I was going to do a mathematics PhD years ago but I’ll be honest and I’m not bashing the process or the outcome here.
I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.
I wouldn’t assume that is the case. The failure modes are different that is all.
I saw a whole corp POS platform a couple of decades ago that was hanging off a TFTP server on a machine that no one dared turn off in case the world ended. One day the DC UPS failed, it didn’t come back up and they had no retail operations for several hours while they sent a bunch of cash to a guy who had left to help them fix it.
There’s stuff like that everywhere lurking in the archaic.
I know of a modem in a DC which is used to talk to a branch office running AS400 hardware that is so old they have to buy spares off eBay.
To add to this, I remember a story my father told me. This is off the top of my head and a few years ago so it might not be fully accurate.
My father worked as a banker for most of his life and when he was in his late twenties he got a position to oversee a smaller investment bank. This is sometime in the late 90s. When he started, he took a general look around, checked with everyone how things are going and happened to meet on of the few IT people working in the building. When the IT guy realized that he was speaking to a new person who might be able to change things around there, he was elated and told him that there was an issue the previous boss never took too urgently, even though it was quite critical. Apparently the servers that were running pretty much all of the transactions of that investment bank were located in the basement of that building and have literally never been migrated, upgraded or anything else. The servers that were left over from that time was literally one running machine and another machine that had died a few years prior that was now only used for spares in case anything on the singular still working machine broke. Since the hardware was so old, there apparently weren’t many replacement parts left and the ones that were left were incredibly expensive due to many bank depending on those specific servers.
Anyway, my father heard that story and immediately got the guy the funding he needed to migrate to a newer and better system. Sometimes I think about this kind of stuff, we think banks are really resilient (and they try to be), but I wouldn’t be surprised if setup like these still exist somewhere because people are too scared to touch them.
UK here. All my data has been removed from iCloud and other public cloud services now. I cannot trust the UK government, the EU or the US government to do the right thing for my data. I also can't trust the cloud vendors to handle my data either on this basis as they are subject to the laws and as indicated recently intimately involved in political matters.
The only option left is to draw a hard line and stay behind it and of course withdraw the only minuscule stick I have which is my investment in their business.
Ha I saw that one when I was trying to work out why this wasn't working. Alas no nothing that good.
Turned out the issue was if you set a print range then it has to talk to the printer driver on windows and that takes forever to respond if the thing is a network printer and it's asleep. You open the ODS file it just hangs.
I'm not sure if they fixed it. It was reported on bugzilla and was rotting already for years. I got so annoyed with it and just thought fuck it and bought an Office license.
Edit: downvoted to -1. Stay classy HN. I need to get stuff done not bugger around with defects all day. Nothing wrong with that!
Ah I just get annoyed. You write up your genuine experience and it gets buried. That's not helpful to anyone. It's not helpful to the engineers on a project or the customers. But it validates someone's ego somewhere. It just seems so immature.
I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
> I'd rather there was no upvote or downvote at all.
You've had an account for 11 days, I'm not sure you've had enough experience to form a proper opinion on this. I feel like the upvoting/downvoting system helps a lot.
I’ve been here a long long time. Around 2009. Occasionally I walk away for a few months.
I was there when it wasn’t possible to criticise MSFT because of the second coming of Satya. I was there when Google did no evil. Now look where we are.
Well, I've had an account for over a year. I think that the voting system is not generally very good, as it is subject to the same ills as all other such systems. Productive comments with unpopular views inevitably get buried, especially on threads which touch anything to do with politics.
It gives me an indication of whether my comments please people or annoy them, and encourages me to keep the two in balance so that my karma stays level.
I have a theory that there's a limit to the human ability to be genuine, and "just be yourself" is not very meaningful, because all interpersonal communication is inescapably an act. Of course you can have sincere intent, and make a great effort to convey what you think is true, but this always has to be done in some kind of register, and so it's always a performance (however simple). Shrek tells us that ogres are like onions, but if you peel all the layers off an onion it vanishes.
Beyond your current self you have room to craft the even greater art-work you aspire to become. The creative effort ideally captures the emotions and experiences.
You are your own composition.
Arguably, judging you should be a privilege reserved for people who know you.
Should civilized men engage in this assumption that everyone is easily understood entirely by written words or does the act describe how shallow the jury is?
I'm sure I have much to learn from people down voting my comments without saying anything.
If only we could all be more like them, then we wouldn't need to have these conversations. haha
The upvote and downvote buttons are a couple millimeters apart on mobile and there's no feedback (that I've noticed, anyway) regarding which one you've pressed. There's probably a lot of accidental voting.
Change your default printer to Microsoft Print to PDF (if you're on Windows) and it will fix the issue. But I agree, that bug is a huge pain in the ass.
This stuff worries me. I have already seen colleagues using LLMs and not checking the results. Really it just makes stupid people more dangerous. And there is a weird absolutist mechanical faith among certain people to the point even criticising the things is blasphemous and yes everyone is going to be replaced by LLMs and that's a good thing.
Real problem: crap is being normalised because no one wants to call the vendors out on it, because it'll devalue their business.
I figure I'm just going to sit this out at this point and watch everything burn.
That is exactly the problem. When my family watch science documentaries I die inside a bit. They seem to have left with some insight but they managed to slap about 20 words together and some fancy scenes and extrapolations and turn it into an hour of garbage.
To be fair Open University still do a lot of decent stuff which goes deeper than documentaries. It's quite well hidden: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/
The one paper I co-authored whilst mostly drunk on a Mediterranean island would have been described as "new statistical model could save billions of lives!" if we hadn't called the university out on it. It would have been a grand extrapolation of a nothing.
I literally just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in. It’s not an insurmountable task but there were easier things that made me feel better. One of which inadvertently lead to a family.
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