Best posts made by GOG
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@topspin said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@PJH said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Paging Alanis Morissette, Ms. Morissette to the socially distanced, sanitised, white courtesy phone please...
Even the friggin pigeons are smarter than that.
That's a seagull.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Zecc said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
What's going on here?
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/kid-holding-soldering-iron-making-robotic-1187282485
At least they know how to hold it.
Discovery of the fascinating things a soldering iron might do to plastic bits seems like the kind of thing one might do at that age.
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RE: WTF Bites
Hey kids! How would you implement a boolean column in your relational database?
Today's WTF comes courtesy of Polish Social Insurance, who - for years - have been providing a dedicated program for filing declarations, etc. Its reputation as a source of is legendary, both among the users, and people such as myself who sometimes interact with the nuts and bolts.
As you might have guessed, I needed to read a boolean type (as opposed to boolean-typed) column from the program's database (SQL Server). Normally, I'd expect this to be a bit column, to be read with
IDataRecord.GetBoolean
or some such. Not here.Instead, someone thought it an excellent idea to store the answer to a true/false question as
char(1), null
.Being nullable is understandable, I guess, because they're adding columns to a long-running table to account for the law changing. Most of the previous years' records won't and can't have data. So, I'm guessing the
char(1)
takes'T'
or'F'
?Wrong. It takes
'X'
- for true.So,
NULL
isfalse
and'X'
marks the spot. -
RE: I, ChatGPT
@Carnage Are you kidding? We're in a position to provide the best possible defence against rogue Superintelligent AI.
Hmm, I guess it's time to turn humanity and the entire Earth into paperclips...
...
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RE: The Official First World Problems Thread™
@boomzilla "Cutting edge" is most certainly not a quality I look for in my toilet paper.
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RE: In other news today...
@cvi said in In other news today...:
@JBert That's several mm of snow. I assume that all kind of public transport has collapsed (including, for some reason, the underground stuff).
Back when I was moving to London, the joke was that if it happens to have snowed and you actually manage to catch a bus, you know you can talk to the driver in Polish.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Hey, you can lead a fire truck to water, but after that it makes its own arrangements.
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RE: In other news today...
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Researchers need to go back to the drawing board to find ways to collect more vital behavioural data to help magpies survive in a changing world.
It seems to me the magpies are doing just fine, thank you very much.
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@error said in Things that remind you of WDTWTF members:
You don't.
The Mojito is the Devil’s gift to bartenders. Made with fresh mint, white rum, lime, seltzer and a bartender’s sweat and tears, this refreshingly effervescent mess is the worst cocktail you could ever order at a bar. And though he or she may smile while they muddle, your bartender secretly hates you for ordering one. As a bartender myself, I count myself among the anti-Mojito-ites. Here’s why.
I can make 20 Manhattans in the time it takes me to make one Mojito.
Seriously. You would think that a cocktail as regal as the Manhattan would be difficult to mix up in large volumes, but once you master your two-handed stirring technique and can perform cocktail jiggery, you’re golden. A single Mojito however, requires patience, focus and the dedication of both hands. The ice has to be perfectly pounded into frosty pulp. The mint has to be groomed and washed. The seltzer has to have the tiniest, Champagne-esque bubbles. And it is physically impossible to muddle two drinks at once. But give me four mixing glasses and two bar spoons and I’ll have you a pyramid of 40 Manhattans in five minutes. Time is money and your Mojito is costing me both.
Your Mojito is never going to taste as good as you think it’s going to taste.
Even if you don’t care that a Mojito is a waste of a bartender’s time, consider the fact that it’s a waste of your tastebuds. Most bartenders will over muddle the mint in seething hatred, impatience or sheer ignorance and instead of releasing crisp, bright, minty oils into your cocktail, the pulverized herb will infuse your drink with muddy and bitter flavors. And now no one’s happy and it’s all your fault.
Only tourists order Mojitos.
The only people who order Mojitos are from out of town. They’re Italian men in their 40s wearing linen suits and Ray-Bans, trying to impress a group of girls at the bar with their cocktail knowledge. They order a full round of Mojitos at the height of rush and then suddenly everyone in the bar wants one. Now picture yourself as the bartender: You’re making dozens of Mojitos (one at a time, of course), you’re sweating profusely and your bicep looks like Popeye’s after eating a can of spinach from all of that muddling your doing. Instead of ordering a Mojito, act like a local and look at the beautiful cocktail menu. It’s there for a reason.
