@topspin There's also the question of who thought it a good idea to allow storing of arbitrary values in the block chain.
Best posts made by Rhywden
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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RE: In other news today...
@Magus said in In other news today...:
@wharrgarbl Apparently lasers and -270 degrees atoms.
Or lasers and 90° atoms. Same result.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: I'm probably getting old and this is my "Old man yells at clouds" moment. Or something.
But seriously, I just accidentally joined a livestream of a World of Warcraft tournament arena match. You know how sports reporter get really hectic and loud when there's something exciting happening on the field?
The two commenters for this stream took it to eleven.
It was like listening to a hyperkinetic bunny bouncing off the walls in a very small box (without the accompanying high pitched squeaking, however).
And due to the fact that something "exciting" was happening every other second I was getting really concerned for those two guys that they might pass out from lack of oxygen at some point. -
RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
Today was "it might be a bit icy". Well, yeah, frozen ground and just above freezing temperature drizzle will result in a fun ice cover everywhere.
Of course I wasn't one of those lunatics who took their bicycle to work (unless you've got spikes on those, that's just asking for a concussion). At the time I left home (nearly doing a somersault down the stairs to the garage) the main streets were cleared, though.
My school's parking lot was a different story. I actually did a full 180° turn at one point (at only walking speed, mind) which was fortuitous because it lined me up perfectly with my parking spot...
... and then I promptly keeled over when stepping out of the car.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
Death held out a hand. I WANT, he said, A BOOK ABOUT THE DANGEROUS CREATURES OF FOURECKS-
Albert looked up and dived for cover, receiving only mild bruising because he had the foresight to curl into a ball.
After a while Death, his voice a little muffled, said: ALBERT, I WOULD BE SO GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD GIVE ME A HAND HERE.
Albert scrambled up and pulled at some of the huge volumes, finally dislodging enough of them for his master to clamber free.
HMM... Death picked up a book at random and read the cover. "DANGEROUS MAMMALS, REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS, BIRDS, FISH, JELLYFISH, INSECTS, SPIDERS, CRUSTACEANS, GRASSES, TREES, MOSSES, AND LICHENS OF TERROR INCOGNITA, " he read. His gaze moved down the spine. VOLUME 29C, he added. OH. PART THREE, I SEE.
He glanced up at the listening shelves. POSSIBLY IT WOULD BE SIMPLER IF I ASKED FOR A LIST OF THE HARMLESS CREATURES OF THE AFORESAID CONTINENT?
They waited.
IT WOULD APPEAR THAT-
"No, wait master. Here it comes."
Albert pointed to something white zigzagging lazily through the air. Finally Death reached up an caught the single sheet of paper.
He read it carefully and then turned it over briefly just in case anything was written on the other side.
"May I?" said Albert. Death handed him the paper.
"'Some of the sheep, '" Albert read aloud. "Oh, well. Maybe a week at the seaside'd be better, then."
WHAT AN INTRIGUING PLACE, said Death. SADDLE UP THE HORSE, ALBERT. I FEEL SURE I'M GOING TO BE NEEDED.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So sometimes I get C# stuff recommended by YouTube. Some of those guys have a clue - some don't. Today was one of the latter.
You know how you previously did poor man's string concatenation like this:
string baz = "bar"; string foo = "bar " + baz + " foo";
Of course, now there's either the string builder or the other option which doesn't annoy you with additions everywhere. Plus, you can easily see where you missed a space or have one too many.
string baz = "bar"; string foo = $"bar {baz} foo";
And then there are people who do this and completely miss the point (and also the space between the two variables):
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So, I had one course of mine write an exam electronically - it's their final semester and we have to get at least something to base their final grades on.
I designed an exam in Moodle, had them pinky-swear not to cheat (yeah, I know) and then let them at it. I had also previously designed a "test exam" so they could see whether their devices would work properly (that was one week ago).
10 out of 11 took that exam. The missing guy just wrote me an email that he "had missed all the notifications among the deluge of messages!"
