Generally speaking, it's better to cover up asbestos than it is to remove it. Remediation attempts can easily go wrong, moving the asbestos from "hidden and staying put under tiles" to "free floating dust in the air and your lungs". One of my parents' friends got mesothelioma from doing just that.
It's not Fear, Uncertainty or Doubt. Nobody serious is saying that TPMs are a bad idea. They are saying they are not required and they are fucking correct to say it, and especially when folks are already suffering under a cost of living hike like few we've seen, plus Trump's stupid tariffs, it's horseshit to effectively hold people's security hostage to them buying an entire new fucking computer.
You can disable the requirements for these features in Windows setup with Microsoft approved group policies. They are the definition of not required. My workbench PC is a shitty old XPS from 2014 and it runs 11 just fine.
Like, would people be more secure with TPMs? Absolutely, but I've been using computers in my home since fucking 2004 that did not have these features. Surely we can let it go a little longer without throwing folks to the digital wolves for the crime of not having a few hundred around for another new goddamn gadget?
> Nobody serious is saying that TPMs are a bad idea.
I am. They by definition mean you no longer have full authority over your computer which is unacceptable. Even their name is orwellian - they are all about NOT trusting the user.
> They are the definition of not required.
They will be once support is widespread enough. And they will be used against your interests.
We're so back. Another quagmire war in the middle east. Exactly what we needed.
For whatever you feel about WMDs or the justification for the Iraq war, the facts are we spent almost two decades in the first go round, found no WMDs, killed a dictator we installed, blew up a shit ton of infrastructure, rebuild a shit ton of it, killed probably millions of innocent people, absolutely blew up the Taliban and later ISIS's recruitment numbers, made ourselves look fucking stupid on the global stage, then pulled out, leaving billions in military materiel to be claimed by the people we were ostensibly there to stop.
An utter fucking farce, and we have learned absolutely nothing. Time to send more young men to die.
The actions on the US-Israel side so far (deeply cutting non-defense discretionary spending, decoupling from international trade, assassinating secular leaders who can be replaced, bombing three locations which can be rebuilt) only make sense as the near-term prelude to a major ground invasion. If the invasion doesn't happen the US will be left with a self-inflicted economic growth wound and no way to explain it, and Israel will be left with an adversary that believes itself to be facing an existential risk, that is able to enrich uranium, and that would not trust any treaty negotiations.
Did you believe Trump and his people when they campaigned on not attacking Iran while claiming repeatedly that Harris would if elected. If so did can you admit you were wrong and need to adjust your priors?
The self-inflicted economic wound is nothing more than Trumpnomics. If the numbers look bad he will just say they are fake or solved by GDP growth or tariff revenue.
Iran already knows that Israel can decapitate them at will, but not occupy them. Nothing has changed with these strikes.
Bombing nuclear facilities and killing scientists kicks the can down the road and that has worked for decades. But the US/Israel coalition is also trying to negotiate or orchestrate regime change, which could provide a more lasting impact.
The population of Israel is 1/9 the population of Iran. The population of the US in 2003 was 10x the population of Iraq. Huge difference in what it takes to actually attempt to occupy a foreign country with a hostile populace.
While I am first to admit that my basic assumptions have been severely tested by the last news cycle, I do think it is very naive to think this is the end of hostilities.
Both the US and Israel currently have leaders that have to be seen as "wartime leaders" to extend their rule beyond what their respective country's laws usually permit, because otherwise they both very likely will end up in prison.
This is not true of Bibi. No law limits how much he can serve. The only legal block for him remaining in power is that he's undergoing various criminal trials, which may or may not end with him being found guilty.
There is, of course, a lot of pressure for him to resign or for various other things to happen that he is currently managing to put on hold due to the war, but that's legal, and doesn't require wartime.
It is true of Bibi that he should be in prison instead of leading Israel, for many reasons. There's speculation that he knew about Oct 7th before it happened, and let it happen so that he could maintain his power. Now it's war with Iran. I'm really not sure how far he would go to stay in power.