There is NEVER a right time to order a Mojito.
Unless its 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, completely dead in the bar (like, tumbleweed-passing-through dead), I have nothing to do except fold napkins for dinner service, you happen to be the only customer, we become friends, you ask really, really nicely for one and a bunny rabbit flies by the window on bat wings—then and only then will I make you the best damn Mojito you ever did drink. And I’ll spend at least 15 minutes making it for you, muddling that mint oh so gently.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Carnage said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Someone is trolling their philosophy teacher hard.
Perchance.
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RE: WTF Bites
@TimeBandit said in WTF Bites:
the amount payable was NaN.
You could probably pay it with Not-Really-Money
I'm more interested in how I can use online filing to make it propagate across the entire tax system.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
Also, I'm now imagining the Big Bumper Book of WTF, wherein interminable Tedious Bickering Over Unfunny Shit may be preserved for the ages.
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RE: Aviation Antipatterns Thread
@TimeBandit said in Aviation Antipatterns Thread:
I love the caption on that photo:
"Yes, I know that is a 747-200 and not a 747-400. Please be nerds somewhere else."
I mostly clicked on the article cause I was like "Hey, that's a 747-200! You don't see many of those these days!"
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RE: In other news today...
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
This is a good reminder to transformer fans, that GPT-3 (and this line of technology in general) is impressive only as long as you don't care about getting an answer that is in any way, shape or form correct.
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RE: In other news today...
@cvi Luckily, all my mattresses are smarter than their owners.
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RE: Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations
@Mason_Wheeler said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Sigh. I just got an unsolicited PM from Ben stating that he's requesting to have all his data deleted from this forum under the GDPR, and subtly encouraging me to do the same. I can't imagine any reason why he would have sent this to me personally, which means it's almost certainly not personal, but a message being spammed to multiple high-profile users.
One possible reason it was sent to you, specifically, was that Ben perceives you as being receptive to his assessment of the situation, namely: that this forum is being taken over by alt-right/neo-nazis/Bad People.
This does not preclude the possibility that other users that Ben thinks would be receptive also received the same message.
Honestly, I find the whole situation not a bit heartbreaking, because I have a lot of respect for Ben and really appreciate everything he has done for this forum.
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@Zerosquare said in Things that remind you of WDTWTF members:
Old Polish joke:
Jackrabbit is telling Bear about the great party at Squirrel's that he went to the other night.
"In the end it's just me and Squirrel left, both drunk AF. She looks at me, rips her clothes open and says 'Take what you want!'
So, I took the TV."
Bear looks at him and says: "Jackrabbit, you are one dumb fuck."
Rabbit sighs.
"I know. If you were there with me, we could have taken the fridge."
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@xaade said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@loopback0 said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
Rule #3: Don't post your code if you don't wanna hear everything that's about it.
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Electronic bank statements: Paving the way to better AI
Office automation is the name of the game for a lot of the dev stuff I do at work. One such (ongoing) project is importing electronic bank statements into our accounting software.
One would think that electronic bank statements is a problem we'd solved back in the days of COBOL. There's even a standard format for it - the SWIFT MT940.
It is so standard, in fact, that every bank has its own distinct flavour. Presuming they offer it at all, naturally...
Luckily, this is exactly the problem OOP was meant to solve. A simple application of inheritance and the strategy pattern lets me knock out a new parsing module for each new-and-completely-incompatible format that our clients bring in within a couple of hours of getting a sample file. After that it (usually) just works.
Those banks that don't do MT940 usually serve up some kind of CSV - which is fine by me. In a lot of ways, parsing CSV files is even easier than the MT940s.
Last week, however, a client brought a bunch of CSV files from a certain French bank that shall remain unnamed to protect the guilty...
Yer bog-standard CSV statement lays out the data in a nice tabular format which makes it easy for machines to read. Here, the jokers thought it would be an excellent idea for every possible type of transaction (of which there is an unspecified number) to have its own, variable-field, record. Most of the aforementioned fields consist of "label"-"value" pairs.
In order to make sense of this data, I had to whip up a decision engine that examines the transaction description field and determines what the order of fields will be for that particular record.
Oh, did I mention that sometimes the description includes misspelt words?
If my little bank account parser ever destroys the human race in a nuclear inferno, I just want you to know: I'm so sorry!
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RE: In other news today...
