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Comment Re:1.5 billion with highest average IQ (Score -1) 28

> Intelligence alone won't get us anywhere, or China and Israel would be the best places to live

China: if you are Han, don't care about freedom, social safety net, live upwind from the factories and aren't in the bottom 90% financially, isn't all that bad.

Israel: a very liberal first world western high tech democracy. As long as you're ok dodging incoming rockets on occasion and don't care about religious crap, which most there don't, is pretty good.

China is no different than most developing authoritarian regimes, just bigger.
Israel is no different than most 1st world western countries, except it's run by Jews so obviously it's a bad place.

Comment Re:No QA before production release?? (Score -1) 55

They made db change. They have effectively infinite amounts of real production flow data they can use to test changes.

In this case, the system failed because it was hard coded to 200 max tests but they added more. If they had tested against that it would've been found.

This is not an obscure rarely used feature. This is a key feature of what their entire service is built around. They are selling filtered/clean incoming traffic against very large production sites. Who thought it was a good idea to have a hard cap of how many rules could be applied in the first place?

This is very much "no one will ever need more than 640k" thinking.

The closest I've ever got to doing similar was using a numeric incremental dns naming scheme based on 3 or 4 digit names like web001-999 or service0001-9999 knowing that it wouldn't be a surprise if we ever ran out of names, especially considering we had a dozen servers at the time which could easily handle 50x the current traffic load. But a numeric naming scheme isn't a surprise when you run out. Long before that we changed to "datacenter-service-number" so web005 became dc3-web-005 giving us up to 1000 web servers per data center in data centers that didn't have space for another 1000 servers anyway.

But this secret hard coded db limit is simple incompetence and lack of real world experience.

Again, this is the very core of their business model. Yet no one knew anything about how their systems work. It wasn't a complex problem. It was a dumb hard coded cap.

I have also seen very complex systems collapse under their own weight. This was not one of those times.

Comment No QA before production release?? (Score 1, Insightful) 55

Seriously?

Even most of the shitty under resourced startups I was at had basic dev -> qa -> staging -> production environment life cycles in place.

This sort of failure is a result of sheer incompetence, bad systems engineering, and clueless management at all levels.

Outages? Yes, shit happens.

Preventable outages by huge critical infrastructure company in their key systems? Clown show.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score -1) 35

Idiots? Ai contraire!

If they had solved this years ago none of them would have jobs today.

They just need to keep bread crumbing it. In 30 years they'll tell us the whales also have sounds for consonant equivalents.

They probably did figure it all out generations ago, already have full blown conversations all day with whales, usually their take on the latest Taylor Swift album, but just aren't telling us that.

Comment Re:BNPL groceries = groceries on credit cards (Score 5, Informative) 94

People buying essentials on credit has been around for a very long time.

Longer than most think.


You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford

Comment It depends on what they're watching (Score 1, Insightful) 21

Are they watching Taylor Swift videos? Complete waste of time.

Are they watching history, science, and other documentary videos? Good use of time.

In general, though, we know from Covid as well as way back when I was in uni and took a few childhood development classes that human interaction is generally a plus and isolation of any sort is generally bad.

There are a small number of anecdotal cases of abused children "raised" in closets or otherwise 99% isolated from all human contact who needed years and years of therapy and training once rescued to advanced beyond basic animal functions.

Video in and of itself is neither inherently good or bad. It's just a tool which can be used intelligently or not which is why this study is so wishy washy about their own results.

Comment Re: What drives bitcoin price vs other things? (Score -1) 50

Indeed, crime, corruption, FOMO, political distress and other abnormal life events do drive crypto. None of them things non-criminal normal people would "invest" in.

Sir, I salute your brilliantly delivered straight up hard sarcasm. Well done. Few can pull it off like that.

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