Speaking of which, one of my favourite UX brainfarts is treating text fields where you enter a sum as numbers.
Why, you ask? Let's you have a number like 10,000 and you want to replace it with 20,000. You delete the leading 1, and boom! The number is now zero, and three of the digits are gone, and you'll have to retype them like you got no other things to do with your life.
I'd really like a collection of unit tests for parsers. There is a lot of details that can differ between parsers.
E.g. in "Section C" the resulting KeyThree is "value 3▵▵▵▵▵▵▵value 3 continued" where each "▵" symbol is a space.
I think most people would expect a single (or no) space here.
I would guess that most software would strip the comments in SectionC or rearrange the output so that it will result in a diff even when nothing in SectionC changed.
So if you edit the file by hand in the same style as shown in the examples, then most editors would not be able to make a minor edit without making a large diff as many sections would be formatted differently.
Since systemd is successfully parsing its INI files, and barks at you when you put weird shit into them, a grammar for them does exist as well.
XML is that wonderful format that gave us vulnerabilities like death by million laughs, up to a certain moment, you could MitM DTDs, and a whole slew of everything-XML stuff back when XML was like AI is today, none of which I miss today.
Oh, and remember times when programmers would argue whether argument order in XML files should be significant or not?
But XML books with their idealized XML future description did give me the same warm fuzzies as some intricate clockwork mechanism to a Victorian geek.
Mainframes can LPAR dynamically. When you want to test if your production system will IPL cleanly, you clone your production environment to an isolated LPAR and IPL it. No impact to production and you get your test.
There were several switch failures in the 1980s / 1990s in which systems which had been upgraded in place without a full restart failed. (IIRC, one burnt down, literally.)
Engineers were uncertain as to whether or not a cold-boot restart was even possible.
iOS 26 is very late to have acceptable performance in the framework that Apple promotes as what you should use. It should have had good performance from the day it was introduced.
WebKit have had great performance for a very long time now.
Why would any startup dare to use tech that only now got fast? Why not go with the battle tested WebKit?
It is also much easier to develop and test html pages than Apple specific tech.
plastic will still be everywhere. The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
> social media as news
Mainstream news isn't going to get any better.
> teflon
teflon has gotten a lot better since it was introduced. It will stick around.
> fossil fuel cars
will be seen like rotary phones: they will not understand why they are so cumbersome or why so many people had resistance against electric cars. It's like electric lights versus living with only oil/candle lights.
I think a near term would be: "you had to go to a cinema to watch a movie?"
> The major catastrophe that could happen is for evolution of plastic eating bacteria like the creation of (dead) wood eating bacteria. Look at all the plastic containers etc you have in your kitchen and imagine it's just gone.
Look at all the wood you have in your house.
Notice that it is still there. Despite the fact that bacteria are very, very good at eating wood.
Even in the hypothetical case that bacteria evolve that can digest plastic, the idea that they would somehow instantly spread to consume all plastic in the world is ludicrous.
We would just need to take a few new precautions with it.
A bacteria that could eat plastic and shit something nicer or at least further-biodegradable would be an absolute miracle. Sprinkle it on every landfill and ocean "plastic island" in the world and let it do its thing.
Oh, absolutely—and as I understand it, something like that has already been discovered or developed, at least in early stages (though I don't recall whether it's a bacteria or a fungus offhand).
But the post I was responding to made it sound like a plastic-eating bacteria would just instantly dissolve all the plastic in your house.
It's a very different world from the exams I had in Denmark, both uni and high school:
* all exams were proctored
* the proctoring were done by external people hired to do this.
* you could not leave exam for the toilet without asking first and then being followed out by a watcher, which then would follow you back and check the toilet afterwards for notes.
* you were never handed back the papers you handed in.
* responses were judged both by your own teacher and by an independent teacher from another institution.
* you must use ballpoint pen (permanent) and not pencil. Pencil responses were ignored.
>you could not leave exam for the toilet without asking first and then being followed out by a watcher, which then would follow you back and check the toilet afterwards for notes.
