Haha, good one. Much like Makefiles, patch format precedes a lot of more modern things (by decades!) and is good enough to stick around. Unlike Makefiles, I've never seen tool gain any acceptance at all to replace patch.
And a lot of these older tools are not meant to be fed untrusted, unvetted input. The patch shown there confused me for quite a bit.
Or, more snarky: tee is also a huge security problem if you pipe untrusted input into `tee -a /etc/passwd`, such as `curl | tee -a /etc/passwd`. Not many things are safe with a `curl |` in front of them. I think yes might be?
3 days? Wow. Can't say I think much of this senior member of your team, who seems to be the anti-social one here. I'm sure it breaks flow for them, but a big part of being senior is amplifying the best in those less so, and helping them improve.
3 minutes, 30 minutes, sure, I've discovered a lot of junior folks would figure things out on their own when I couldn't get back to them immediately, and tended to add some delay just to encourage trying a little harder before contacting me. I would say even 3 hours has value. Buy yourself a rubber duck and have a heart-to-heart about your problem.
3 days is going to result in lots of folks getting stuck in local minima, likely confusing themselves in the process. To be clear, sometimes a problem requires a deep dive, or there is no one who can provide useful help. Even then, some guidance just to get outside perspective is helpful.
I would argue it depends on the context. Of course, gaining enough experience on which contexts are worth persevering for which duration is it's own thing.
The rubric I give to juniors is a bit more simple: if you get stuck, consider alternatives that you haven't tried out. Alternatives are of a few types including: relevant evidence/facts you can gather that you haven't yet gathered, and attempts you haven't tried yet. As long as you have alternatives keep trying them (gather evidence, make attempts). Once you run out of alternatives then seek help (avoid spinning wheels).
This way when a junior comes to me I can ask them to list the alternatives they have already tried. If they haven't tried obvious alternatives (gathered facts and reasonable attempts) I send them back. If they've tried all the alternatives I can think of then I get involved.
I'll note that this tends to work when contact between team members is relatively frequent (e.g. once a day) so I can get a sense of how long the junior has been working on a task to avoid rabbit-holing.
I think with regards to new hires, go for the quick question up front every time. Onboarding people fast is an investment with high-ROI.
It's a really bad sign if someone keeps asking thirty second questions three or six months into the job and hasn't figured out how to answer those themselves yet.
It's a really bad sign if they keep asking you the same questions.
But when someone's new? It's your job to help them get up to speed. A thirty second question is probably something like "is there a reason we use Azure instead of AWS" or "do you want me to use library A or B, I see both in the codebase," not something that they'll benefit from diving into for three days.
Pre-internet/stackoverflow, pre-AI... I'd easily spend 3 days working out how to solve a problem that I hadn't seen before. Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either. So, if that was the formative experience of the senior person, I could understand where that attiude was coming from.
Today, yeah 3 days is a long time to spend researching and spinning your wheels. But it's still the best way to learn.
> Asking others generally didn't help anyway because they hadn't seen it either.
Fair, and there are certainly some kinds of problem for which asking questions is unlikely to help because it's untrodden ground; and for learning skills, answers are indeed less useful than practice.
But that's not the only kind of problem to be encountered. As sibling commenters point out, questions like "hey, why did we pick Azure over AWS (and is that likely to change at any point soon?)" are questions that _no_ amount of research is going to resolve, because the answer _only_ lives in people's heads. That's not about _learning_, it's about going to the right source for the information.
more importantly there should be a time once a day where asking is not a disruption. you are not in the flow for 3 days in a row. we used the daily standup for this. or any break time.
I once helped someone get their car home after one of these was installed. Their license would not be returned until it was installed, but they weren't allowed to leave it on the lot. Someone else drove it there, and then I got to experience the breathalyzer to drive it home.
