Not every “smart” software solution is smart nor is every “AI powered” software having AI.
AI is not a meaningful term.
If you ask people if a piece of software that never loses at tic tac toe is AI, most will say yes. Everyone I’ve asked that didn’t already know why I was asking said yes.
I cannot separate that piece of software from any piece of software.
I’ve literally had this conversation with the marketing department. It’s marketing. Tell me what you want to say is AI, and I’ll give you a justification.
I mean, technically, any software with an if-else is AI.
It is if you’re in marketing 😂
For the marketing folks: adding “AI” to your product ad may increase the chance that the pencil pushers will want it, so I get why it may make sense to put it there. But it will make IT folks start with the assumption that your entire product is worthless bullshit that tries to trick people into buying it with meaningless buzzwords. Same for “Blockchain”.
If I had a product that actually had a good use for AI/ML, I’d use the most technical term possible to describe it, just to avoid the appearance of buzzword fishing. With blockchain… just invent some new name for it. It’s so toxic that people will roll their eyes and stop listening.
Reminds me of block chain tea. Their stock price went up
I think the waters have been muddied for a long time by referring to NPC behavior trees and state machines in games as AI. You can apply that to just about any software that takes input and makes a decision. Then you have the movie version of AI which is sentient computers. So decades of use without any actual meaning have made the word useless in actually communicating anything
I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.
I think there are various categories for types of AI/ML right? Like, neural nets, expert systems, Bayesian systems? Idk. I should really learn more about this topic.
“AI” is a vague and all encompassing term used to describe computers making decisions.
Machine learning, yeah, is what you’re describing. If you’re interested in learning more, look into writing your own neural nets from scratch using any number of programming languages. They’re actually a fairly simple concept to both understand and apply in practice, but they can become fairly complex at scale.
Do you happen to have a good guide for writing your own machine learning algo? Ideally not relying on Python libs?
The best thing I can recommend is to just pick your most comfortable language and find guides specific to that.
It’s functionally the same regardless of language, however it’s much easier to learn as you build it.
> “AI Powered”
> Looks inside
> Data structures and algorithms
In Germany: Big car manufacturers do have round-table sessions where they share research informations with each other. However, they do not co-ordinate pricing.
When you feel like car manufacturers release models with similar specs within a short time frame, this could be why.
Phone systems that give you the prompt, “Press # for more options” etc are called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If you encounter an IVR that asks for credit card info, social security number, etc, don’t enter it in! If you stay silent, you will usually be routed to an agent, though that varies on whichever system you are calling into.
Even if the system is designed for completely non-nefarious purposes, the IT people who maintain the phone system can analyze call logs to pull electronic keypresses (DTMF) and reconstruct every digit entered to capture your data. Most IT people would never consider abusing this access, but some organizations contract or sub-contract their phone support out to the lowest bidding third parties and might not do a great job of vetting their techs.
Giving this information to a live agent has its own risks, but if you initiated a call to a documented telephone number for the organization you are trying to reach, it is generally a safer option than keying in sensitive digit strings to an IVR. It is much harder for anyone outside of the call center to scan recorded audio for information like this. (Though technology is closing that gap)
I used to work as a contractor for an environmental remediation firm. All the waterways that you joke about not swimming in are actually full of some awful carcinogen. Old industrial plants dumped awful chemicals for years and years. Some of these issues are being slowly addressed, but regulation is always well behind the science. But often, if the liability is significant enough, companies will spend millions of dollars a year to kick the can down the road doing studies and monitoring so that they can avoid what would be hundreds of millions to actually remediate the problem.
Many software developers care even less about security than the people who use the software. Their attitude is that it’s just more work to do things in a secure manner. It’s only after a major security breach that they fix their security holes.
Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we’re just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.
The SLA on any product is not a guarantee the platform will be fixed in that timeframe. At best it is wishful thinking.
Sla is?
Service level agreement
Service Level Agreement, typically a legal contractual requirement. SLAs can vary, but a common one is for a service to be online and accessible. Web hosting providers that host web sites for companies typically guarantee that their service has an SLA of 99.5% uptime, meaning any time the service is down, the engineers and incident teams need to restore operational services quickly. A breach of SLA invokes financial penalty to the provider for violating the contract uptime guarantee.
With most pre-written SLAs, the penalty is something like “we’ll refund the service cost for the month” at best. So it’s “we have a financial reason not to fuck up” not “you will be made whole if we fuck up and your business is down”.
