Root_Denied

I have Junior in my legal name - it's the bane of my existence when it comes to legal forms because of how inconsistent various systems handle it, even for different government systems. This became especially true after 9/11 and the Patriot Act pushed these systems to update and go digital because they couldn't get their act together to coordinate for years.

All the men on my dad's side of the family have the same middle name, with just a different first name.

It's apparently not an uncommon tradition in several areas of the world to either have either the first or middle name be shared, and then a unique name for the unmatched one (e.g. John Alan Doe, John James Doe, John Matthew Doe - Alan John Doe, James John Doe, Matthew John Doe).

A couple more to add to your list: an inch is about as long as your thumb joint (with some variation between individuals obviously). It's an easy way to gauge the size of everyday objects without needing to carry around a tape measure.

The recommendation for emergency supplies is about a gallon of water per person per day - or 3.7 liters if you're using metric.

I've also heard it claimed that the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale is more functionally useful because the endpoints of 0 and 100 represent the tipping point of serious danger for humans from hot or cold weather. The closer you get to 100 degrees the more care you need to take about heat stroke and keeping hydrated, and similarly the closer you get to 0 degrees the more care you need to take about retaining heat and staying out of the elements - the freezing and boiling point of water isn't a necessary marker for survival. And people like nice round numbers to serve as markers for such things, divisibility be damned.

Metric is sterile and functional for calculation and consistency, which is fine and necessary for many things, but that's not a reason to completely ditch Imperial.

The datacenters certainly aren't helping their case.

We're 10 years out from the Epochalypse as well. Past a certain point you need a governing body to intervene to force the issue in advance of problems with systems, and we've got a dearth of functioning governments these days.

I was going to say that the court looking at this at all is a recession indicator...

Did you get better?

Yeah, Fintech is specifically the kind of startup and post-startup space. Companies that predate the DotCom Bust and GFC would be a decent delineator for banking/finance companies that aren't fintech.

Fintech != banking/finance, at least not necessarily.

From a consumer perspective there's an unknown number of layers between your actions or instructions and what the backbone tech of the bank is doing, but having worked in the space I can point to a few things.

Firstly, the transaction failed and notified you about the error - that's certainly intentional.

Second, there's failures that would be invisible to you as the customer, such as "instead moving $100 from account A to account B it credited account B but didn't debit account A, without generating an error". Those are mostly the systems I'm talking about being insulated from AI development. Without more detail about the exact problem you had it's hard to tell if it's a failure in customer facing systems or backend infra.

Third, I'm assuming you were able to reach out to the bank directly and resolve the issue by talking to a person (if the issue was really outside the norm), which isn't something you can assume will be possible with a lot of customer service ops these days (or you're going to be waiting hours/days for that callback).

Fourth, you can't really know the error rate of the bank's systems, or how common a given particular error is. It may be a known issue, or it may be a completely unreported one. Assuming it's an error with something on the backend/backbone of the bank's operations, it's running code that can be inspected, reviewed, understood, and fixed - sometimes by a very expensive COBOL consultant.

Banking/Finance is the one industry I've seen push back against this type of thinking. Transactions must be handled in a perfect and repeatable way, or the system is unusable as far as the company is concerned.

There's definitely still AI/LLM integration happening, but is kept out of specific areas of the business.

I'd say it's still very worth playing. It has a lot of tropes that future games took inspiration from, and it's art style is iconic (in part because the character designer and art direct was Akira Toriyama, of Dragonball fame). If nothing else the soundtrack will grab you by the ears and draw you in.

I've seen people bounce off of it, no shame if that happens - in typical JRPG fashion of the time it came out it's involved (there's some non-intuitive progression steps) and takes about 20-30 hours to complete.

There's a DS version which I can't speak to since I've only played the original SNES version, but I understand it adds some additional content that's not required for the story.

> The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm a fan of a slightly different version of this that I heard years ago:

"Just because something isn't working as advertised, doesn't mean it's not working as intended."

I'm seeing this happen in the security space right now. Someone on my team I was helping train and bring along is all of sudden regressing in their understanding of the issues we're working on, and instead focusing on AI tool outputs to do their job for them.

The problem I see with this approach is threefold.

First, from a technical standpoint the required context window would be massive if you're looking at a person's career/life holistically. Probably solvable, but definitely something to be aware of.

Second, privacy goes completely out the window since you're sharing everything. You don't know what's relevant and what's not up front so you need to provide everything.

Third, you would need a training dataset of all those input variables and their outcomes to be able to provide any sort of useful output. The first set of people to share everything wouldn't be able to derive any value from the tool, and I think you'd be hard pressed to convince enough people to do it to get a useful dataset.

