WTF Bites

My WTF of this week: So, maybe someone remember the last hiccup UPS had when handling a shipment to me? The one where a neighbour got my packet and I got my neighbour's packet because both packets had the same tracking number? Which according to UPS should be impossible?

Well, I present you: UPS' new Schrödinger Packets!

My Philips electrical shaver needed a replacement part and thanks to the help of Philips' technical support I found and ordered the needed part rather quickly. That's not the WTF. Due to signing up to their shop (minor WTF: The registration form hit a bug and presented it in Korean. Nothing which wrangling the URL didn't fix) I also got a gift certificate over 10€. The replacement part is 30€, free shipping is available at 40€.

You can guess where this is going: I ordered something else to basically get it for free. That part still isn't the WTF.

One day later I got the "We shipped your packages!" email with two tracking numbers - because one piece was from The Netherlands, the other from Poland. I also had them shipped to a UPS Access Station nearby because UPS always arrives at 11am (the time when I'm least likely to be at home). So, come Tuesday I got an email: "Your package arrived!" I checked the tracker for the other item - that was due to arrive on Wednesday, so I decided to wait one day. After all, the replacement part was in the Wednesday package.

Come Wednesday afternoon, I get the next email about the package having arrived. Walked over to the station and ... got one package. The one from Tuesday. The other one simply wasn't there.

Called UPS - the guys designing this hotline are the most sadistic bunch I've ever come across: First you get unskippable 30 seconds of blurb about data privacy. Then a whole unskippable two minutes about the Covid-Situation. Then you can say your tracking number. Then you get a "Your package has been delivered already, doofus!" message, after which you can finally request to talk to a human. Then you get the two minutes of whining about Covid again. Then you can press "1" to agree to participate in their QA. After which you get one minute of talking about how the call may be recorded as if that wasn't the exact thing you just agreed to! Then (after 7 minutes) you finally find yourself in a queue. Wherein you get 20 seconds of music and 40 seconds of talking about how about you simply go to the website and look there where the package is? 20 seconds of music and another 40 seconds... you get the gist. For 15 minutes.

I was fully prepared to be a reasonable being when I began the call. After that shit? Only a saint would not have been enraged beyond sanity.

It didn't help that UPS basically told me to call Philips ("LOL!") because they obviously only give a shit about the people who pay them.

So I called Philips and the customer support (which, by the way, only has a "There are 5 people ahead of you in the queue" every 30 seconds) also didn't like the situation but promised to call UPS and launch an investigation. I resigned myself to waiting.

Next day (Thursday) I got another email: "Your shipment has arrived" - and as it had the tracking number of the missing packet, I was overjoyed for the situation to be resolved that easily. How naive!

"What packet? There's none here with your name on it!" and as I had arrived after 8pm (long day at school) there was nothing else to be done about it.

But I did check the UPS site again Friday morning at 11am for info about my packets (during my free time between two lessons). And that's where Schrödinger came into play.

Because you see, package #A was the one I had received. It also contained what Philips had said package #A would contain. However, according to UPS, this package was delivered to the Access Station but was marked for return to sender. The timestamp for the "Return to sender" order? Wednesday afternoon. The exact time I had taken possession of package #A. I also compared the tracking number on the site to the one printed on my package. They matched 100%. So, here in my hands I have a package which is both delivered and not delivered.

But what about package #B? The one I was still missing? Well, that one was marked as "Collected by customer". At this exact Friday morning at 9am (I have 10 eye witnesses who will state unequivocally that I was successfully putting them to sleep at that time!)

I can only imagine what this would have looked to Philips during their research: "Customer complained about missing package on Thursday. On Friday UPS reported that he picked up the package. Case closed!"

UPS put this down to "Philips switching the labels around!" Yeah, the guys in The Netherlands and Poland conspired to switch my labels around. And then switched the labels again shortly before delivery?

Customer service at Philips also wasn't amused. Let's see if I actually get the follow-up they promised for tomorrow.

error

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

I got my neighbour's packet because both packets had the same tracking number? Which according to UPS should be impossible?