The interesting part is how bad the interlock was. First off, it can apparently randomly not work, so you get three tries. Worse yet, per the official documentation, apparently they can misdetect an ignition while driving at speed, and when that happens you have to pull over and blow within thirty seconds. Now, this is not something you can do while driving, as you have to look at the camera while you do it, on top of needing to have a deep breath. There's no motivation to improve this, because the customer is the legal system, not the person who has to have it installed
I knew somebody with an interlock and if they were around too much car exhaust in a relatively enclosed space, the ethanol in the air would trip the detector apparently.
Having to blow while you're already driving is supposed to be a feature. It's to dissuade people from successfully turning on their car, immediately drinking, and then driving.
If it only kicks in at 45 or lower (i.e., not the highway) then there's always a safe place to pull over. I have no idea how it actually does work though, thankfully.
I take it you've never been stuck in slow traffic on a long narrow bridge, or highway sections that surround you with concrete barriers on both sides for miles. There is nowhere to pull over.
Is this comment a joke or do you not understand how dangerous it is to ask a driver to blow into a breathalyzer while operating a vehicle?
All this seems to be is a company collecting corporate welfare while doing the bare minimum. Such companies should both be sanctioned and have their leadership investigated for potential fraud.
If you receive public dollars to function, the public should expect some modicum of sensibility and accountability.
If they set their own place on fire, they're also homeless. Just as self-inflicted, but significantly less dangerous to third parties than driving drunk.
Driving while drunk is not a silly little mistake. A third of all fatal crashes involve drunk drivers. Letting these people drive at all even with a breathalyzer is an abomination. You can expect them to have a similar disregard for other fundamentals of safe driving.
I'm not commenting on the morality of drunk driving. I'm commenting on the effectiveness of just fucking them over, that being, not effective at all.
There's this thing in the mainstream where people feel like the best way to handle people doing bad things is to just pummel them into the ground as much as possible.
While that might feel the most justified, that doesn't actually solve the problem. Suspending licenses doesn't stop drunk people from driving, because cars are more or less a necessity.
So, knowing it's a necessity, we have to design the car around that and enforce safe operation by an alcoholic.
Which is a stop-gap solution. A better solution is making cars not a necessity. But until then, we should do the stop-gap.
Stop-gap is restricting the driving to work schedule then. Everything else is optional and you can learn to work within that system. We try to put up industrial solutions to everything. Why not keep the laws cut and dry. This action = this consequence. You determine your actions you must accept x consequence. Or better yet jail time for 6 months then you will be fed and you will lose everything. There are options
That's how the legal system worked a couple centuries ago. You might be familiar with some of the literature written about it, like Les Misérables. I don't know about you, but returning to the world of 18th century French penal codes sounds pretty dystopian.
It wasn't that long ago these devices weren't mandatory and they'd just suspend your license.
I am actually curious now whether that was more effective since the offender had to endure the judgment of the person in their life giving them a ride to work.
I don't understand why this is obviously untrue. Do we have any reason to believe that those people didn't just... continue to drive with a suspended license?
Not to mention DUI is a fairly recent development. In the 20th century, it was pretty easy to drive drunk and get away with it.
Yeah and what's stopping someone from drinking while borrowing someone else's car? Oh they don't want their car wrecked too? They may just drive the drunk to work then.
We arrive at the same place with the same real solutions (the people). The technology doesn't do anything except add extra steps and convince the public something was done.
If anything it creates enough hassle for the offender that new crimes are being committed with harsher consequences (domestic abuse), or dragging additional people into crime they didn't intend (negligent entrustment).
> We arrive at the same place with the same real solutions (the people)
This is always the case. There will always be murderers, and thieves. But technology just helps.
There are real solutions, and fake ones. Fake solutions include "make people not bad anymore". This just doesn't work, there will always be alcoholics, end of.
If there was less of a reliance on cars, there would be less drunk driving. We take drunk driving as a necessary consequence of transportation, but that's just not true. And, if we had less of a reliance on cars, we could actually suspend licenses sooner.