One issue that I see with this type of system is that it doesn't allow for parental/guardian oversight of what kids are doing or discussing.

Ever gone down the auto-suggestion rabbit hole on YouTube Kids? You start getting into weird and potentially disturbing territory much more quickly than you'd expect.

China has spent the last couple of decades making inroads into Africa to secure raw materials, not because they want to annex anything on the continent.

So no one working on railroads before 1907 was a "real" professional? That's more than 100 years after the railroad was invented and took off.

The Bar exam in the US didn't start until the 1780's, so lawyers before then weren't "real" professionals either?

It's a ridiculous argument.

A better one might be that the externalities and opportunities for software engineering to kill people, or be directly tied to deaths or negative outcomes, didn't exist or weren't well enough documented until recently. As an immature field/industry that's not surprising, but it does point to a responsibility by the community to push for standards that don't currently exist.

New unicorn founder 10x success signal just dropped

>my engineering licence would be revoked and I would be kicked out of the industry.

This isn't because you're a "real" engineer, it's because of regulation and industry licensing around specific engineering disciplines that didn't exist until the start of the 20th century. Railroad engineers in the 1800's didn't have the same set of regulations to follow, or the same liability for mistakes.

Software engineering could have similar regulation and licensing set up, though I think you'd find it to be an impossible uphill battle in today's world against the lobbying power of the big tech companies.

Unregulated capitalism breaks things for sure. That regulation can stem from government intervention or private ownership (or both).

Regulation can also break things if done incorrectly/poorly/inefficiently/corruptly.

Is that 2.5x number the average of the whole of the US compared to Switzerland? Because NYC probably has higher density than Switzerland, but Oklahoma probably has much lower than even that 2.5x number, and it doesn't make sense to put them under the same umbrella.

> To trigger building inspections in my county it can only be forced if there is compensation or commercial intent for building or use of the house, but you have to use a special process to record this with the county affirming you're the owner and the builder and it's a non-commercial non-rented domicile.

The question I have about this is whether you would need to get inspections and permitting done if you ever tried to sell the house?

If that's the case the loophole only works for the owner/builder and the next person to own it is going to have to scrape it clean and rebuild entirely. If you ever wanted or needed to sell it sounds like this would complicate that process by quite a bit either way.

Velocity of Money is the term to look into. Governments also like it because as money circulates it generates tax revenue through sales tax/VAT.

Yeah, people who talk about how "fiddly" it is to game on Linux must not have tried recently, or have a very low tolerance for doing anything other than clicking play.

I occasionally have to right click a game and enable the compatibility in the settings - that's just a single checkbox. Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works. There's a setting in Steam itself that you can set a default compatibility tool.

The only games that do shaders preload are Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter World/Wilds, and even those are quick and can be canceled if I cared to. Even modding is fairly straightforward using something like r2Modman for Steam games or Prism Launcher for Minecraft.

If that's too hard for some people then I bet they also don't run adblockers, which means I've written them off as actually knowing how to use a computer at the most basic level.

Competent underlings just means that delegation works to make him look better, it doesn't make him or his actions any smarter or more effective.

A lot of those VPS instructions these days recommend a reverse proxy like Caddy or Traefik for that exact reason. I think it's also a valid argument to say that anyone playing around on a VPS without knowing what they're doing is probably going to learn some hard lessons, and that's kind of the point.

Again, if your router or perimeter devices are appropriately managing your network then it's a non-issue. By default most home routers have IPv6 disabled, and if you're setting up an enterprise environment with a VLAN you're probably subnetting IPv4 instead of using IPv6 at all.

All that means that if you're using IPv6 then you're proactively enabling it on whatever is handling your perimeter, which means you hopefully know what you're doing along with all the gotchas that come with that setup.

Tossing in my two cents here to agree with you. I worked remotely on and off from about 2014 onward until post-COVID RTO brought me into an office for 18 months before I became remote again. During that time (and across a bunch of companies) I went from desktop support to senior sysadmin to security on the cusp of senior security engineer.

In my experience the biggest factor in teams usually came down to the middle management layer. If their "style" was "watch over your shoulder, butts in seats" type of micromanagement then juniors didn't tend to progress unless they were self motivated to seek it out.

My understanding is that docker will expose the ports to the host machine's network interfaces, which is a crucial difference. For my home server running docker that means exposed to the LAN, but not the WAN unless I add in a port forwarding rule on my router. Similarly in an enterprise environment you would be exposing the port on whatever VLAN the host is connected to, which hopefully doesn't have directly transit to the open internet.

Anything you're running on the perimeter with open access to the internet in an enterprise environment probably (hopefully) isn't running docker containers without some additional config and protections.