It’s also a tactic of bullshitters to say a whole bunch of stuff in series, just put something out there and quickly move on to the next thing, making it sound like they have a lot of substance but hoping the quick change doesn’t give anyone much of a chance to pull on any of the threads of what they said or look close enough to realize that there is little to no substance behind any of it.

Ancient Aliens and Alex Jones both also use that.

And it’s a pain in the ass to unravel because people who don’t want to look more closely and just want to believe think there’s a list of things that need to be disproven if you wait and let the speaker finish or don’t question him about it directly because the believers don’t feel like they have the expertise to rebut counterpoints (so shelve them instead of discarding) and instead just want to go down the list. Which is fair, though it would be nice if they applied that same skepticism to that list of points in the first place.

But this seems like an effective counter for that strategy. Just pick an item on the list that doesn’t sound right and keep pulling on that thread with the person that said it on the first place rather than the disciples blindly following. Then they’ll see it’s not just their lack of expertise getting in the way of arguing back against counterpoints, it’s the whole thing lacking any real substance at all.

I’m just tired of people trying to sell me shit. Or beg. Like I know I’m not interested 3 words in to the spiel but still feel like an asshole if I just say no and close the door or hang up the phone.

Though I did eventually tell my phone provider to put me on their no call list for their internet marketing because I got tired of them trying to get me to switch to their less good internet package.

Hoping (but not holding my breath) that we, as a society, squash the whole data broker thing sometime relatively soon, though.

I remember a time when the phone or doorbell would ring and I would get excited to know who it was.

Now I seriously consider setting up a series of mirrors so that I can see who is at the door without giving up my ability to pretend like no one is home and my phone ringing causes an emotion somewhere between worry and rage.

A representative 300 sample would give a more accurate result than a biased 2.4k sample. Bigger number doesn’t mean better results.

That said, I’m not sure how to get representation from certain subgroups of the population, like the “never engages with polls” or “lies specifically to fuck with your data” subgroups.

Yeah, if they are able to intercept traffic or access the logs, they probably already have other access to the account without needing the password. If you don’t reuse passwords, then your other accounts will be safe from that.

Yeah no worries and agreed. I hate seeing commercial sites using worse password sanitization practices than I used for my first development website that wasn’t even really intended for anyone else to log in to and any max length suggests the password is either stored or processed in plaintext.

IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).

Correct, hence the sentence after the one you quoted :)

If any service can recover your password and send it back to you rather than just resetting it for you to set a new one, don’t rely on that service for anything you want to keep secure. And certainly don’t reuse a password there, though you shouldn’t be reusing passwords anyways because who knows what they are and aren’t storing, even if they don’t offer password recovery.

Once upon a time, battle.net passwords weren’t case sensitive. I used upper and lower case letters in my password then one day realized I didn’t hit shift for one of the caps as I hit enter out of habit, but then it still let me in instead of asking for the password again.

It was disappointing because it takes more work to remove case-sensitivity than to leave it. I can’t think of any good reason to remove it. At least the character limit had a technical reason behind it: having a set size for fields means your database can be more efficient. Better to use the size of a hash and not store the password in plaintext, so it’s not a good reason, but at least it’s a reason.

Go around crossing all lowercase Ls into Ts. Or add serif and turn them into uppercase i.

Someone set up a script to automatically create daily backups to tape. Unfortunately, it’s still the first tape that was put in there 3.5 years ago, every backup since that one filled up failed. It might as well have failed silently because everyone who received the email with the error message filtered them to a folder they generally ignored.

Yeah, I was going to mention race conditions as soon as I saw the parent comment. Though I’d guess most cases where the debugger “fixes” the issue while print statements don’t are also race conditions, just the race isn’t tight enough that that extra IO time changes the result.

Best way to be thorough with concurrency testing IMO involves using synchronization to deliberately check the results of each potential race going either way. Of course, this is an exponential problem if you really want to be thorough (like some races could be based on thread 1 getting one specific instruction in between two specific instructions in thread 2, or maybe a race involves more than 2 threads, which would make it exponentially grow the exponential problem).

But a trick for print statement debugging race conditions is to keep your message short. Even better if you can just send a dword to some fast logger asynchronously (though be careful to not introduce more race conditions with this!).

This is one of the reasons why concurrency is hard even for those who understand it well.

I once lived in an apartment where the bathtub drain was pretty plugged. It would drain but every shower was done in a slowly rising puddle. I tried draino but it didn’t make a difference.

I eventually had a roommate move in and noticed right away that the tub drained better, asked him how he fixed it. He used the plunger. It blew my mind because up until that moment, I had thought a plunger was specifically for use with toilets.

Now I have a toilet plunger plus a smaller sink plunger since the size of the standard one can be awkward to use on a sink, plus the whole not wanting to use something that’s been in the toilet on things outside of the toilet.

Not that I’ve even had a plugged toilet in years, and, having a bidet, it’s even less likely going forward.

Maybe the downvotes are because firing him into the sun would be very expensive. Just fire him into a volcano or something more local than the ball of plasma 8 light minutes away that we have way too much momentum to hit easily.

It’s interesting to me that they used the English alphabet for the Toyota symbol instead of Japanese. Or is that symbol localised?

I dunno, opening the package to see that it’s a dildo might give some peace of mind that they won’t be using the produce.

Now I’m wondering what would be an appropriate age to have that awkward “It’s ok if you want to play, it’s just much safer and more sanitary to use toys meant for the purpose rather than improvising with anything that is the right shape” conversation.

Yes, though it stops being as good if there’s a “you can postpone this n more times” involved.

Though I don’t mind the “accept, deny, ask me again later” for when something seems interesting but I don’t want to put the effort into looking into it right at the moment but don’t want to click yes without looking into it.

The first paragraph or the second one?

Swordfish is the one I was thinking of for the first paragraph. I might check out Big Hero 6 either way because both versions would be fun to see lol.

Or sometimes they think it’s moving 3d shapes on a screen until they fit together, and to show how difficult it is, the entire thing will fall apart during the hacking/programming montage.

Though to be fair, I don’t think the producers of that media think it’s like that. Trying to put actual programming on the screen would probably be boring unless it was just a montage of reactions, starting with an overwhelmed look, followed by confidence or pride, followed by a completely baffled look and wtf expressions, then a “fuck I was stupid when I wrote this yesterday” look, then maybe a bigger wtf and physically acting out frustration, then a eureka look, all followed by a satisfied smile and nodding as the montage music ends and another character says, “I can’t believe it’s finally done and hasn’t crashed in 30 minutes!” Though I bet that would be more entertaining for programmers who can relate to the stages of development and debug than non-programmers.

Manager: spends raise budget on getting high end microscopes for everyone to improve debug productivity