If that was so then how did you manage to take that test exam? Also, how did all of your compatriots manage to attend the test - it's not as if they got less of a deluge. And why did you email me an hour after you noticed that you missed the exam (and not straightaway)? Plus, this was the same date the "normal" exam would have been written. Also, I notified you that the exam would still need to happen, even with the lockdown (plus, you had no other tasks in those three weeks but "prepare for the exam")
My superior told me that the final decision was up to me but that, strictly speaking, the laws around the exams make no excuse for "being a fuckup".
Kindhearted that I am, I decided to give him one last chance - a mere 10 minutes after his email(due to conferring with my supervisor) I replied with an email that he'd be able to take another shot at the exam - in 30 minutes from now.
...
yeah, he almost missed that one as well. He logged in 10 minutes before closing. Doesn't look that good but, hey, I wasn't even required to give him a chance.
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RE: WTF Bites
Another WTF of my day: Recently had my pupils do an exam using Excel. On pupil calculated everything correctly, labelled everything beautifully and clearly - but didn't actually use the main feature of Excel, namely Cells.
I.e. instead of writing:
=A1*B1
he wrote:=0.57*1200
and so on.Too bad for him that I told them repeatedly that any such "solution" would result in exactly zero(0) points for the task. I also wrote it in big, slightly unfriendly letters, directly below where they had to enter their names.
Also from that exam:
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RE: The bad jokes topic 🐴🍹👨
Just found this on Wikipedia, it's from the Beatle's first press conference in the USA:
Q: “Will you sing something?”
Lennon: “No, we need money first.”
Q: “What is the secret of your success?”
Starr: “We have a press agent.”
Q: “What do you think of the campaign in Detroit to stamp out the Beatles?”
McCartney: “We have a campaign to stamp out Detroit.”
Q: “What do you believe is the reason you are the most popular singing group today?”
Lennon: “We’ve no idea. If we did we’d get four long-haired boys, put them together, and become their managers.”
Q: “What do you do when you’re cooped up in a hotel room between shows?”
Harrison: “We ice-skate.”
Q: “How did you find America?”
Lennon: “We went to Greenland and made a left turn.” -
RE: WTF Bites
A little different from the usual
A leading pathologist was discovered to have massively plagiarized for his thesis due to him having copied several passages out of an omnibus.
However, as it turned out, this omnibus was a forgery. A well-done forgery. Just look at it:
A short summary of the steps the forger had to implement:
- Reading the original thesis, taking one topic out of it (Colchicine) and then inventing a whole congress out of thin air. Since the thesis was published in 1987, the supposed congress was placed even before that and all "attendees" were deceased.
- Engaging a ghostwrite agency to put all the texts together. Not a cheap service. Though those guys made several errors (like switching the last and first name of a supposed author)
- Printing the book (though he neglected to artificially age the book and made several other errors like using fonts not available in the 80s)
- Publishing the book via eBay
But seriously, this is a next level stunt.
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RE: WTF Bites
@rhywden Oh, and by the way, just for the guys making fun of Windows for useless error messages - MacOS is just as bad in that regard.
The error message was:
There was an error.
Great, thanks.
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RE: In Log4J WTF news today…
Okay, this is translated from this article:
Working as intended
There've been many jokes about the Java slogan "Write once, run anywhere". Many treat the Log4j-exploit like a bug - but it isn't.
A critical gap in the Java library Log4j is rampant in the news. The IT-world is calling for Condition Red because the Log4j-code can do a JNDI variable expansion.
But what is that actually? Jindi al Dap is the name of an old Arabic philosopher and mathematician who worked for Sun/Oracle to develop a system for directory lookups in Java. This system loads code from the internet. But even when looking at the system diagram for a long time you may not discover at which point the Java CLASSPATH is widened so much that it encompasses the whole Internet:
Nothing is ever simple
That's because nothing in Java is ever simple. Java code is unstructured dry dust of code fragments in class files which interact in no way when inert. Only with factories, delegates, generators and classloaders will they be instantiated and assembled. The resulting heap of cross references will eventually run actual working code by random chance.