The SLAs are also often tied to SLOs (the quality they promise to deliver, e.g. “we promise to be up 99.5% of the time”) that are very generous for the service provider. If your critical service was down 3.6 hours in a month, that would still meet a 99.5% SLO. So if your business was down for 2-3 hours per month, that would be a-ok. Only if it was down for say an entire day, you’d get (depending on the contract) typically either a day or a month of service refunded.
I’d take a provider with no SLO but a good track record over someone that offers an SLA. If they fuck up the month of refund is going to be the least of my problems, and if they fuck up repeatedly, I’ll have to emergency-migrate away to a different provider either way.
I’ve consulted with many companies trying to save money by moving to AWS because they have twelve 9s of availability. They don’t do any redundant deployments because they want to save money.
I keep telling them that the SLA just means that AWS will give them a refund for anything you couldn’t use while they have an outage. There’s no guarantee.
So they just treat their uptime target sorta like the office and bankruptcy? “I declare 12 9s!”
Like, bruh, you actually have to pay for that if you want it, wtf?
I guess it is a bit like car batteries. A 4 year warranty doesn’t guarantee it will last 4 years, it means you get a refund if it doesn’t. (Though unless they’re idiots they build the batteries so statistically it is somewhat more common to last that long vs dying early).
SLAs are not a guarantee because a guarantee is a guarantee .
Sounds about right lol.
But that’s why you put SLAs into contract language with penalties. Like, say my company pays your company for a SaaS product. And you go down longer than the SLA, we get a discount or something. If it’s not in a legal agreement it is meaningless for sure.
Also the refund is not automatic you need to apply for it.
Ok? I never said it was nor would I expect it to be unless it is part of the contract. And even then probably not.
Manufacturing here. We dont have a trained QC person looking at our units before sending them to the customer. Its just some guy that checks physical dimensions. We have electronics that comes in for RMA and never gets retested on its way out. Most of our customers dont install the pieces for months so the process control gets muddied by time. Literally everyone in our company knows this. We just got our ISO 9000 cert anyway, because no one really cares about doing things right. We just put untested parts in shit and cross our fingers.
Supermarket employee here. We have a “fresh” fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.
Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they’re lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some … people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.
Long story short, “fresh” fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.
Food dropped in fastfood restaurants is still sold. Just brush the rat hair off it and top that pizza!
Not sure how secret it is, but in many states your credit score can be used as a rating factor in determining your auto insurance premium. Insurance companies charge you more if you have bad credit.
Oil and gas workers are normal people with children and dogs that care about the environment and they do a pretty good job on average of protecting the it. But accidents do happen in the industry, and when they do, it’s sometimes not a simple “cleanup on aisle six” scenario. I’ve seen grown men on their hands and knees mopping up drops of oil in a cow pasture more than once.
Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
Are there currently any that are showing signs of imminent collapse? (Twitter, maybe?).
Or what are the signs to look for those who are untrained in this field?
Mostly tge first sign is something like all old .doc files can no longer be opened. So some thing like.
Regarding Twitter: yes.
As a tech person outside Twitter, looking in: Twitter is metaphorically a huge airliner with one remaining engine, and that engine is pouring smoke.
The clown who caused the first four engines to fail has stepped out of the pilot’s seat, but still has the ability to fire the new pilot, and still has strong convictions on how to fly a plane.
That plane might land safely. But in the tech community, those of us fortunate not to be affected are watching with popcorn, because we expect a spectacular crash.
If anyone reading this is still relying on Twitter - uh, my advice is to start a Mastodon account. Or Myspace or something.
I can’t imagine the shit show it would be if that log4j vulnerability and software update hit Twitter in its current state. I could see shutting off all external web traffic until the overworked devs finish committing while being held up with a visa loaded gun pointed at their head.
Is a website running on WordPress? That’s a system built on failed practices and is constantly attacked. It needs a serious overhauling and possibly replacement, but the software runs a huge majority of websites.
While most instances of WordPress you we’ll find in the wild are insecure and nothing more than bloated garbage. The CMS is actually fairly secure with minimal intervention if you properly configure it on setup and maintain software updates as they continually roll out patches for vulnerabilities as they are discovered.
If you turn off comments and the ability for new users to self-register and throw it on PHP 8.2 with a WAF and enable file write protection it’s actually very robust.
At least when WordPress breaks you have WP-CLI to troubleshoot it
I work for a web hosting company. So many WP sites are out of date with plugins and core. I’ve dealt with many compromised sites. Granted there are auto updates on the WP side and the hosts service, it’s still pretty often.
I also work for a WH. Yeah most idiots don’t do basic maintenance which is why I just rename the dir as xxx.old make a new folder install core and then delete the blank wp-content an copy over the wp-content DB and wp-config.php from the borked install. Takes 10 min rather than 30 to update and fix. I call that the “Doctor Frankenstein” method
As an everyday user of software who’s not a developer, this is not a secret. Nothing works well for any extended period of time.