I admire your faith in the system. Neither party wants to see presidents prosecuted, because basically every president remaining alive could be easily convicted of a slough of war crimes and other crimes against humanity for their actions in perpetuating the American Empire.
This isn't even to say they are individually imperialists, but every last one, as soon as they take the oath of office, immediately begins getting their hands soaked, drenched in blood. They can't not. That's what the system does and that's all it can do. And the few candidates who ran on the idea that that should be changed were roundly rejected by their associated party, and an independent has received, at most, 5% of the vote?
Nah. Trump was never going to see anything, even for his particularly egregious offenses. I knew it in 2018 and I still know it. If he ever faces the most meager iota of consequences I'll eat my favorite hat, and post video here.
Except that Trump was being actively prosecuted when he was re-elected. By the DOJ, by a special prosecutor, and by the Atlanta DA. None of these were performative, none were condemned by the party in charge, all had a fairly high probability of eventual conviction.
"War crimes" and "crimes against humanity" sound a lot like offenses to so-called international law (cough, treaties).
> By the DOJ, by a special prosecutor, and by the Atlanta DA. None of these were performative, none were condemned by the party in charge, all had a fairly high probability of eventual conviction.
What does that matter when getting elected was apparently all he needed to dodge the entire thing? There's no evidence at all that said prosecution will resume when (if?) he leaves the White House, he's had free reign to demolish the case against him while in power, and again, all of this hinges on the Justice system actually holding a president accountable for crimes, international or otherwise, which has yet to be done, ever.
Even NIXON didn't actually get prosecuted for anything and (at least before Trump) he was the most crooked president ever, and his crooked actions in office persist to this day in the form of the war on drugs. When you're president, apparently, crime is just legal. It was for Nixon, and it has thus far for Trump.
Nixon was going to be impeached and removed from office. The House Judiciary Committee had already voted to impeach, so the motion to impeach was headed for the full House. He resigned because he knew he couldn't stop it.
It's true that he wasn't going to be imprisoned, but he wasn't going to "dodge the entire thing". I don't know whether he would have been prosecuted or not; Ford pardoned him before we got a chance to find out.
> What does that matter when getting elected was apparently all he needed to dodge the entire thing?
Well it is relevant to your statement that neither party wants to see a president get convicted. And understanding there is some wiggle room in your exact phrasing, the dems presumably wouldn't have permitted or endorsed the prosecution if they didn't want a conviction.
> getting elected was all he needed
I mean, getting elected president of the United States is probably one of the hardest things to do. I don't like that he has immunity while holding office but the voters used their authority over the justice system to excuse him. It sucks, but it means the DOJ and Atlanta DA office didn't get their day in court. Well, DA Willis kinda shot herself in the foot, but that's beside the point.
> There's no evidence at all that said prosecution will resume
That doesn't change the fact that he was being prosecuted and in all likelihood would have been convicted of numerous felonies. None of the facts will change in four years except that Trump will either be dead or pardon himself.
> Even NIXON didn't actually get prosecuted for anything
He wasn't convicted because he was pardoned. This is a good example to your earlier point of the US not wanting to suffer the disgrace of a president being convicted. But that has limits that we witnessed with Trump. It's unfair to say the justice system won't hold presidents accountable when it doesn't actually get the opportunity due to a pardon from the executive or, in Trump's case, the will of the electorate.
I suspect the Biden DOJ miscalculated badly. They wanted to let Trump be the convicted as late in the 2024 election cycle as possible, in order to mess up the Republican campaign. (Almost a mirror image of what happened to the Democrats when Biden decided not to run.) But Trump was able to delay the process until it was too late.
If my suspicion is right, that was one of the more spectacular political miscalculations in American history. If I'm wrong... well, maybe the DOJ was investigating and stuff, but from the outside it looks like they wasted a year that they really could have used.