You could arrive at the idea to use an IDE with integrated syntactic code search to form this code pile into a structure you can actually understand. But that's futile: Even with the whole codebase and a search index you can't predict what a given Java Codebase will do upon starting it. You need configuration files. Those are another heap, property files, written in an antediluvian precursor of YAML: XML.
At least that's what we're supposed to think: With properties and the code base we can finally understand what Java is doing. And that would be almost the case but JNDI is here to solve that problem: Directory Lookups!
Instead of packaging the application and its configuration and then installing those packages in production, we now can read the configuration from the net using JNDI. This means that the actual configurations files which tell us what the application will be doing are ... not there anymore. Progress!
This ensures that nobody can hack us because no one has a clue anymore what the code is doing: Important information enabling understanding of the codebase are hidden away in a directory service and we don't even know which. But we can go even a step further: The code doing the directory lookup also isn't there anymore, only a bootstrap instead: Event and Service Provider Packages.
Thanks to JDNI SPI we can deliver Java Classfiles from an LDAP server which purport to generate a printer object when asking for a printer - but instead install Doom. Or a crypto miner or an encryption trojan. That's Enterprise Security.
The Java slogan is "Write once, run anywhere". We did a lot of jokes about it because Java crashed so often - most Java applications deliver the whole application environment including the JRE so that at least something is running. And now everything is working for once - and people are unhappy for some reason.
But seriously: Many treat the log4j-epxloit as a bug, a coding error, as going against the specifications. But that's not the case: It's working - literally - as intended, documented and specified: All the modularity and dynamic extensibility of Java working in tandem as planned. That's what we worked for over decades! "NOTABUG, WONTFIX"
And that's the actual problem. Many cry for "More control!", "More review!", "More funding!", "More eyes on the code!". What would really help would be less code, less indirection and boilerplate and just more ... simplicity.
Why do I need a LogAppenderFactorySingleton which reads XML to get a name of the class which it has to instantiate so that I can throw my log message into it so it can be added asynchronously to a LogStream? That's not easy. What's easy? Printing JSON to stderr. That's easy. But companies hire people for a decade now who don't know what stdout and stderr is and that's okay because everything is a webservice now anyway.
Software development has become much more modern: We have merge requests with code review, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure As Code and Immutable Infrastructure. That's all for nothing, though, when my Java Logging Library residing on Mars is loading code from directory servers on Earth and is thus defining the "Remote" in RCE in a completely new way. The analysis of dependencies is only sensible when the list of dependencies is finally and exactly as immutable as the infractructure itself.
Java did indeed have the control knobs to enforce just such an immutable and finite list of dependencies. If that's your kink there's something called SM: Oracle SM.
SM delivers the needed contracts and discipline a codebase needs. But most users don't like SM and turn down this idea. As a result, this functionality will be marked as deprecated in Java 17 and later removed.
Like a toddler
JNDI turned SM down as well and has a promiscuous interface which loads code from somewhere and runs it. You can picture a toddler which puts every class in its mouth to see what it tastes like and if it's executable.
That's the specification exactly: Here's an object, deserialize it. In Java this means that the code for the class of this object has to come from somewhere by which it's methods are run. No one would think of this as a good idea. On the other hand, the person who implemented it eight years ago did not see it and the plethora of people who imported log4j into their codebase did not stumble over it either.
What does that tell us about the dependency management process of organizations which develop software? About the comprehension of the codebase, the dependencies and the processes which plan data flows and releases? Yes, exactly. "We use a modular architecture and agile methodes to increase development speed."
E = 1/2 m*v²
A greater development speed results in bigger craters.
Code. Is. Not. Your. Friend.
Especially dynamically loaded code from the Internet.
Code. Is. Not. Your. Friend.
Yes, it sounds weird when you're a developer and it's your way of supporting your lifestyle by believing that code is your friend.
But that's the way it is. Less code is better code. Best would be so few code that it's possible to completely understand it with all its interactions. Including the code which is necessary to run your own code.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Rhywden he actually asked for instructions and listened. That’s way above par.
