Solid comment. I do miss talking shop with coders.

Oh, I'll also add that for many years we tried in vain to increase the general competency, training, and skill level of the resources they gave us; leveraging every contract requirement, required education and training we could, but it is 100% futile. They can manufacture any credentials instantly, and it is impossible to exceed the lowest common denominator of skills on their teams.

It was quite common in the steady stream of bodies they were throwing at your projects and contracts to come across someone new who clearly did have talent and skill. No matter how hard you tried to latch on to that individual, again they are the few smart ones - it took no time at all for them to become aware of their level of ability compared to the others and they'd leave in no time for better pay and treatment, as they should clearly do. They'd quickly be replaced by a handful of complete morons.

Having been involved with countless Indian IT outsourcers over the years, There is some truth there but it's poorly worded. One of the things I used to say, and my timeline roughly matches up with theirs, is that the gold mine of skilled labour arbitrage has indeed been gone for about 15 years. Since then, if someone assumes they can go hired a skilled IT resource in Indian for any savings over a North American of similar skill, they are sorely mistaken.

Why? Well, the smart and skilled Indians (many but no doubt a minority in their vast employee counts), are just that - smart and skilled. They aren't going to sit around and accept 50% of the wages they can see the same person in North America makes. All those skilled resources have either immigrated here, or otherwise just don't accept rates below their peers elsewhere in the world now. Actual talented IT people the world over have indeed known their value and haven't accepted less for 15 maybe more years now.

The only thing the Indian outsourcers have left to offer is is just raw body count, and they can deliver huge amounts of bodies on a dime. To be fair, you can't get this in North America, hiring is hard. That said, I truly believed they just rounded up anyone who can fog a mirror off the street and had them listed as an experienced IT resource within hours. They would know one specific thing and literally nothing else in the entire technical realm. I can't imagine there is an actual school you graduate from, and know how to create a very specific type of SQL query, and not a thing else about computers at all. Seriously, it was shocking.

And what they are good at, is convincing executives these are skilled resources and fleecing them dry while still being able to show a cost-saving business case. This is many years ago, but I managed to find out one major Indian firm was charging my major North American firm $85/hr as the "blended rate", which is basically an all-in rate for a resource with their "management fees", etc. An easy sell to sr. management who pays North American professionals ~$150/hr burdened rate (included all overhead). That said, no doubt the actual worker received a fraction of that, and while cheaper, the value was absolutely nowhere near that cheaper cost.

Semi-related. I remember at least twice in the last year (fuzzy on dates), being alerted to a 9+ rated vulnerability that allowed for unauthenticated remote code execution, on a fucking firewall (basically the primary security device for countless business networks). While there are other guilty parties, I'm looking at you Fortinet. Oh lookie, another one from this month: https://fieldeffect.com/blog/f...

Even fucking worse, the patch for one of these critical remote code execution flaws, didn't actually fix the issue!! That someone can bypass SSO login with a "specially crafted SAML" message is beyond incompetence for a device responsible for security. Makes my blood boil.

Related to your comment, we found out about these when posted as CVEs, and it's not terribly hard to find such devices not locked down to specific IPs or geographies (not always easy). i actually don't know how easy/quick someone could read the CVE and do an IP scan for these devices on network edges. Reading the details of vul'n, I half assumed every Fortinet device would jump out and announce itself like a big dumb gorilla in a forest clearing to anything that pinged it.. "Heeeeyyyy guuuyyyysss!".

I didn't want to go find out exactly what type of code can be run arbitrarily on these devices. The last thing I needed for my sanity and rage was to find out FortiOS was written in VB6. Rant over.

Not saying this is you, but having written software for many years then managed software teams for many more, one of the most annoying developers to work with is the one guy who always insists things be done "the right way". I actually think your last line describes them perfectly: they are no doubt waiting for a set of very specific conditions to come to fruition, usually causing disaster, whereby their suggestions are proven useful or right and which would have prevented said disaster. They have an unhealthy attachment to various fantasies involving simply watching the disaster unfold, and the golden moment they can't wait for, telling those responsible "I told you so", and hence being venerated through the company and software circles as the greatest ever.