It would be completely on-brand for the dems to slow roll the prosecutions only to have the entire thing blow up in their faces and let a criminal off the hook.
That said, the Jan 6 prosecutions followed the traditional, deliberate bottom-up approach. The classified documents case was derailed by a maverick Trump judge but would eventually see a jury. The Georgia state charges were hamstrung by their chosen RICO path and Willis's ill-advised romantic entanglement. It could be that Biden and the DNC stayed out of it in a deliberate attempt to take the high road and/or avoid handing Trump a political defense.
On January 7 everyone thought Trump's political career was over and that he could only delay justice. Alas, he set up a very large inflation time bomb in 2020 and the rest is history.
Another quagmire war is underway, you forgot Russia. Tortures, genocidal propaganda, cutting body parts. And the soldiers doing that are not prosecuted, but awarded.
I feel about Iran war the same way: yes it's going to happen whether we want it or not, there's nothing we can do. If you persuade everyone to not interfere, Iran would just drop nukes on other countries, so there will be nothing to interfere into later.
Saudi Arabia always declared that if Iran gets nuclear, they will do too, and they have unlimited money to do that.
> Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance.
They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places don't have water still. You basically need to put up with some combination of public relations people who look down on you, celebrities who look down on you, politicians who look down on you, religious folk who look down on you, and all to get a damn well with a filter on it.
> Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
There's nothing really to improve. This could be solved in a matter of weeks, if we wanted. But as with most things like this, the solution isn't sexy, it isn't interesting, and unless you monetize it as you describe, it isn't profitable. This isn't a problem silicon valley can solve with an app that's name is a regular word with vowels removed from it, so they don't give a shit. Nestle can't change people for it, so they aren't stepping up. Every charity comes with some or another condescending string attached, even if it's nothing more nefarious than they're going to take selfies or video or whatever with them helping the needy, that's not nothing and it's still denigrating.
Wells and filters are not a site of innovation, not really. We know how to build them, but the under-serviced people remain because servicing them won't make money, so nobody cares.
They need to dance because they don’t have the intelligence and diligence to do things themselves. It’s not really anybody else’s fault. Beggars can’t be choosers.
I doubt there will be a letter... there's been an enthusiast-driven project to remake Lego Rock Raiders (Manic Miners if you're interested) for years now, and not only is Lego aware, they've actually provided some of the original assets for the game (the intro movie and some misc. graphics) to help the project along. As long as no one is monetizing it they don't seem to much care.
Which like... is the balanced view IMO? Like nobody is making money off this or the Manic Miners project, it's not detracting from any games Lego is actually releasing right now, and absent those factors, it's essentially free advertising and building community goodwill. I wish more companies would take this "it's not hurting us, just let it be" route for fan projects instead of guarding their IP like a dragon.
> In fact, we as engineers are quite willing to subject each others to completely inadequate tooling, bad or missing documentation and ridiculous API footguns all the time. “User error” is what we used to call this, nowadays it's a “skill issue”. It puts the blame on the user and absolves the creator, at least momentarily. For APIs it can be random crashes if you use a function wrong
I recently implemented Microsoft's MSAL authentication on iOS which includes as you might expect a function that retrieves the authenticated accounts. Oh sorry, I said function, but there's two actually: one that retrieves one account, and one that retrieves multiple accounts, which is odd but harmless enough right?
Wrong, because whoever designed this had an absolutely galaxy brained moment and decided if you try and retrieve one account when multiple accounts are signed in, instead of, oh I dunno, just returning an error message, or perhaps returning the most recently used account, no no no, what we should do in that case is throw an exception and crash the fucking app.
I just. Why. Why would you design anything this way!? I can't fathom any situation you would use the one-account function in when the multi-account one does the exact same fucking thing, notably WITHOUT the potential to cause a CRASH, and just returns a set of one, and further, why then if you were REALLY INTENT ON making available one that only returned one, it wouldn't itself just call the other function and return Accounts.first.