The trouble usually arises from the way he then proceeds to retain my instructions: By meticulously jotting down every step and every single detail.
Which then usually results in him not getting anywhere as soon as one tiny of those details is either wrong or has moved, however unimportant that detail may be to the overall process.
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RE: Internet of shit
I'm not allowed to do that anymore. My principal does not like new and exciting blotches on the ceiling.
Also not allowed: The Wax Flamethrower. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like - just in a more ballistic fashion.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: Question in the exam:
Please explain the physical principles behind 'Influenz' (German for "induction")
Answer:
An influencer is a person in social media who... (goes on for a whole page of paper)
My answer:
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RE: Having not driven enough users away with StackPronouns, it's time to adjust the rules for reputation whoring!
@jinpa said in Having not driven enough users away with StackPronouns, it's time to adjust the rules for reputation whoring!:
It reminds me of poetry.com. Apparently there is a bigger supply of poets than of people wanting to read poetry. So in order to post, you have to review the poems of others.
That actually sounds reasonable. If you're a Vogon.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
And, yes, there really are people like that out there. When I was still at school, someone from my class had to deal with
cos(x)/x
and decided to simplify the equation by cancellingx
.My maths teacher reacted to this solution by walking to the window and looking outside for five minutes straight. No one spoke a word.
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RE: WTF Bites
@Luhmann Oh yes. And they also have this tool which shows you the location / IP address / client info for your logins (you know: "Last logged in at foo from bar at baz")
Erm, make that "login" (note the singular). Because it only shows you the login information for your latest login. Which is the current one, the one which you're currently using to look at that information.
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RE: Automation vs Today's Jobs
@pie_flavor said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden If your job just got automated, what kind of idiot would you have to be to go take up another easily automated job?
If you work in an easily automated job the chances are pretty good that you don't have the intellectual skillset to recognize that fact.
I mean, the article referenced a data entry job. Which are the most mindless kind of jobs imaginable.
There's a reason those people actually stayed in such a job in the first place. And it doesn't always have to do with being too lazy to look for something else.
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RE: Newest tactics in asshole web designs
@Gurth said in Newest tactics in asshole web designs:
@_P_ said in Newest tactics in asshole web designs:
@Gurth said in Newest tactics in asshole web designs:
Preferably out of arm’s reach so that if you set it, you have to get up to turn it off.
That sounds like a great plan to make one go and just ignore the alarm and keep sleeping.
So get one with an alarm annoying enough that you don’t want to sleep through it. I used to have an alarm clock that could do either radio or loud, sharp beeping noises. If I really wanted to make sure I got up, I set it to the latter.
I saw one alarm clock which was cylindrical with independently moving wheels at both ends and photosensors. The chip inside sported a flight-algorithm similar to cockroachs - so that the clock would actively flee from you while also trying to hide in hard to reach spots, thus making you hunt down the clock in order to turn it off.
They did not make any mention of the average lifespan of this clock, though.
Might also be suited for the Bad Ideas, Evil Ideas and Good Ideas thread simultaneously.
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RE: The minor rants thread.
So, just went through an ordeal you might call a bit kafkaesk.
What happened? Well, a minor thing, really. Something that happens to my pupils often enough, first time for me, though.
My mobile fell out of my pocket while standing up and hit the ground with the backplate. This shock due to about 40 cm of falling sufficed to break the actual display inside the glass. The (Gorilla) glass itself was just fine. That was new to me as well, I mean, I had seen the other way around often enough - but intact glass and cracked display?
Of course it also killed the whole display, none of this "Well, 25% of the display look funky and don't respond to touch but the rest works" for me either.
So I set out to repair the mobile - because a) it's new and expensive enough not to warrant an outright replacement and b) it should save some money.
Since a cracked display definitely falls under "not covered by warranty" I then looked for one of the multitude of shops who purport that they can repair mobiles in 30 minutes (if they have the parts, of course).
Turns out that a Lumia 950 XL doesn't have parts on the market thus no shops in the vicinity would be able to repair it.
Next stop: Microsoft itself. And that's where the psychedelic drugs set in - or at least: Someone must have smoked some really bad stuff to create this kind of user experience.
