next comment I came to. Glad it's still rattling around someone else's head, though I couldn't remember what it was called (nor the word "pod"; I had "cube" in my head for some reason) so had to scan through TBL's wiki article to remind myself.
Oh and WRT companies having their own stores on Amazon and eBay — a lot of them already do; some see it as "multi-channel" and some even end up closing down their self-run points of sale. I worked for a bricks-and-mortar entertainment (e.g. CDs, DVDs) retailer back in the day and by the time I left the company (2004 or 2005 I think) they were making most of their money selling things on Amazon Marketplace and eBay, because the overheads were lower and they could even sell the products for a higher price as customers assumed the eBay or Amazon price "must" be the cheapest.
As a mildly amusing aside, when I interviewed for my final job in their head office I got to eavesdrop on a meeting between the Accessories buyer and a supplier that was happening in reception due to lack of meeting space, wherein I discovered that the relaunched Chewits we had inexplicably been told to display in boxes at all the tills were in fact the highest-margin item in the company. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My personal trouble with it is that I refuse to use Amazon to the point that I've found manufacturers who literally only sell through Amazon and abandoned any hope of obtaining their wares. It must be a good business model for some as I always get in touch with them to ask if there's any way I can buy their stuff and the answer's always no. eBay I can live with though the interface is even worse than Amazon's.
Sounds like TBL's weirdy "pods" concept, which I'd be mildly interested in if it went anywhere but haven't heard much about since it kicked off close to a decade ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project)
Retailers should really be getting rid of or at least anonymising that information after there's no reason for them to hold it anymore, though it can be easy to argue the toss on that in various ways and I can count the number of times I've seen it happen on one finger (and that was only to reclaim disk space).
A couple of mitigations for the more privacy-minded might be to get things delivered to one of those bajillion locked thingies or dropoff points and use a payment processor that you have an account with, though the only one I've used is PayPal and they seem to fling your name and address at anyone you buy from regardless of whether either are necessary for the transaction in question.
I've only ever seen perishables reduced to a decent price and by a decent percentage (considering they can't be sold after the store shuts that day) in the Co-ops near me. Admittedly the percentage thing is down to the fact that they've become a decent price from the full Co-op price, but it bloody works — marked down around 1500, reduced shelves empty by closing.
(That said, sometimes Co-op's "reduced to clear" prices strongly imply that they understand neither the concept "reduced" nor "to clear").
Near me there are also some Tescos (the crappy overpriced convenience ones), a Morrisons, an M&S and an Aldi. Their reductíons are so slim as to be practically nonexistent and seem to be a waste of yellow stickers as well as the stock they're presumably lobbing into the skip every night. Morrisons is by far the most egregious; you can count on a full fridge unit absolutely overflowing with meat, dairy, ready meals, snacks, fruit and veg right before closing every single night. Reductions are usually a few pennies at best. I hope the staff get to take it when they close.
Nothing too sweary from me; I'm foul-mouthed in person but tone it down a bit in comments and messages in favour of wit and sarcasm.
However by the end of my first "proper" IT job (first line moving up to second line and application support) I'd automated and replaced huge swathes of manual work for the service desk and wider company with all sorts of unholy scripty email-parsey ETL-y stuff I'd probably laugh my tits off at today. There did however in the absence of suitable monitoring systems remain a few of the more stultifying manual checks/processes that it fell to first line to perform and check each month, so rather than have it be a copy/paste job on random bits of shell script across various OSes, I wrapped them all into a PowersHell script to do all the various gubbins at the push of a button; connecting to wherever it needed and doing the job for the operator with as much exception handling and helpful messages as I could muster.
Just before I actually left I converted a photo of myself pulling a face into ASCII (okay 8859-1, whatever) art and had the script print that into the console output with the words "MISS ME?" in huge letters. Wasn't due to be run for almost a month so I'd completely forgotten about it by the time I picked up the phone to hear a colleague cackling on the other end of the line.
Yep, I've been complaining about it for years. The default storage engines for MariaDB and afaik MySQL now support RI out of the box, but the damage was already done. You can't move these days for code-first stuff with questionable ORMs, attempts to hamfist everything with document databases and the resultant loss of any semblance of truth that goes along with it.
I know the most about SQL Server and it's a very competent RDBMS but I'd always advocate for Postgres based on license cost, love of FOSS and general de-MICROS~1ification.
I tried to sign up many years ago on the basis that they were the only people not requiring a credit card for a free cloud tier in advance — unfortunately none of their (required) MFA services worked for the signup; I tried with multiple email providers and phone numbers and their support staff were unable to figure out the problem. So I ditched it as I couldn't imagine the actual cloud platform was up to much if the signup process was so broken.
I have to agree. Forced to use Win11 at work, and not wanting to overload it with too much low-level stuff due to the industry I work in and other reasons, I manage to keep it barely functional with a combination of PowerToys and WindHawk. I'm older now so don't feel the need to tweak everything so much, just attain a relative level of comfort and efficiency; but Win11 is the first since a long time where I've felt compelled to mess with it to get it back to a usable state. Windows 11 is simply a worse experience and one that's pushing me to Mint on my personal laptop if the touchscreen support is there.
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