@TimeBandit said in In other news today...:
Here's why...
There isn't much money in journalism any more, and, hopefully, it will allow us to dump some of the keyboard-bashing monkeys whilst maintaining a constant level of output.
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@boomzilla said in Things that remind you of WDTWTF members:
* except in California. Still a fish.
From another forum:
I tried shooting fish in a barrel once. It was in California. The fish swarmed and stung me.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else
@Zecc said in WTF is happening with Windows 10? And nothing else:
@dkf But that will only bring more ambulances.
How else are you supposed to rack up massive combo streaks?
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@JBert said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
And here goes the art-world to show that they can still be crazier than your average NFT buyer:
I mean, "high art" has been a money-laundering/tax-evasion scam for decades now, so no surprises here.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@kazitor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If you find yourself going to an event that looks anything like this... You have bigger problems than eye damage.
I think that "Bored Ape Yacht Club" was a stronger, pre-existing indicator.
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RE: In other news today...
@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Here's a headline you don't see every day:
I am deeply distressed, because there are no photographs of Pole Assassin in the article.
I want my money back.
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Fun with exchange rates and broken software
The setup
One of the accountants comes up and asks if I could help her out. She has a number of foreign currency transactions she needs to input, but the exchange rate dictionary in the database doesn't have data for the dates she needs - she's working on past periods, probably prior to the accounting database being set up for the client.
Step 1: Try the obvious
"Have you run the updater?"
For an extra fee, the software provider offers the service of providing exchange rate updates - it's a service we subscribe to, naturally. Yes, she has tried it and no - it didn't work.
Step 2: Try the fancy management software
The accounting package we use can be centrally managed with a separate program that performs bulk operations on many databases (each client has a separate DB). One of the operations involves updating the exchange rate dictionaries. I do it - does not solve the problem.
Step 3: Consult the internet
"Maybe we're doing something wrong..." I think.
I pull up the official website and am informed that the exchange rate update mechanism only provides rates for 30 days prior. The sole support forum for the software does not offer any user-discovered workarounds either.
I had been hoping that the central management mechanism I mentioned in step 2 would perform a bulk update from a source DB to the target DB, but it turns I was overly optimistic. There is no way to automatically update exchange rates older than 30 days.
Step 4: What if we throw SQL at the problem?
"Fine," I think, "if that's the way you want to play it, I'll just dump the data from where I have it to where I need it."
I pull up the schema for the exchange rate table and, wouldn't you know it, identity fields are for wimps. Sure, the table has a bog-standard, incrementing integer id field - except, it is not actually specified as an identity. The software only runs on SQL Server, by the way. At this point, I could develop a data transfer solution that would integrate the import without breaking anything (which would be an excellent opportunity to find out how their update mechanism dervies its PK values; and just how braindead the solution is) - or I could shrug and say that manual input is the way to go.
Bonus
It is pretty much an immutable principle here in Poland that whenever you're dealing with a foreign currency transaction, the amount should be recorded in PLN, at the rate published by the National Bank of Poland for the working day directly preceeding the date of the transaction (the NBP doesn't publish rates for non-working days, incidentally). This requirement is specified in both income tax (PIT and CIT) Acts, the VAT Act and anywhere else you damn well please. It's been like this forever and shall remain so in the foreseeable future.
Guess what date our accounting software takes the rates for? The date of the transaction, of course! Why on Earth would it do anything different? And no - you cannot set it up to act otherwise.
In trying to solve my immediate problem, I came across this issue being raised on the aforementioned support forum - five years ago. Apparently, the company was going to fix it in one of the upcoming updates, but eventually decided not to, because it turned out to be too hard to implement.
Seems that "WHERE ExchangeRateDate < TransactionDate" was too difficult. Sure, some checks for missing data would be in order here, but even without them the software would perform as expected 90% of the time (and you're meant to perform manual sanity checks anyway; that's what accountants get paid for). To make matters even funnier, the software also does HR and payroll and therefore the DB has calendars with all weekends and holidays built in - whether the actual HR module is enabled or not.
I am left wondering if it's a case of them having really crappy developers, or was it simply that they couldn't be arsed. Either way, the way their software handles exchange rates continues to be wrong, five years on.
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@topspin said in Things that remind you of WDTWTF members:
Someone needs to brush up on their memes.
The correct response to to "I meant erotic rp" is "I put on my robe and wizard hat".