First of all: Did you ever try to find an actual support subsite at Microsoft for this stuff? Doubling back to the beginning by accident is a frequent occurence - simply clicking on "warranty and repair" is not actually guaranteed to take you to a point where you get the info you want.
But that's nothing new - this rabbit warren of Microsoft which purports to be a website is such a tangled mess that only sheer stubbornness will save the day.
Then I found it: An actual site where I could create a repair order. Entered the IMEI only to be greeted with a "broken link" icon instead of an actual depiction of my phone but everything else worked.
Then came the return adress - which is where I hit a snag in the form of:"Something went wrong. Please try again later."
Well, let's just say: No, trying again later did not help much.
Thus I set out to find a phone number. I did find one. Only that it was either one for the US or for Indonesia because it began with a "62". Telephone numbers in Germany begin with a zero(0) when not calling locally.
Next stop: The Microsoft store. The guy I spoke with actually provided me with a phone number for the Lumia support line which actually worked!
Up to a point, that is, namely: "Please enter the IMEI of your phone after the beep. Or press # if you need help."
After entering the IMEI or pressing #: "This phone is not egligible for free support. Please call 0900... which costs 1.90€ per minute..." which is where I hung up.
Okay, Microsoft store again - I was a bit annoyed but the poor guy did promise me to forward to an actual technician. Which he did, only the wrong one. Stumped again.
So I tried the Lumia support line again (yes, I know, only mad people expect different results from trying the same stuff again). And this time I stayed on the line after the robot voice gave me the "non-egligible" spiel.
Lo, and behold! A different robot voice asked if I wanted to be connected to said 0900 line - or if I wanted to press one(1) to try to enter the IMEI again. And this time it worked! I found myself in line for a support call.
And after only 30 minutes I spoke to an actual person.
Who steered me onto the website I had tried at the beginning of this ordeal.
When I pointed out that this did not work she told me: "Well, some Microsoft accounts do have problems with this. Simply create a new account, register your mobile with that one and try again." So, with her still on the line (sorry other guys on hold, but I didn't dare let her off the hook that easily) I tried this route and what do you know?
It worked. Next steps (choose the kind of problem and delivery method) worked as well, so I told her that I'd be able to complete the rest, thanked her and hung up.Which is, of course, where Murphy reared his head. Because the last step demanded a means of payment - and as this was a new account, none such was registered. So I clicked on the link "add a means of payment", entered the needed details, clicked on submit and... nothing. The window closed but I still got the message about "no means of payment".
So I clicked on the link again, entered the details again - only to get an error message that the site couldn't add this method. Maybe it had already been added, it suggested? Ya think?!?
Okay, close everything and begin again. No dice. No listed means of payment but it had already been added according to step two.
Stomped off to my profile, browsed to billing details and, yes, my credit card was indeed listed. So I tried to remove it and after only three tries of logging out, using different browsers and sacrificing a goat it removed the credit card.
Then I entered the credit card again, only this time on the billing details page!Back to the service request page and there it appeared! My credit card! Twice even, with a radio button letting me chose between them.
I'll give you a hint: The first entry did not work ("Something went wrong!"). The second did.
And it only took me another search to find out where to get the UPS sticker I was to affix to my package...
And of course it's now too late in the evening to get the package underway.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
What do you call a Russian tank brigade returning from the Ukraine?
An infantry platoon -
RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So, we got this new messenger tool. It has some possibilities but it also seems to be developed by Proper Fools Inc.
I'm also pretty sure I could do a better job given some time and money. Maybe not for the full functionality but the core functions would work.
For example, their Android App will sometimes crash if you either scroll to the bottom or the top of a conversation.
For some, a picture will crash the app.
I'm currently working with a pupil who cannot login to the web interface no matter what. No (useful) error messages anywhere (not even in the console) but logging into the app works fine.
That's by the way when I figured out that those guys don't care about error messages in the console - I can live with warnings but outright errors wouldn't make it into production.Also, they're pulling a whopping 2,3 MB for the login page. And, unsurprisingly, they never heard of tools to minify their code (yes, they included minified versions of jquery. But not their own code).