Because it fit into an ecosystem of tech that is constantly evolving. Software as a whole evolves more quickly than most tech. You see the same effect in every other branch of engineering but just slower.
Example: They are having problems rebuilding a certain famous church in Europe that burned down because the trees that went into it are now all smaller. They can’t get a replacement part.
I just dealt with this about a month ago at work. A customer machine died and they wanted “an exact replacement”. I explained to sales that is all I need to hear to know this project is going to be a disaster. Parts go out of stock, the network stuff is not as backwards compatible as people think it is, and standards change. They went over my head and demanded the same machine. I get daily emails from our fabricators about the problems they are having. Engineering is not a once and done thing. You need to have the staff and resources to continue to make your product match up with the environment it is in.
Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.
(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)
My dad is a tech in the telecommunications industry. We basically didn’t see him for all of 1999. The fact that nothing happened is because of people working their assess off.
My dad had to stay in his office with a satellite phone over new years in case shit hit the fan.
My dad still believes the entire Y2K problem was a scam. How do I convince him?
Well my dad does too and he worked his ass off to prevent it. Baby boomers are just stupid as shit, there’s not really much you can do.
Maybe a documentary from some folks who worked on that stuff? I imagine a short documentary exists on YouTube, or at least an interview on a podcast from someone who did it.
If he won’t believe it then, not sure what else you can do. Some people are just stuck in their old ways and beliefs despite any evidence you provide.
Even more difficult in a situation like this because it wasn’t widely publicized until years after. I didn’t even know this stuff until a few years ago, but I work with computers so I believe it partly because of what I know about computer architecture.
Maybe he’ll believe it if he understands how 2038 affects Linux OS and can see it in real time then?
Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and OSX have all already switched to 64 bit time.
So they have a year 202020 bug then
I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:
The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.
A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.
That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.
an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.
I can’t wait to retire when I’m 208 years old.
Omg we are in same epoch as the butlarian crusade.
Butlarian crusade
Butlerian Jihad, my dude. Hate to correct you, but the spice must flow.
If you’re going to correct people about Dune quotes, at least use one from the book! “The spice must flow” doesn’t appear in any of them, it’s a Lynch addition.
Im just glad you got that reference
Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.
Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.
Cars haven’t. A whole lot of cars are gonna get bricked.
How many UNIX machines in production are still running on machines with 32-bit words, or using a 32-bit time_t?
How much software is still running 32 bit binaries that won’t be recompiled because the source code has been lost together with the build instructions, the compiler, and the guy who knew how it worked?
How much software is using int32 instead of time_t, then casting/converting in various creative ways?
How many protocols, serialization formats and structs have 32 bit fields?
Irrelevant. The question you should ask instead is: how many of those things will still be in use in 15 years.
I am taking the week off, family camping, and cell phones off for that week in 2038.
What is the basis for the 2038 problem?
The most common date format used internally is “seconds since January 1st, 1970”.
In early 2038, the number of seconds will reach 2^31 which is the biggest number that fits in a certain (also very common) data type. Numbers bigger than that will be interpreted as negative, so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901 or so.
Huh interesting. Why 2^31? I thought it was done in things like 2^32. We could have pushed this to 2106.
Signed integers. The number indeed goes to 2^32 but the second half is reserved for negative numbers.
With 8 bit numbers for simplicity:
0 means 0.
127 means 127 (last number before 2^(7)).
128 means -128.
255 means -1.Why not just use unsigned int rather than signed int? We rarely have to store times before 1970 in computers and when we do we can just use a different format.
Because that’s how it was initially defined. I’m sure plenty of places use unsigned, which means it might either work correctly for another 68 years… or break because it gets converted to a 32 bit signed somewhere.
so instead of January 2038 it will be in December 1901…
Maybe this is just a big elaborate time travel experiment 68 years in the making?
Package management is impossible. When a big enough package pushes an update the house of cards eill fall. This causes project packages with greatly outdated versions to exist in production because there is no budget to diagnose and replace packages that are no longer available when a dependency requires a change.
Examples: adminJs or admin bro… one of them. Switched the package used to render rich text fields.
React-scripts or is it create react app, I don’t recall. Back end packages no long work as is on the front end. Or something like that? On huge projects, who’s got the budget to address this to get the project up to date?
This has to be a world wide thing. There is way to many moving targets for every company to have all packages up to date.
It’s only a matter of time before an exploit of some sort is found and who knows what happens from there.