I exaggerate, or course, but this isn't far off. Oddly enough, they are usually among the technically smartest and most logical team members, but for some reason, they are the only ones who can't understand there are other valid considerations and priorities outside of the technical world. I never thought I'd be arguing a non-technical point of view either, but there you have it. Management corrupts the best of us.

I've encountered the exact situation your describe. Something to do with a SQL injection vulnerability, which to fix, involved updating the JRE in this particular environment, which by domino effect would necessitate a bunch of other costly software upgrades. True to what you say, tech debt is always involved and for some shitty dependency reasons, couldn't just pick up this app and move to another host. Anyway, it required enough money where I'd have to go ask for it from the executive.

My "greatest ever" coder was a constant pain in my ass that we wouldn't fix this, and do some helpful other fixes while in there, and moreso because I wouldn't even ask for the money. I knew the questions they were going to ask, and i already asked them. Every exploit has a cost to remediate, cost/impact if exploited, and probability of being exploited to consider, plus alternatives to fixing it. It was in a not-fully public area, I had a guy write a script in an hour that could tell if SQL commands were injected through the form and alert us, and simply increased the frequency of database backups. He could not understand this "doomed to fail and destroy us all approach".

"The right thing to do" actually sounds stupid, because it's whatever the purse holder pays for, assuming you have adequately informed them of risks and whatnot. Now, maybe this guy was advocating for a better choice, but he would scoff at me telling him he just needed to make the right case to the executive. The non-technical people could never understand.

I got the first version of an iPhone Pro that had this dynamic island thing (it was just my long awaited upgrade time, and I'm certainly no Apple fanboy).

It's actually a decent and unobstructive addition to the UI. I do think most of it is to be flashy, but it does serve a useful purpose: it's a tiny bit of useful info and a quick switch to apps that you typically run in the background, but frequently jump back in and out of. Spotify and Uber most commonly. Although, the "time to arrival" Uber shows in the island does not update properly and is always off from what is shown when opening the app.

Whether that's true or not, I think the US government did us a favor here. They've shown us once again just what bullshit these feel-good corporate "Social Responsibility" policies/pledges/slogans/etc. really are. This is not new. I remember the "don't be evil" example mentioned above, many years ago, and thinking that'll get axed at the tiniest bit of shareholder pressure. What's funny (or sad) is that anyone believed a word of this bullshit from Anthropic in the first place.

I would bet 99% of those companies will also be on the list the next time a Democrat gets elected, and would have been there regardless of who won the last election.

If that's what you see, you're most likely getting trolled. Or, of course, there are represent and speak to entire viewpoints and political outlooks they don't believe in, but it's done for money, not some idea of power and heirarchy.

You Americans are so extreme in your political dichotomy now that you literally see everything (bad) you want to see in the other side, and of course your side is the paragon of virtue and intelligence.

Hate to break it to you, as an outsider looking in who could really give a shit less about the American right or left: I'd say it seems clear that the right wing actually says what's on their mind on issues, regardless of how controversial or even offensive it is, and disagreement is rife. Sure there are some common opinions, but they seem comfortable saying their real opinion, consequences be damned. The downside (even in my country, where the right wing is a tiny shadow of the US, probably more like the Democrats in the US) of this is it's very hard to "unite the right" and get a common platform all support, and while not a majority, many people with hateful or crazy ideas join this party.

The left wing in America (even here) seems to be in perfect lockstep in nearly all points of debate. This is actually what makes me certain you are describing the left wing. I do not believe all those people actually agree with all of the mandatory viewpoints, but they are slogans they must say or be excommunicated. Variety of opinion can't be that low on that many subjects, ergo you have a lot of people saying things they don't believe in. How many leftists do you see arguing that Israel isn't committing genocide, or that trans women aren't women. None that are welcome in the left anymore. Of course, this leads to a lot of unity, and all other things equal the left should win most elections (they do here). Downside is there is almost no room for debate.