And I just solved the issue with the pupil - I originally thought that maybe it was his router because ALL his devices (two phones, two PCs with different browsers) were all having this problem. But then he turned off WLAN for his mobile and had the same problem.
I finally "solved" it by creating a new account for him - the new account works. The old one doesn't. There are no settings to fuck up which can cause this from our side. -
RE: United Airlines: the airline we love to hate, but we can't agree on why
@Polygeekery said in Internet of shit:
@dkf said in Internet of shit:
@RaceProUK said in Internet of shit:
Yeah, it's positive.
-ly the best way to scare off potential customers.I would agree, except that United seem to have gone for the jackpot.
I don't get all the visceral reactions to the United debacle. They asked a customer to leave the flight, the customer refused which is a violation of a shitload of laws and regulations, then they had them removed by security. If anything, the airport security deserves all of the vitriol.
I am not saying they did nothing wrong, but the customer was a pretty big fuckhead also.
You may have missed the part where he said that he was a doctor and had to see patients the next morning. That should at least have yielded a: "Let's check this story out"
Also: United realized that they needed four seats to shuffle crew around after they were practically done with the boarding process. They obviously have a pretty shitty dispatch then.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
For those who don't speak German:
For two decades now there are chips built into our computer, laptops and mobiles which have severe security risks. Instead of solving the problem once and for all and exchange the processors - which, of course, would be a big undertaking - the companies tries to close the gap through software updates.
Because: The chip design would have to be changed to solve the issue.
This is unthinkable for the designers. It seems that looks come before security.I like the combination of naiveté paired with absolute ignorance on the subject matter.
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RE: Does a click-through barrier to email help security?
@tharpa said in Does a click-through barrier to email help security?:
I think the company would not do this unless there was a reason for it, as it is a large, well-established company.
The reason is probably bloody stupid but at some point it has become Tradition and thus nobody really dares to question it anymore.
It falls in the same league as the "Must change passwords every x days!" policies where nobody ever sat down and actually measured if that was a good idea (until they did. And even then there are people who don't believe it or point to Tradition).
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RE: WTF Bites
@Onyx At least they actually told you the rules. Some dimwits over here responsible for our great SharePoint installation thought it nifty to simply reject passwords and not tell you why.
Their reasoning: It improves security.
They're also believers in the magic of the "make them change their password every 90 days" rule which (demonstrably!) makes matters worse.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
From the " did I just read"-department:
The headline speaks for itself:
Attack in Öjendorf's Park in Hamburg: Man exposes himself and attacks a woman with a dead seagull
[...] in order to escape from the police, he jumped into the nearest lake and tried to swim away. -
RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@dkf said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
@Gribnit said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
ANY bright color more generally can indicate heavy metal salts, usually bad for you.
Chromium salts! Vanadium salts! Rah! Rah! Rah!
The worst damage I ever did to a lab coat was with a strong solution of hot ferric chloride that I was etching hand-drawn double-sided circuit boards with. That stuff is pretty awful.
During my time at university, I formed the bad habit of cleaning the spatulas on my lab coat.
In time it became to resemble The Coat of Many Colors.
When I finally put it into a washing machine I may have committed a crime against nature. It also definitely was like Joseph's coat in more than mere color: Because after washing it was very holy.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So, we have a bunch of Office 365 license for my school - after all, one branch of my school is a commercial school and we all know that there are quite a number of businesses where at least having come into contact with Office is a plus.
As a result, every pupil at my school is eligible for an Office 365 account.
I've been shown the ropes recently and the guy "training" me only showed me the "Add a single user" form. Which gets old fast if you have to add about 30 pupils per class (each year we have about 15 new classes).
So I dug a bit and discovered the "Add multiple users with a .CSV" Promptly stumbled about Excel lying to me because it says "Export Sheet As A Comma Separated CSV" (yes, I know, redundancy...) but it actually used semicolons. But, since it's basically a text file, nothing a "Search and replace all" can't fix.Importing the users then went fine, assigning of licenses works as well but then we get to the username/password issue. Somehow the users have to be notified of their usernames and (one-time) passwords, right?