The iOS UI languages (ObjC and Swift) have three different mechanisms that are in the realm of exceptions/errors.
ObjC has a widespread convention where a failable method will take an NSError** parameter, and fill out that parameter with an error object on failure. (And it's also supposed to indicate failure with a sentinel return value, but that doesn't matter for this discussion.) This is used by nearly all ObjC APIs.
Swift has a language feature for do/try/catch. Under the hood, this is implemented very similarly to the NSError* convention, and the Swift compiler will automatically bridge them when calling between languages. Notably, the implementation does not do stack unwinding, it's just returning an error to the caller by mostly normal means, and the caller checks for errors with the equivalent of an if statement after the call returns. The language forces you to check for errors when making a failable call, or make an explicit choice to ignore or terminate on errors.
ObjC also has exceptions. In modern ObjC, these are implemented as C++ exceptions. They used to be used to signal errors in APIs. This never worked very well. One reason is that ObjC doesn't have scoped destructors, so it's hard to ensure cleanup when an exception is thrown. Another reason is that older ObjC implementations didn't use C++ exceptions, but rather setjmp/longjmp, which is quite slow in the non-failure case, and does exciting things like reset some local variables to the values they had when entering the try block. It was almost entirely abandoned in favor of the NSError* technique and only shows up in a few old APIs these days.
Like C++, there's no language enforcement making sure you catch exceptions from a potentially throwing call. And because exceptions are rarely used in practice, almost no code is exception safe. When an exception is thrown, it's very likely the program will terminate, and if there happens to be an exception handler, it's very likely to leave the program in a bad state that will soon crash.
As such, writing code for iOS that throws exceptions is an exceptionally bad idea.
More importantly: why is having more than one account an "exception" at all? That's not an error or fail condition, at least in my mind. I wouldn't call our use of the framework an edge case by any means, it opens a web form in which one puts authentication details, passes through the flow, and then we are given authentication tokens and the user data we need. It's not unheard of for more than one account to be returned (especially on our test devices which have many) and I get the one-account function not being suitable for handling that, my question is... why even have it then, when the multi-account one performs the exact same function, better, without an extra error condition that might arise?
> why is having more than one account an "exception" at all? That's not an error or fail condition
It is if the caller is expecting there to be exactly one account.
This is why I generally like to return a set of things from any function that might possibly return zero or more than one things. Fewer special cases that way.
But if the API of the function is to return one, then you either give one at random, which is probably not right, or throw an exception. And with the latter, the person programming the caller will be nudged towards using the other API, which is probably what they should have done anyway, and then, as you say, the returns-one-account function should probably just not exist at all.
Chances are, the initial function was written when the underlying auth backend only supported a single account (structurally), and most clients were using that method.
Then later on, it was figured out that multiple accounts per credential set (?!?) needed to be supported, but the original clients still needed to be supported.
And either no one could afree on a sane convention if this happened (like returning the first from the list), or someone was told to ‘just do it’.
So they made the new call, migrated themselves, and put in a uncaught exception in the old place (can’t put any other type there without breaking the API) and blam - ticket closed.
Not that I’ve ever seen that happen before, of course.
Oh, and since the multi-account functionality is obviously new and probably quite rare at first, it could be years before anyone tracks down whoever is responsible, if ever.
There’s no good way to solve this, though. Returning an arbitrary account can have unpredictable consequences as well if it isn’t the expected one. It’s a compatibility break either way.
Yes there is! Just get rid of it. It's useless. The re-implementation from using one to the other was barely a few moments of work, and even if you want to say "well that's a breaking change" I mean, yeah? Then break it. I would be far less annoyed if a function was just removed and Xcode went "hey this is pointed at nothing, gotta sort that" rather than letting it run in a way that turns the use of authentication functionality into a landmine.
Sure, but not introducing the ability to be logged into multiple accounts isn’t the best choice as well. Arguably, throwing an exception upon multiple logins for the old API is the lesser evil overall.