I actually don't care too much about the Epstein stuff since his suicide, which was suspicious. That said, you people and your conspiracy theories are right up there with anti-vaxxers and pizzagate weirdos. I keep waiting for a bombshell, or actually any real evidence, but most of what I see is everyone of thousands of people in random junk files and emails from this guy over many years being labelled a pedophile. Like, we all hate the pedos, but we should also stand for principles. Someone should have some decently strong evidence before making such a claim.

Are you waiting to jump all over someone who holds his nose and defends Trump, by pointing out the inconvenient fact (for you) he banned him from his resort after he was recruiting young women? I get it, it would be great to know he's a pedo, but so far the evidence is that he knew some rich and very well connected financier before knowledge of his crimes were public? Don't get mad, you're the one making me stand up for truth.

And good lord, moving someone to minimum security is some massive conspiracy? Like 99.99999% of the time that happens it's because of the assessed low risk of the inmate to harm anyone or escape. Quick image check: yep, frail old lady confirmed. Dumbass.

Ehhh.. that position of yours sounds ripe for abuse the other way. Now, if there was a way to prove someone was powerless, or for valid reasons of coercion, legitimately felt they could not say no, then we can all agree that's abuse.

Women are not weak and powerless either. They should (are) taught to say no to any unwanted contact, regardless of money or perceived "power" (probably mostly applies to police and/or guards). Women are also just as capable as men of lying, and too broad (no pun intended) a definition leaves the door open for a girl to laugh and happily consent to being touched by someone rich, then turn around and claim abuse. This isn't to degrade women either, actually it's acknowledging they're the same as the rest of us. So no, "letting him" (consenting) do anything should almost always absolve a person of abuse complaints, unless a true position of authority can be established.

That said, I have absolutely no idea the actual facts of the instance you're referring to. But "allowing it" is "allowing it", even if the reason to do so is because you want to make some rich person happy.

Not disagreeing, but a comical and true personal anecdote: I used to be an intense privacy nut and advocate as a younger man. Few years back, I was laying on my pull out couch looking at my Alexa and wondering just what had changed.

Well, I I looked over at my beautiful wife as we were getting high and basking in silly happiness, and told her I figured it out: if someone out there is spending their life listening to my life, they lose. No question. Actually wished in that moment there was some dumb loser having to listen to me in that moment.

You say that as a joke or insult, but consider this: it is hard for a day to go by where you don't see the topic of trangenderism discussed in the media, across the entire political spectrum. You have to be living under a rock to not think about it somehow. I'm in Canada, and just last week we had the third largest mass shooting in our history, and the perpetrator's trangender status was front and center of all news stories. Then we had a Rhode Island hockey game shooting, and again, nearly all of the news coverage was on the transgender aspect of it. And this isn't right wing newspapers... here, from the front page two days ago of a very left-wing news org in Canada, a story about the heated debate around a trans transfer to a women's prison.

Like it or not, it is one of the largest social issues and discussions of the modern day. I could care less about what someone wants to be, but I also can't deny it is raising very interesting questions we haven't had to deal with before, and they deserve real discussion and debate. Again, I support trans people, but the fact many can't answer "what is a woman?" is actually a very interesting sociological debate.

According to this source:

And the trial results show it was "somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.". Sounds like a nothingburger.. someone read the title and immediately wanted to fire up the usual crowd.

In that case you'd be shocked to see how Canada operates - whenever a new government is elected, each area of government is assigned a "minister" which absolutely implements the agenda of the government of the day, and they would be removed in a heartbeat if they didn't display "loyalty" to the prime minister. This includes the Justice Minister, who issues sweeping decrees as to how to mold the justice system's priorities to their whim. Great example is the current Justice Minister (who is also attorney general) issued guidance that bail should be prioritized and given at the earliest possible opportunity, which has lead to massive crime problems in Canada.