“W” -> “Great success, my liege!”

“Thanks for the raid” -> “Gondor has heeded our call”

“Don’t forget to hit your primes” -> “Word has reached me that the archbishop hasn’t received your monthly heavenly contribution”

You’re describing proper incident response but I fail to see what that has to do with the status page. They have core metrics that they could display on that status page without a human being involved.

IMO a customer-friendly status page would automatically display elevated error rates as “suspected outage” or whatever. Then management can add more detail and/or say “confirmed outage”. In fact that’s how the reddit status page works (or at least used to work), it even shows little graphs with error rates and processing backlogs.

There are reasons why these automated systems don’t exist, but none of these reasons align with user interests.

To be annoyingly nitpicky, how is “unnecessary” defined in this context? Whitespace is usually “unnecessary” but I quite like it for readability.

I broadly agree with you though, the W3C spec changes things.

> Clicks on <br>
> Example is <br />

The actual thing that matters is that the / is ignored so (unlike with XML I believe) you can’t self-close a non-void element by adding a trailing /. But “void elements should not have trailing slashes” is extrapolation on your part; the trailing slash improves readability and is kosher since it doesn’t act as a self-close.

Uh, they originally weren’t paid. They were paid for.

There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

What kind of non-agile bottom-up software projects have you experienced? Bottom-up waterfall? I guess it’s possible in theory but that would be a sight to behold.

My only point is that in most situations, upper management are fools that should be left to their devices and should never get a say in development methodologies. By definition if upper management imposes Scrum, it’s a self-defeating prophecy.

Your average tech company should be somewhere in the bottom-right, but bad managers are trying to pull the needle upwards to justify their existence or make up for their incompetence. But they still call that “Agile” (which can be true by some definitions of the word) or “Scrum” (which that isn’t, by definition).

Good software does not come out of companies without a bottom-up approach to software development. Top-down approaches are either terrible or extremely expensive.

Agile development is something that at my company we fought for, not against. It’s literally impossible to fight against actual agile development since it has to come from the workers. Agile is not scrum, and neither are a collection of ceremonies. It’s just a framework to give agency to developers.

Scrum is not the be-all end-all, but in organizations that cannot implement scrum effectively, no system could hope to achieve anything meaningful either.

Scrum aims at empowering workers to remove power from clueless MBAs and meritless CEOs, if they don’t want to play ball then the idiocracy will win every time regardless.

I’ve witnessed similar corporate screwups from the inside, I know the greed and political games and misaligned incentives that allow for such an obviously and catastrophically badly scoped project to be pushed dead-on-arrival in production, against the advice of literally anyone with a pair of eyes and literally any honesty.

Intellectually, I understand. Yet my heart doesn’t, because it refuses to believe the sheer amount of collective stupidity and outright malice at every level of management, consistently for years on end, required to achieve these outcomes. How anyone can sleep at night with “Product Manager for New Outlook” on their resume is beyond me.

I would be very surprised if it wasn’t voluntary, as far as I know each Wiki is maintained independently with very little oversight.

I remember when “new” Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.

My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.

I mean, bad programming sucks regardless of the “paradigm” (and vice-versa, mostly). But as someone whose job it often is to sift through production logs hunting for an issue in someone else’s component, at least I have a chance with OOP, because its behavior is normally predictable at compile time. So with the source and the backtrace I can pretty reasonably map the code path, even if the spaghetti is 300 calls deep.

Now where shit really hits the fan is OOP with dependency injection. Now I’m back to square 1 grepping through 15 libraries because my LSP has no idea where the member comes from. Ugh.

Anyone who praises FP is either a student, works primarily in academia, or otherwise never had to look at a deep stack trace in their life.

Every time a production system spits out a backtrace that’s just 15 event loop calls into a random callback, I lose 6 months life expectancy. Then I go look at the source, and the “go to definition” of my LSP never works because WHY WOULD IT, IT’S ALL FUNCTIONAL hapi.register CALLS

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. I support UBI because the people pushing functional programming in real production systems should be reassigned to gardening duties.

Comparing Cloudflare to insurance companies is not how you’ll convince me they’re not acting like jerks lol

You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.

proper thermal insulation

what an understatement. it’s very unsexy but also incredibly effective. if your house is over 20 years old, you don’t need fancy-ass blinds, you need to get your house insulated ASAP. everything else must wait.

insulation is the number one most effective thing anyone can do to improve the energy use of their living space. only when your house is properly insulated can you think of shade management, greenery, passive ventilation, heat pumps, etc. in an insulated house, those either won’t work at all or will be wildly inefficient.

Unlike here where it’s all embittered middle children in their 40s in their mom’s basement