Seems like you should have a generic error handler that will at a minimum catch unexpected, unhandled exceptions with a 'Something went wrong' toast or similar?
I understood “crashing” as them not catching the exception.
Most functions can fail, and any user-facing app has to be prepared for it so that it behaves gracefully towards the user. In that sense I agree that the error reporting mechanism doesn’t matter. It’s unclear though what the difference was for the GP.
I'm not sure I understand how both occurred at once. Typically an uncaught exception will result in a crash, but this would generally be considered an error at the call site (i.e. failing to handle error conditions.)
To me, it makes sense that "Give me the active/main/primary account", when multiple accounts are signed in, is inherently ambiguous. Which account is the main one? You suggest Accounts.first. Is that the first account that was signed into 3 years ago? Maybe you don't want that one then. Is it the most recently signed into account?
The designer of the API decided that if you ask for "the single account" when there are multiple, that is an error condition.
"crash the app" sounds like the app's problem (ie. not handling exceptions properly) as opposed to the design of the API. It doesn't seem that unreasonable to throw an exception if unexpected conditions are hit? Also, more likely than not, there is probably an explicit reason that an exception is thrown here instead of something else.
Yes, if your app crashes when a third-party API throws an exception, it's a "skill issue" of you. This comment is an example why sometimes blaming the user's skill issue is valid.
At the risk of being an amateur psychologist, your approach feels like that of a front end developer used to a forgiving programming model with the equivalent of the old BASIC programming language statement ON EFROR RESUME NEXT.
Server side APIs and especially authentication APIs tend towards the “fail fast” approach. When APIs are accidentally mis-used this is treated either as a compiler error or a deliberate crash to let the developer know. Silent failures are verboten for entire categories of circumstances.
There’s a gradient of: silent success, silent failure, error codes you can ignore, exceptions you can’t, runtime panic, and compilation error.
That you can’t even tell the qualitative difference between the last half of that list is why I’m thinking you’re primarily a JavaScript programmer where only the first two in the list exist for the most part.
> No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game.
Too true! I can handle VTOL spacecraft, lizards with tits and guns that shoot other guns, but a gay person!? IMMERSION RUINED
That misses the point entirely. You know how bigoted people were in the 1970s right, when video games were still in their infancy? What if the early game industry or congress and the courts had decided that any depiction of a woman in games must conform to the moral standards of the day, so that if you have a female, she must be either a straight virgin, married to 1 faithful man, an old maid, a widow or dead.
Thats exactly what is happening today but in reverse.
> Thats exactly what is happening today but in reverse.
No, it's not.
For a start: it's not some overlording organization demanding this from the top: it's a ground-swell of people who come from diverse backgrounds entering the industry and making their voices heard.
For another it isn't an edict at all from an organization, government-affiliated or otherwise. It's companies realizing that making inclusive games boosts sales, and it doesn't hurt that they get a huge dose of free marketing from the Outrage Merchants by courting controversy that no well adjusted person gives two shits about, and well adjusted people tend to have more money which is all they care about.
If you don't like nonbinary pronouns, don't use them. If you find the new Horizon simply unbearable because Aloy doesn't look like a pornstar, don't buy it. There is simply no version of this where "Every product in this market isn't suitable for me, therefore I am oppressed" is going to scan for anyone outside your weird little group.
>>If you don't like nonbinary pronouns, don't use them.
That's not even what I'm talking about, it's "Body Type A" or "Body Type B" where the proverbial child has been sawn in half so nobody can have it, these mods restore the choice back to people who have a legitimate claim TO their pronouns.
> Who decides who has a legitimate claim to pronouns?
The normal people, of course. :eyeroll:
I just can't fathom giving enough of a shit that people different from me exist and are doing things I don't want to do, in places I am not, with people I am not.
Genuinely, get a life y'all. This is so sad at this point.
