In the early days of the steam engine’s success, what helped it find an economic footing was the need to pump water from coal mines. At the time, logistics of transporting things over large distances were difficult, so having the coal supply on-site was an obvious benefit. So while using a steam engine to pump water from a pool would be quite archaic and inefficient, but at least for emptying the pool, it could technically be used.

Of course, a locomotive moving the engine around would be entirely impractical for pumping a somewhat steady stream. Chlorinated water would also make for poor steam, I imagine.

I guess driving a scrubber back and forth would be possible, but I could do that more efficiently by hand. I drink less water, eat less coal, don’t require rails and skilled operators and I’m easier to transport to the site. I’m not sure how the carbon footprint for a human compares to that of extracting and processing iron, but it won’t be favourable if at least one human is involved.

The scrubber couldn’t be as large and heavy though. If you need a heavy scrubber, you’d also need a powerful motivator. That’s where a steam engine might have an edge over me: sheer power output.

To match that, you’d have to employ and pay multiple people. So if the steam engine’s rent seems cheaper than that…

CEOs are lauded as visionary and it’s just not as engaging to read about crushed visions. Even if we disregard the whole “corporate talking pieces” and “journalists often stem from the social elite” parts, just the drive for engagement and clicks would explain a slant towards writing about great ideas rather than disappointing realism. How many people enjoy SciFi? How many love pedantic analyses why they’re absolutely unrealistic?

I mean, I love pedantry (as well as the genre itself), but I’m a minority and fine with it – stories can be fun without being realistic and disbelief can be suspended in favour of entertainment.

CEOs spouting bullshit shouldn’t be taken as stories for entertainment though, and much less printed in a serious manner. For them, critical disassembly should be the norm, mandatory even.

LLMs are highly impressive text generators, amazing facsimiles of human writing and wholly unsuited to anything involving semantic understanding and critical thought. You cannot generate facts, and it doesn’t understand how the patterns it analyses and reproduces relate to actual concepts or things, but they’re extremely “knowledgeable” about those patterns.

They’re a technological marvel, relentlessly abused by grifters posing as prophets to scam the gullible.

Unfortunately, the gullible are executives and representatives.

None of us are paid well

Does that extend to the bosses too?

I didn’t know about the “revert single file” trick either. The rest is a handy reference too, thanks for sharing!

Does management love them too? Financially, in particular? I don’t know their hobbies, but Games Workshop don’t accept colleague approval as payment.

MBAs in action: John was the biggest expense, his professional infidelity a welcome justification and his importance just a number on a sheet.

Unfortunately for him, the fallout hit too hard and too fast, so he couldn’t leverage the cost savings brag for a better position and let some other lucky fella deal with the disaster.

If you replace the ü in “Das Wetter ist schwül” (“the weather is humid”) with a u though, you get “the weather is gay”.

And the commas between function arguments in formulas become Semicola instead

Who hurt you?

They apparently lost eight years of data, 858TB, with no backups at all because it’s “too much”. That’s a disaster for sure, but I’m not so optimistic about there being a lot of recovery…

Their explanation for having no backups was that 858 TB of data was “due to its large capacity”. They stored eight years of data without backups. Even with systems where they had backups, it sounds like there’s no redundancy – nobody can work because the single building where all the servers are located is currently out of order.

Sounds like the acute symptoms of chronic penny-pinching when it comes to IT infrastructure. I hope they take some good lessons from it at least. Just a shame that it’s such a devastating way to learn.

The person in charge of allotting budget. “You want how many thousands for backup solutions? Here, take this flashdrive I picked up in the parking lot and use it for backups, that should be plenty enough. I mean, how many bytes can our data be? Two, three maybe?”

Does the database use the same authentication and permissions as the API? If the API authenticates against the DB with a technical user, it may be still be an exploitable vulnerability for people who can’t access the DB directly but can access the API. I don’t know what database it is, what other databases run on the same server and what privileges might be achievable or escalatable, but generally “there are worse weaknesses” isn’t a solid security policy.

You could give me a VPN access and I’ll take a look around :p

(Please don’t, actually – in case it needs to be said, running pentests on prod is a dangerously bad idea already even before we get to the whole “trusting a stranger on the Internet just because they sound sorta knowledgeable” issue)

I feel the morbid desire to display both of the Ubuntu-Debian bastardisations from cursed-logos next to each other, despite using neither

Pentesters: “Bet”

If your language specifies support for it, sure. Might still be difficult to read at a glance.

❯ ls -l | sort -n

Shouldn’t that work correctly?

Some grSSk letters?

oooor you could just stuff it all in the square hole 😁

But seriously, I like the approach. I tend to go overboard with my type definitions sometimes, because I feel like it saves me some thinking down the line, and conversely get frustrated when the tools for it are limited.

My first foray into the world of programming was a python book for kids. Among other things, it featured an example for multi-line strings that contained the line “Explicit is better than implicit”. Aside from the irony of quoting that in the context of python (I believe it was written for 2.4 or 2.5, before explicit typing was even supported), it stuck with me.