That’s basically what happened with log4j or whatever that java bug was a few years ago. A lot of things still haven’t been patched.
Does leftpad count as a collapse?
We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.
We pretty much read about them at least once a week.
Then you start off fresh going “this time it’s going to be different” but the same fucking things happen and you end up cramming that project in 3 weeks.
In the news this week: https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL Major Incident Investigation Preliminary Report.pdf
This is unprecedented since, well, January: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_FAA_system_outage
This pertains to the US:
A lot of people are unaware of cancelation lists, and a lot of providers don’t really advertise that. When I was a casemanager for adults with severe mental illness, I would always ask to have my clients added to the cancelation list, and this would often get them in much sooner.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
Some of these things are just so overlooked/unknown by the general public. And sometimes you’ve got to be assertive and stick with your guns to be treated fairly and get the attention you deserve. Especially now more than ever. Our healthcare system was bad before, but it’s been so strained ever since covid…
The healthcare system can be a nightmare for average people functioning well. It is so much worse for the population experiencing severe mental illness/with cognitive disability. This barrier for care plays a significant role in the reduced life expectancy in the disadvantaged population I worked with.
Patients suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders, have a reduced life expectancy compared to the general population of up to 10–25 years. This mortality gap requires urgent actions from a public health perspective in order to be reduced. Source
If anyone reading this has family or friends with severe mental illness or trouble with intellectual functioning, you may want to offer some support for doctors appointments. Honestly, everyone would benefit from having another person in their appointments for support and as a second set of ears.
Anyone reading this with severe mental illness, don’t be afraid to reach out for support. If you don’t have a social support system, there are services out there to help. Try to find social services in your area to get some help navigating thru all the bullshit. And don’t give up hope.
Always like to share this website with free evidence-based resources that I used all the time with my clients. I personally benefitted from the material as well.
Also butted heads with a receptionist last year when my client was literally experiencing congestive heartfailure and she wanted to schedule him like 1.5 months out to see his specialist about having a defibrillator implanted. I said it was unacceptable and said he needed to be added to the emergency openings I know the providers reserve. She got a look on her face and said “But I need to get provider approval for that…” I told her “I think you better talk to the doctor then.”
Specialist eventually came over to scheduling and asked what was going on. The receptionist said what we wanted and asked if she would approve it, with a real dismissing inflection. The specialist said “Oh my god, yeah of course he’s approved for the emergency list…”
I’m not sure I understand what happened here. Was this all just because the receptionist didn’t want to ask for approval because it seemed like a hassle?
Yep… at least that was my guess. Didn’t want to pull the specialist back out of what she was then doing/didn’t want the hassle. But I was adamant that we weren’t going anywhere until she checked.
Some people are just finicky and I can’t really say for sure what her deal was, but her demeanor was just rude and like she didn’t have the time of day to give us…
What a fucking bizarre attitude to have when working in healthcare. Laziness in that area can cause deaths.
It’s more prevalent in the industry than you’d like to think… Burnout is often linked with lack of empathy.
I worked exclusively with adults whose illness was severe enough that they were residing in various residential care facilities (RCFs) and assisted living facilities (ALFs) in my region.
I was a 3rd party and a mandated reporter and I can’t tell you how many times I hotlined facilities and did internal/DMH/DHSS reporting/assistance with investigations. Misallocation of Client funds was a common problem (especially at specific RCFs), medication errors/stealing Residents’ meds, neglect of facilities/cleaning, improper nutrition, and abuse and neglect were all too common…
At first I thought the same thing when I started that position, wondering why someone like that would even take those positions. But people are complicated and often shitty. Some people like to power trip, some people want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, some people’s self-care is so neglected by being over-worked that they no longer have the capacity, and some people are just assholes…
This just makes me sad. :(
There’s so much wrong with the system and so much that could done to improve it, but I don’t want to frame it here in a hopeless sort of way. Our treatment options and accessibility continue to improve, social stigma of mental illness has improved tremously in the last decade or two, and there’s no reason to think further advancement won’t continue. But acknowledging the current shortcomings and feeling sad and angry about it are important to drive that positive change.
I’m in total agreement. What we need is fully nationalised healthcare, with direct political participation from the people.
Reduced mental function definitely includes dementia; my mom had Parkinson’s disease and definitely needed my help and advocacy and memory.
Loading animations on websites and some apps that give you a percentage and messages about what’s going on are usually faked with animations. The frontend for things like that usually just puts fake messages and animations because it’s not easy to track the stages of complex steps happening on the backend. It’s possible in some cases but I don’t think I have ever seen a real working version of a loader like that in my 15 years of experience.