So I definitely agree about being smug. This isn't funny and you can approach this with empathy and understanding for how soul-crushing this is for this person.
And also, you do not need a rack of homelab gear to do backups. I have an AV rack (somewhat undermining my point I accept), 16U, bolted to my laundry wall. Within it is a network switch, my ISP's routing gear, my Phillips hue controller, and 3 PCs. One is a dedicated Minecraft box (shut up), one is my universal Ubuntu box for miscellaneous automations + plex, and one is a Windows 10 box that handles my DVR, file shares, and backups.
The actual backups themselves are scripts that run nightly and move data from the misc. PCs to the big one, along with some syncthing shares that do the same, and then the lot is backed up offsite with a backup vendor's application. I grant if you were setting this entire setup up from nothing, it would be a decent amount of work. However I also point out, this is all off the shelf batch files and OSS. This is hardly what I would call engineering, and that's by design, I wanted it to very simple.
So, big empathy, big understanding, I would give this dude a hug if I could. AND, people should take this as a lesson to not just shove all their shit into a monolith and call it a day because it's cheap and easy.
Who's sensitive? I feel like the people who made the mod are the sensitive ones, so sensitive that they can't exist in a fictional space where trans or non-binary people exist so they had to make a mod to restore their version of reality. The only thing they got right is that a world without trans people is, in fact, a fantasy.
Except that modder explicitly stated that the mod was created to offend trans people. Nexus has a right to not host transphobes who are using their platform in a way that could hurt their business.
And it's not like the modern AAA industry is short on games absolutely saturated with T&A. For fucks sake they just dropped Stellar Blade on PC, and the remaster of Lollipop Chainsaw came out recently too.
> Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity, and therefore wealth.
Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.
I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery, entry into which also requires some level of wealth and not a tiny amount of it either.
> Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.
Not too long ago I dug a large hole, and then filled it back in again. It was very difficult and tiring, and entirely useless.
If you accept that I don’t deserve money for this, then you reject the premise that effort/work is the only factor determining value, and “utility” or value to others also matters
There’s no objective way to determine how much of a product’s utility is created by whom. For example, if I invent a thingamajig and hire people to build and sell it, how can we determine what percentage of the value comes from me, the workers, or the users who find new ways to use it? We can’t.
As a result, money gets distributed based on the relative power of those involved in the process. Business owners typically hold the most power, in-demand workers have some leverage, and others have less. So being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a lot of value for others, it may just mean you’ve held positions of power.
Getting rid of these positions of power is the way to create a more equal and prosperous society.
>Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.
This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid", because the statement basically becomes "show me literally any study that correlates salary with wealth". However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work", and would rather have some subjective measure like "social value" or whatever. As imperfect market wage is, it's as objective of a measure as we can get, and letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.
>I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery.
My claim isn't that wealth right now is distributed 100% meritocratically, only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.
> This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid"
I do not even remotely accept your premise. A short list of jobs that are crucial to modern life that are chronically underpaid:
* Teachers
* Nursing/care staff
* Daycare workers
* Janitorial staff
* Delivery/logistics workers
FAR from an exhaustive list.
> However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work"
Considering how many working poor there are I'd say there's a solid reason for rejection. If people are working full time hours and still unable to meet their needs, clearly something is wrong.
> only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.
This is an utter non-sequitur to anything I was talking about. You assert that value of work is tied to the wealth of the one doing the work. I challenged this by pointing out numerous whole categories of laborer that are and have been underpaid for some time. You assert that this is a subjective measurement. I don't know what to really say here.
If doing work that needs doing for the understood full time hours we as a society have stated is not a path to at least a stable life, if not a particularly luxurious one, then what's the point of working? And, more concerningly, why would anyone take up that job that being the case? Nurse and teacher retention right now is horrific specifically because the pay isn't very good and it's a very demanding job, and as a result we have a shortage of both. But we still need them.
>letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.
Asbestos too, though that's less threatening as long as it's not being actively fucked with.
reply