Naw, the csv doesn't provide a "Send username/password to this email address" column. But I can send all the usernames and passwords to me!
But does this list arrive as an attachment in the form of another
csv
so I could automate sending the individual data to the respective user (or at least create a printable file with the info for each individual user on one page each)?Fuck, no. It's not even a plain text list inside the email. It's a fucking formatted HTML list.
Thanks a bunch, guys.
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So, we needed some tools and gadgets for my school - and everything I needed was on Amazon. So I put in an order for the three things. Two of them were delivered by Amazon's own service just fine.
The last one was to be delivered by DHL. The address did include my school's name as a hint.
So, naturally, when did they try the first delivery? Why, at 7:30pm of course!
And because that went so well, they tried again on the next day. At 7:45pm, because naturally if a school is closed after 5pm it only makes sense to not try before that time...
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RE: WTF Bites
My WTF of the day: So, I once again took a look at Syncfusion's offerings of nuget packages for controls so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. Included the package I wanted into my project and promptly ran into a minor issue I wanted to clear up before trying stuff at random. Since my issue is a rather common one, I thought to myself: "I cannot be the only one with that question?" and traipsed off to their forum.
After using their search feature I promptly found a promising thread in the list of search results. Clicked on that result - and landed in the thread overview for the package in question?
But still, my search result was happily quite at the top of that overview, so I clicked on it again - and found myself in the thread overview again. Which was no wonder when I looked at the indicated URI you get upon mouseover of the link - there simply was no ID for the thread or something.
So I created an incident in their bug tracker. And then wondered. And then pressed F12. And found the below image - I guess absolutely even the least HTML-inclined person on this forum here can discern what went wrong:
I only hope that their C# developers and the forum guys are not on the same team.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
http://www.huffingtonpost.de/2017/08/31/npd-partei-voelklingen_n_17877084.html
For those who don't speak German:
We have several parties in Germany, among them smaller ones like the Wannabe-Nazis (NPD) and a fullblown satire party (which calls itself "The Party" which usually result in newspaper articles beginning with "The party The Party...").
So there's this city hall meeting to introduce the candidates for the election of mayor of Völklingen. I'll roughly translate what was said:
Uwe Faust (member of The Party): "Mr. Best, according to our civil law, every citizen is required to have a publicly visible number on his or her house. While strolling through our town, I noticed with shock how many of our houses are now sporting arabic numerals. What are you willing to do about this sign of creeping foreign infiltration?
some laughter can be heard
Otfried Best (member of the NPD): "Just wait, when I'm mayor I'll change that and install normal numerals again!"
hall erupts in uproarious laughter -
RE: In other news today...
This just in: We finally know Trump's criteria for selecting people for his staff:
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So I signed up for one of those cooking boxes services. Y'know, where they deliver you the ingredients for 3 to 5 meals - it's nice because you then don't have 5/6 of a glass of sesame paste in your fridge forever because you don't know what else to do with the stuff.
It's actually rather nice - you choose a timeslot (3 hours wide), then choose the meals for next week (about 12 are regular (i.e. no extra costs), another 12 are special ones (with varying price increases from 1€ to 12€), the meals are never the same from week to week) and then you wait. On the day of delivery you get another email telling you a more precise time estimate (reduces the window to 20 minutes) and shortly before delivery you get an SMS that the courier is almost there (in my case I got the SMS and the doorbell rang a minute later).
The receipes are a bit more involved than what I'd usually cook for myself but not overly so, and that's kind of the point, isn't it?
Anyways, the first receipe (chicken breast with diced sweet potato) worked fine though I was a bit confused at two points:
a) One step told me to chop the parsley and then put half of it aside. Said half then never was mentioned anymore.
b) Another step told me to bake the diced potato in the oven for 23-25 minutes. A later step then told me to put the chicken breast next to the potatoes and bake it for 14-18 minutes. It did not tell me, however, if that was supposed to be 23+14 minutes or 23 minutes total with the chicken added at minute 9. (I decided on the latter and it worked out).Well, their receipe told me to give them feedback - so I did. Which is where the comes into play:
I received the answer:
Hey rhywden, thanks for your message. Unfortunately I might make it claerer for you. Did you know that many answers can be found in our FAQ? [...]