Fucking primary keys, how do they work?

Rhywden

@error said in WTF Bites:

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

I got my neighbour's packet because both packets had the same tracking number? Which according to UPS should be impossible?

Fucking primary keys, how do they work?

Hell, even a GUID would do.

Luhmann

@hungrier
That still exists? I remember using it on win95 at uni to watch my euh ... collection of landscapes ... yes. Let's go with that.

TimeBandit

@Luhmann said in WTF Bites:

collection of landscapes

The famous twin mountains

HardwareGeek

@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:

You'd think that they'd leave a note

You wouldn't think that if you've ever dealt with IT.

Tsaukpaetra

@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:

@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:

You'd think that they'd leave a note

You wouldn't think that if you've ever dealt with IT.

I am IT. I try to be the best specimen possible.

LB_

Erm... excuse me, what? Why does Authy need ffmpeg of all things? And why did this only start happening today??

Tsaukpaetra

@LB_ For the media encoding you do with it, clearly.

Could replace it with a dummy.

GitHub - ykhwong/dummy-dll-generator: Dummy DLL file generator

Dummy DLL file generator. Contribute to ykhwong/dummy-dll-generator development by creating an account on GitHub.

pie_flavor

@LB_ I would guess to give you an annoying bloop if it turned out you were

TwelveBaud

@LB_ Because you only think you're running Authy. You're really running Chrome running Authy. And Chrome needs ffmpeg.

pie_flavor

@TwelveBaud Oh, god, electron. @Tsaukpaetra If you think ffmpeg is bad, I believe somewhere in there is a userland Xbox driver.

LB_

@Tsaukpaetra I had a 1.8.1 directory with lots of files like yours, and a 1.8.2 directory with just the Authy executable and the updater executable, otherwise empty. Copied all missing files from 1.8.1 to 1.8.2, and it works. Botched upgrade, I guess.

dkf

@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:

Oh, god, electron.

Correct reaction.

dcon

@LB_ said in WTF Bites:

Botched upgrade, I guess.

Installers? We don't need to test no steekin installers! They're so simple!

error

Currently rewriting my Minecraft mod to use the official source mappings released from Mojang instead of the MCP mappings that were reverse-engineered by the community.
Why isn't everyone using the official source mappings you ask? Well, despite the modding community's work being largely FOSS, and Mojang explicitly releasing the mappings to support modders, they released them with an All Rights Reserved license that's not FOSS compatible!
Which is why I had to update my license to "you figure it out." I figure the likelihood of me getting a C&D from Mojang or FSF is rather low.

Edit: stopped using Mojang and Microsoft interchangably though they are mostly interchangable

hungrier

Youtube search, are you drunk?

topspin

@error said in WTF Bites:

Currently rewriting my Minecraft mod to use the official source mappings released from Mojang instead of the MCP mappings that were reverse-engineered by the community.
Why isn't everyone using the official source mappings you ask? Well, despite the modding community's work being largely FOSS, and Mojang explicitly releasing the mappings to support modders, they released them with an All Rights Reserved license that's not FOSS compatible!
Which is why I had to update my license to "you figure it out." I figure the likelihood of me getting a C&D from Mojang or FSF is rather low.

Edit: stopped using Mojang and Microsoft interchangably though they are mostly interchangable

Why is the license for that relevant to the final product? Are you shipping that? I'd assume they're just relevant for building.

error

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

@error said in WTF Bites:

Currently rewriting my Minecraft mod to use the official source mappings released from Mojang instead of the MCP mappings that were reverse-engineered by the community.
Why isn't everyone using the official source mappings you ask? Well, despite the modding community's work being largely FOSS, and Mojang explicitly releasing the mappings to support modders, they released them with an All Rights Reserved license that's not FOSS compatible!
Which is why I had to update my license to "you figure it out." I figure the likelihood of me getting a C&D from Mojang or FSF is rather low.

Edit: stopped using Mojang and Microsoft interchangably though they are mostly interchangable

Why is the license for that relevant to the final product? Are you shipping that? I'd assume they're just relevant for building.

