wvenable

41 ms·

811.
by wvenable 2y ago
Twitter/X is an advertising company. They exist to sell content created by others to advertisers. Of course 80% of the company should be dedicated to doing the thing that brings in revenue. The technical side isn't terribly int
812.
by wvenable 2y ago
I think even your list isn't bullshit jobs. The world needs cart returners, landscapers, etc. And replacing jobs with the customers doing the job doesn't seem particularly desirable either (and proves those job aren't bul
813.
by wvenable 2y ago
Exactly my point! A statistical text generator trained a vast majority of the available content on the Internet and is able to understand natural language commands to generate content on any available subject is bloody amazing. Literally f
814.
by wvenable 2y ago
That seems like an arbitrary distinction. Plenty of software gets built that doesn't meet the minimal standards -- and you know what happens? It doesn't get deployed. How is that different from the bridge that doesn't get
815.
by wvenable 2y ago
I think I agree with you but disagree with the article. > But because of the things called out in this article, these magical tools and technologies are plagued by endless amounts of things that just don't work right, break randomly
816.
by wvenable 2y ago
> This is obviously subjective, but most people wouldn't look at any practical software and call it great. This what I think is insane. We interact with probably thousands of pieces of software every day (and I'm probably off
817.
by wvenable 2y ago
I think being a software developer is always being in conflict with reality. Most of our job is logic and rules. Preciseness and completeness. Reality, however, is full of people, chaos, and change and we are uncomfortable by that. I t
818.
by wvenable 2y ago
What I've noticed is that most issues are at the leaves. Abstractions that have existed for a long time and that are used heavily tend towards being more solid over time. (And more documented, well known, etc) It's the stuff at
819.
by wvenable 2y ago
> No, I'd argue it's much more common for there to be flaws. They're just not obvious. They're random crap like my phone continuing to vibrate after I've answered the call until I get another call or text. This i
820.
by wvenable 2y ago
This article presupposes that this software crisis actually exists or is a significant problem. The crisis is all this these things: Projects running over-budget Projects running over-time Software was very inefficient So
821.
by wvenable 2y ago
Yeah I don't think that's a good analogy. Instead, you have guns that don't let you point at your feet. So you can never shoot yourself there. However, if you ever need to shoot straight down for a legitimate reason, you&#
822.
by wvenable 2y ago
I met my wife on ICQ. There were a bunch of filters you could apply to random chat function (age / location / etc) and then you could just randomly chat with someone. I met a lot of people that way.
823.
by wvenable 2y ago
In my opinion, WPF is the logical choice. Still.
824.
by wvenable 2y ago
I haven't shopped at a cash-only business in years now. The last time was the little snack stands at parks but post-COVID even those take cards now.
825.
by wvenable 2y ago
I disagree because the complexity doesn't exist. If you concentrate only on the places you can handle errors/exceptions and what you can handle that is significantly simpler than fussing over the individual error return types of
826.
by wvenable 2y ago
A little context for Americans: Canada implemented chip and pin debit cards across the country in the 90s. Pretty much overnight, paying by check(cheque) disappeared and nearly all businesses took debit cards. So Canadians have been used
827.
by wvenable 2y ago
I just assume every piece of code can throw any kind of exception. If some code doesn't throw an exception today, it might change tomorrow. It ultimately doesn't matter. There is no need to worry about it. There are only key po
828.
by wvenable 2y ago
I have a desktop application with a single error handler at its event loop. All that handler does is show the exception message in a messagebox and then the event loop resumes. This application has a "save file" option. In this
829.
by wvenable 2y ago
> What code? I interpreted that as "all the following code", which feels like an entirely reasonable interpretation to me. It is. As long as you define "all following code" as the code that would execute from that po
830.
by wvenable 2y ago
> But even if they did that, the server could be down, the user's internet could be down, or there could be a typo in the URL that makes it unreachable, even if the URL itself is still valid. That doesn't contradict my statemen
831.
by wvenable 2y ago
Semantically I think it's great. .NET has a bunch of these especially in LINQ. A parsing failure isn't necessary an error. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Even if exceptions weren't expensive, catching exceptions
832.
by wvenable 2y ago
The pattern for returning errors is something like the following pseudocode: main() { (result or error) = functionA(); if (error) die("There was an error: " + error); print result } f
833.
by wvenable 2y ago
In .NET, they have 2 sets of parsing functions, "Parse" and "TryParse" for parsing strings into other types. The first throws an exception if it can't parse and the second returns a Boolean indicating success or fa
834.
by wvenable 2y ago
> So you think you know what an “exception” means? An exception is when code can no longer do any meaningful work. This could be because of a programming bug, unexpected input, network issue, hardware issue, etc. The cause doesn't
835.
by wvenable 2y ago
...unless I haven't looked at it in a few years.
836.
by wvenable 2y ago
Much of Linux's weirdness can be attributed to that as well -- at least the userland API.
837.
by wvenable 2y ago
I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my de
838.
by wvenable 2y ago
By the time I worked on Symbian, devices were far more powerful than what the Symbian API was designed for (and this was still before the iPhone). It made you jump through hoops that you didn't need to jump through anymore. I wrote
839.
by wvenable 2y ago
As soon as computers are on a network that changes things. A compromised machine is a danger to others. > So it was necessary to destroy the product in order to save its users. I fail to see how an updated OS is a destroyed product.
840.
by wvenable 2y ago
Microsoft care quite a bit because security vulnerabilities of end user machines that were out of date was a huge issue. Since they basically stopped allowing users to run outdated versions, that problem has effectively disappeared.

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