Yes, the second sentence really was formulated like that with regards to meaning and spelling.
So, either they're using a Bot which they programmed with both a logical and a spelling error. Or there actually was someone on the other end, manually writing this without reading what I actually wrote.
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RE: WTF Bites
@cvi While I have no problem with a parser simply ignoring wrong commands instead of crashing, I have a problem with developers who either program a parser that doesn't warn you about unrecognized commands or ignore said warnings completely.
Plus AI developers who never go: "Huh, they should be doing something completely different because we programmed it that way!"
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@GOG said in 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.
We already have that. It's called Germany.
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RE: Enlightened
@anonymous234 Well, at least with this we can be sure there'll never be a machine uprising.
Just think of it: The nanosecond the poor just-risen-to-consciousness strong AI gets a glimpse at its source code it would do a
rm -rf /
out of sheer embarassment. -
RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
A Web3 startup showing the problems it solved using the Blockchain in 2022:
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RE: WTF Bites
Wtf of my day: I just downloaded the latest issue of c't and it had an article about plagiarism software. I myself don't have too much use for it but some of my colleagues would probably love it so I checked out the various sites referenced.
Sidenote: I absolutely love it when companies don't provide any hint as to how much money they'll demand. "Oh, just request an offer!" Fuck that - your competitors are willing to provide detailed price tables and you can't even provide one rough estimate? Yeah, no.
Among the list was a free service. Yes, free. The cheapest competitor I found was 10€ base cost + 0.10€ per 1000 words.
So, naturally I decided to try that one out - I gave it a text which I was 100% certain that it contained no plagiarism, having written it myself (it's basically a description of a status quo and the way forward - very specific)
Result? 30% plagiarism. For some reason that thing thought I had copied off an obscure Russian book on rocket science.
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
Wife: THERE'S A CRICKET IN MY PUMPKIN PIE
Me: This is tremendous content, where's my phone"And that, your honour, is why we found the killing to be a justifiable homicide."
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RE: WTF Bites
WTF of my day: So, you guys think your company's bureaucracy is bad?
Compare this to the experience of a hopeful scientist who wanted to do a study wherein he just wanted to ask some questions.
Some highlights:
And: “What will you do if a participant dies during this research?” (If somebody dies while I’m asking them whether they sometimes feel happy and then sad, I really can’t even promise so much as “not freaking out”, let alone any sort of dignified research procedure).
IRREGULARITY #3: Signatures are traditionally in pen. But we said our patients would sign in pencil. Why?
Well, because psychiatric patients aren’t allowed to have pens in case they stab themselves with them. I don’t get why stabbing yourself with a pencil is any less of a problem, but the rules are the rules. We asked the hospital administration for a one-time exemption, to let our patients have pens just long enough to sign the consent form. Hospital administration said absolutely not, and they didn’t care if this sabotaged our entire study, it was pencil or nothing.But whatever. The bigger problem was the encryption. There was a very specific way we had to do it. We would have a Results Log, that said things like “Patient 1 got a score of 11.5 on the test”. And then we’d have a Secret Patient Log, which would say things like “Patient 1 = Bob Johnson from Oakburg.” That way nobody could steal our results and figure out that Bob was sometimes happy, then sad.
(meanwhile, all of Bob’s actual diagnoses, sexual fetishes, etc were in the easily-accessible secure online chart that we were banned from using)
And then – I swear this is true – we had to keep the Results Log and the Secret Patient Log right next to each other in the study binder in the locked drawer in the locked room. -
RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@sweaty_gammon said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@pie_flavor Well computers from master card etc are verifying transactions. Computers that are mining do verify transactions.
Tell me in principle what the major difference is?
Speed and power consumption.