As previously discussed, the deobfuscation mappings must also be applied to my mod for the reobfuscation process. Which means all my method and field names have to match the ones in the mappings, but those mappings are proprietary. That's why it requires a rewrite, and FOSS projects are abstaining from using them entirely. The people doing the MCP reverse engineering can't even look at them for fear of contamination!

topspin

@error said in WTF Bites:

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

@error said in WTF Bites:

Currently rewriting my Minecraft mod to use the official source mappings released from Mojang instead of the MCP mappings that were reverse-engineered by the community.
Why isn't everyone using the official source mappings you ask? Well, despite the modding community's work being largely FOSS, and Mojang explicitly releasing the mappings to support modders, they released them with an All Rights Reserved license that's not FOSS compatible!
Which is why I had to update my license to "you figure it out." I figure the likelihood of me getting a C&D from Mojang or FSF is rather low.

Edit: stopped using Mojang and Microsoft interchangably though they are mostly interchangable

Why is the license for that relevant to the final product? Are you shipping that? I'd assume they're just relevant for building.

As previously discussed, the deobfuscation mappings must also be applied to my mod for the reobfuscation process. Which means all my method and field names have to match the ones in the mappings, but those mappings are proprietary. That's why it requires a rewrite, and FOSS projects are abstaining from using them entirely. The people doing the MCP reverse engineering can't even look at them for fear of contamination!

Yeah, but I don't see how that affects the finished mod.

The copyright should only apply to the mod if you're using the Oracle definition of "APIs are copyrighted".
If the end result is the same if you use either the Mojang or MCP mappings (which I assume it is, otherwise it wouldn't work), then the copyright of the final product shouldn't depend on which you used to build it.

pie_flavor

@error Why, though? MCP mappings are generally considered to be way better.

error

@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:

@error Why, though? MCP mappings are generally considered to be way better.

If by better you mean "incomplete and often incorrect."

error

@topspin said in WTF Bites:

If the end result is the same if you use either the Mojang or MCP mappings (which I assume it is, otherwise it wouldn't work), then the copyright of the final product shouldn't depend on which you used to build it.

I'm not just publishing the binary output though. I've made the source code available (though it's not quite FOSS any more).

topspin

@error said in WTF Bites:

@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:

@error Why, though? MCP mappings are generally considered to be way better.

If by better you mean "incomplete and often incorrect."

C++ draft would call this: incomplet and incorrekt, with lots of bad fo_rmatting.

Gąska

The biggest WTF is of course Mojang providing official tools for undoing Mojang's obfuscation.

topspin

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

The biggest WTF is of course Mojang providing official tools for undoing Mojang's obfuscation.

It's standard Microsoft practice that nothing can simply make sense.

Benjamin Hall

I am the WTF: Had a failing test because things weren't getting sorted right, even for trivial cases. Then I realized that LINQ's OrderBy function does it in ascending order, but I was expecting descending order. Doh.

cvi

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

The biggest WTF is of course Mojang providing official tools for undoing Mojang's obfuscation.

Why do they still do the whole obfuscation thing anyway? Backwards compatibility?

Tsaukpaetra

@cvi said in WTF Bites:

@Gąska said in WTF Bites:

The biggest WTF is of course Mojang providing official tools for undoing Mojang's obfuscation.

Why do they still do the whole obfuscation thing anyway? Backwards compatibility?

For not breaking all the existing mods or something.

TwelveBaud

@cvi They say they have reasons. but I don't know if they're technical (inlining, stripping bounds checks, etc) or legal (maintains trademark or IP rights against problematic mods).

@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:

For not breaking all the existing mods or something.

That's definitely not it. They're releasing the maps so mod authors know what's available, but they explicitly maintain no compatibility constraints with mods.

aitap

Perl5 is famous for being defined by its implementation at the same time as its implementation being IOCCC-worthy in places. A new version has been released today:

The lexer (Perl_yylex() in toke.c) was previously a single 4100-line function, relying heavily on goto and a lot of widely-scoped local variables to do its work. It has now been pulled apart into a few dozen smaller static functions; the largest remaining chunk (yyl_word_or_keyword()) is a little over 900 lines, and consists of a single switch statement, all of whose case groups are independent. This should be much easier to understand and maintain.