That's not how you do it. The notes are in your pocket. You go to the toilet, read the notes, put the notes back into your pocket and go back to do the exam.
during GCSEs (nationally held exams at 16 for non uk people) i was sick in hospital for two weeks. when i came back i had to sit the missed exams in a special sitting.
exact same processes with external monitor etc. but with the backup exam papers that was different to the ones everyone else already did.
which is kind of in contrast to university (organised by the institution) where someone stole the exam paper for a difficult module in our final year. so they assigned one of the past year’s papers instead, as if everyone hadn’t memorised it already.
one of the benefits of scale with central organising bodies where you have to get things right (organising GCSEs nationally) is being forced to prepare for edge cases because they become a lot more common.
My experience is that some people (of all generations) react really strongly against anything that involves birth and family.
IVF, gamete donation, surrogacy, gay families, various experiments with human embryos or artificial wombs, much or all of this is banned in many countries of the world mostly due to the "ick" factor. The smarter opponents tend to decorate their objections in the "we must be very, very careful" cloak, but if you dig deeper, you will find that it is indeed just a cloak in many cases and that the underlying root cause is "ick, this is against nature", and "really careful" means "erect impossibly high barriers by law".
This even isn't subject to polarization and seems to be shared across the political board.
IDK, but I have read a lot of objections from feminists as well.
Where I live, the religious population is under 10 per cent, but complete atheists will argue like this as well.
I suspect the "ick" factor is simply inherent here. Kids provoke instinctive protective/emotional reactions in a way that other phenomena don't.
For example, it is quite obvious that Trump faces a lot more popular backlash due to his suspected connections with Epstein than over his actual threats to Denmark/Greenland and war with Iran.
Non-religious people are also susceptible to the FUD about supposedly or genuinely new things. Whatever innate ick there clearly is, it gets co-opted to demonize much wider ranges of things, and conversely can be suppressed like in the Epstein's circle's case. I don't find it convincing that the legislators passing reactionary prohibitions are just driven by a natural ick rather than particular agenda.
A lot of younger people think that building of solar power and wind power in the past years caused decrease of global CO2 emissions. In reality, global CO2 emissions have been increasing each year.
Per region CO2 emissions don't matter, CO2 is a largely non-reactive gas, which is rapidly mixed throughout the entire troposphere in less than a year.
It's the total CO2 amount in atmosphere that determines radiative forcing.
The IPCC summarized the current scientific consensus about radiative forcing changes as follows: "Human-caused radiative forcing of 2.72 W/m2 in 2019 relative to 1750 has warmed the climate system. This warming is mainly due to increased GHG concentrations, partly reduced by cooling due to increased aerosol concentrations"
Regional emissions do matter for the conclusions you draw.
All high-income countries already trend down in emissions.
Global emissions are rising because poorer countries that were basically almost "no emission"/capita in the past are still catching up (but that catch-up is less steep than in the past because green energy is available from the get-go).
Conclusions would be: Emission reductions in rich countries need to be aaccelerated, and helping poor countries peak at a lower level would probably be prudent (but good luck selling such policies to alt-right voters).
"Renewable are not helping" is not a sensible conclusion.
Conclusions would be: it's not that renewables are not helping, it's renewables are not helping enough. We need global emissions tax. The European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a step in the right direction, but still a very small step because it covers only production of few carbon-intensive goods imported to Europe.
To be fair, a lot of younger people also think that human extinction by climate change is a significant threat (it is not), while a lot of older people believe that a nuclear war could eradicate our species (also no).
Think of the difference between a highway with few cars versus a highway filled to the brim with cars. In the latter case traffic slows to a crawl even for ambulances.
It seems like it was just cheaper and easier to build more bandwidth than it was to add traffic priority handling to internet connectivity.
And that cheaper bit I think just came from reduced complexity. With things like ATM circuits and other similar highly reliable and predictable methods, they needed a lot of hand holding. You needed to provision an ATM circuit, you needed to make sure across the network that the path was there, capable, maintained, and configured, and you had visibility end to end
That was a selling point, because "hey we guarantee this circuit" but it was also very expensive and labor intensive
Where just dumping your bits into the internet and letting the network figure it out outsourced a lot of that complexity to every hop along the network you didn't own. But, because they care about their networks everyone would (in theory) make sure each hop was healthy, so you didn't need to hand hold your circuit or route completely end to end
It is always the creative world building part.
The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.
The same holds for software.
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