GATTACA

In Life is Strange

In “What remains of Edith Finch” you arguably don’t change anything. You just discover what has already happened, then you leave and the story ends. Even more so with “Dear Esther”. Less so with “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter”.

Alan Wake? Unclear what happens and what doesn’t, but one possible interpretation is that the main character is just stuck in a room typing on a typewriter for the entire game.

In Xenon, when you finish level 4 it just restarts at level 1. 🙂

Well yes, their sales department needs to know whom to contact

Did anyone catch what the Proton app adds over all the already existing apps?

Unfortunately some developer tools fail to work correctly in separate worktrees. I used them for a while but had to give them up. For example, Maven’s release plugin cannot reliably create tags / branches if you’re in a separate worktree.

Not everybody cares for SEO BS

How about jabber/XMPP

This reads like The Onion for IT geeks

sometimes, it feels like managers hate engineers

They hate engineers because the engineers ask difficult questions that somebody needs to answer in order to really automate a process, and they take the time necessary to do so.

SQL was explicitly designed to allow “normal humans” to query the database. Nowadays even “normal developers” aren’t able to use it properly.

Oracle has a product called Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) that it sells as “you can write the rules in plain English in MS Word documents, you don’t need developers”. I worked for an insurance organization where the business side bought OPA without consulting IT, hoping they wouldn’t have to deal with developers. It totally failed because it doesn’t matter that they get to write “plain English” in Word documents. They still lack the structured, formal thinking to deal with anything except the happiest of happy paths.

The important difference between a developer and a non-developer isn’t the ability to understand the syntax of a programming language. It’s the willingness and ability to formalize and crystallize requirements and think about all the edge cases. As an architect/programmer when I talk to the business side, they get bored and lose interest from all my questions about what they actually want.

I think the article makes a good point, but perhaps I’m over-interpreting. It’s not that we should stop using strings. It’s that we should use the type system to separate different kinds of strings and enlist the compiler’s help to detect incorrect mingling of them. So for example a symbol type would only permit strings that contain ASCII letters, underscore and digits, and concatenation with / conversion to plain strings would be limited.

Yes, the US is a third world country

I don’t believe that. You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP. Sure, we can’t reach some kind of theoretical 0.0 bias - even particle physics research is biased by assumptions. But at least it makes an honest attempt. Although the conclusions an article arrives at may be influenced by the author’s opinions, a journalist who is honestly trying to avoid bias would provide the reasoning, data and sources behind those opinions instead of simply stating them as fact. That gives me as a reader a chance to evaluate their merits.

I’m talking about letting the user change their own password. I’m honestly not sure how that would be technically accomplished in this situation without having to contact IT each time. It seems like something Microsoft should provide a no-frills GUI for that doesn’t require elevation.

The thing I’m really aching for in news media is journalism that rises above merely reporting events. “A guy got murdered yesterday” is not useful information for me. It’s barely even a data point, because I can’t read about ten such events and extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Other things like population size, number of stopped crime, completeness of data etc affect any conclusion that could be drawn from it

In fact I shouldn’t try to extrapolate from it, because I’m paying the journalist to talk to the right experts and hopefully also do research on their own, to figure out trends and cause-effect relationships. That’s meaningful journalism that helps me make decisions such as how to vote.

Media today has so much noise and so little signal. I don’t need a daily newspaper filled to the brim with events. I need perhaps a weekly magazine that I can read on a Sunday morning in half an hour, which teaches me something about what’s going on in the world without bias, and brings up the data as evidence. I wouldn’t mind paying for it and I’d take it on paper, though e-ink would be better. I’d trust it a lot more if ads were not mentioned anywhere in its business model.

Surely some smart key exchange algorithm could be used for that, e.g. the CPU provides a public key to the TPM and the TPM encrypts the symmetric disk key with that public key. Similar to how TLS works.

Which kind of makes it useless in many corporate environments where it’s most needed, since the users won’t be able to set their own password.

Thanks, that sounds really useful. I’m guessing it won’t work unless you’re local admin though.

I guess they mean use the password as part of the encryption key, or encrypt the key with the password. Bitlocker doesn’t use the user’s password in that way, which is why it can boot an encrypted system without user interaction. That part always seemed very sketchy to me.