Better late than never, I guess!

PleegWat

@aitap Their lexer isn't generated code?

BernieTheBernie

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

Hell, even a GUID would do.

Depends on their algorithm for creating Guids.
You know, Oracle, high-performance high-scalability high-price high-buzz blurb blurb, ... they invented an algorithm which was shown to create very similar Guids on some special hardware. Well, that guy did not get two same Guids, but only 1 position differing.
Unfortunately, I do not remember the address of that blog.

Oh, sorry, even real duplicates:

Andrew Hogg / Jan 22, 2012

Oracle : Duplicate GUID values being returned from sys_guid() when run in parallel

A post? yes, it’s been a while and because I am having to spend all my time on Oracle these days – it’s a post relating to a problem in Oracle. I had to construct a test case rece…

Yes, ORACLE can do that!

So the cause of your Schrödinger packets was found.

topspin

@PleegWat said in WTF Bites:

@aitap Their lexer isn't generated code?

The yy makes me assume they started with some generated code and hand-tuned it from there.

aitap

@PleegWat git blame toke.c mentions some important comments being 21 years old as of now, and at no point they say that the file is generated. It hasn't been generated in Perl 2.0, 33 years ago, either. At least, I don't see any .l files. They do use yacc for the grammar itself, which might explain yy.

hungrier

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

toke.c

:elon_smoking:

HardwareGeek

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

toke.c

That explains so much about Perl.

topspin

@HardwareGeek said in WTF Bites:

@aitap said in WTF Bites:

toke.c

That explains so much about Perl.

And C.

Kamil Podlesak

@Rhywden said in WTF Bites:

Yeah, the guys in The Netherlands and Poland conspired to switch my labels around.

To annoy some germans? That actually sounds plausible!

Luhmann

@Kamil-Podlesak

Finally some results from another miljoen dollar EU project

Steve_The_Cynic

@BernieTheBernie said in WTF Bites:

You know, Oracle, high-performance high-scalability high-price high-buzz blurb blurb, ... they invented an algorithm which was shown to create very similar Guids on some special hardware. Well, that guy did not get two same Guids, but only 1 position differing.

"Very similar" doesn't matter. All that matters is "same" (bits_different == 0) versus "different" (bits_different != 0).

bobjanova

@Steve_The_Cynic Yeah, and when he ran the parallel query, he got duplicates.

That is a long time ago though, hopefully it wouldn't still be true even if you're on that hardware.

I do like sequence IDs (or auto-increment, depending on DB), even if they're only unique within your database, because surely a database engine can manage to synchronise with itself well enough to generate those. There's all sorts of ways you could screw up UID generation so that two requests for UIDs on the same machine in the same tick could give you duplicates.

Rhywden

@bobjanova I now think that UPS was trying to be clever and included at least part of the address as a kind-of checksum into their tracking number. And then flummoxed the "random" part. Otherwise I cannot explain how two completely different packages (save for the same street address) got the same tracking number.

Mason_Wheeler

@Rhywden It's UPS. This is what they do.

Zerosquare

Michael Allison / Jun 17, 2020

Google will use new Windows 10 2004 feature to reduce Chrome's RAM hogging nature

With the latest version of Windows 10 (the May 2020 Update), Microsoft introduced Segment Heap memory management improvements (originally only for “Modern” apps and some system apps such as Edge) which can help to reduce the memory usage to Win32 apps. Microsoft says Segment heap is a modern heap...

The feature will roll out once Google is able to build Chrome with the Windows 10 Build 19041.0 SDK, though this is currently blocked due to unexplained build failures.

“We could enable it now but that would cause build warnings. Therefore enabling it is blocked on a switch to the Windows 10.0.19041.0 SDK which is currently blocked on some mysterious build failures,” the engineer notes.