But as it currently stands, we cannot. We would just be permanently fucking people over in such a severe and unnecessary manner. Being unable to drive is one of the most reliable ways to become homeless in many parts of the US. This will only lead to more crime.
I didn't say it directly, but did mention depending on others multiple times in my replies. If you are truly all alone, that is the biggest contributing factor to becoming homeless. We live in a society.
There often is a ton of help for alcoholics with stuff like this. In fact, I would say alcoholics probably have the most support out of any type of addict because it's so common. When a drunk is forced to seek assistance to make their commute, it often comes with strings attached to put them on the path to quitting. I don't see what's so bad about that.
You might be a functioning alcoholic, but when alcohol intoxication is so prevalent in your life it interferes with day to day routines activities, it absolutely meets the psychosocial definition of addiction, and likely points to a deeper one.
Every rural area I've ever worked in had a non trivial number of folks who would have 2-3 drinks at the bar/whatever on a Friday or a Saturday and drive home. It was not alcoholism, it was "I'm totally fine to drive, the law doesn't know my limits" etc.
On some level that's just the price of wanting to go out and not wanting to drop a bunch of cash on a taxi (assuming you can get one to come).
2-3 drinks on a Friday night when you're supposed to drive home is different. I'd also say "I can drink because the law is wrong" is also not exactly a neutral take.
- I believe the law is overly proscriptive / strict / wrong.
- I believe I won't get caught
It's no different to someone speeding because "It's clear conditions and I consider myself to be perfectly safe at this speed". Or skipping a stop sign "I can clearly see nothing is coming".
Unfortunately driving on a suspended is mostly not enforced either, so giving them the carrot of keeping their license is the only thing the judicial branch can do that has much sway (other than jailing them) without being able to order the executive branch to change.
LOL. Do you know how many people are driving with suspended licenses now? The number would skyrocket if systems like these didn't exist.
Especially in rural areas, you can get away with driving on a suspended license for a pretty long time before a cop catches you. I know someone who was probably (she wouldn't admit to it) doing it for at least a year.
Once while hot air balloon chasing, we saw a guy driving his 4 wheel drive in the ditches along a gravel road and found out later from someone he had a suspended license.
They said he figured the cops couldn't stop him if he stuck to the ditches and didn't operate on the official roadway.
Oh wow so the judicial system is developing the software? It's not a private company that only exists to fulfill a government need with zero accountability? What were the terms of their contract? What was their SLA? How do users engage with the company?
Sorry but these companies are all scams thrusted upon the public. Any business that takes government money should be held accountable or compelled to engage in workplace democracy.
I'm not a fan of companies making garbage products while getting rich off of public dollars. Just because some people like corporate welfare doesn't mean the vast majority of the public likes it.
Nothing specific yet, but the legal groundwork has been laid both in the US and in the EU. Starting in July, all new cars sold in the EU will need to be able to fit after-market alcohol interlocks. In the US, interlocks are already mandatory for convicted DUIers in most states, but new cars will also have to come with factory installed drunk driving prevention technology in the coming years. We just don't know how far that mandate will go eventually.
obviously it will require an age verification, also you need to tell Google that you want to go somewhere 24 hours in advance, and Apple gets 30% of the revenue that gas stations make.
Manufacturers are now encrypting Canbus traffic, voluntarily on current and future models.
Buying or selling tools designed to break the law is already illegal - trivial or not. If a driver gets a DUI and possess a NOOP interlock, they are getting an additional charge, and get to help am investigation into the illicit device supply chain.
> Buying or selling tools designed to break the law is already illegal - trivial or not.
I'm curious how this will play out. The "John Deer" exemption from the DMCA comes to mind, not sure if it's strictly for farm equipment or still in effect.
There is no proposal to require these janky ass aftermarket units, nor require any type of interlock at all.
NHTSA was directed to write some guidelines/rules around the implementation of passive impairment detection as OEM features. They have yet to do so, probably because it is flaky technology.
My guess is that the final rule implementation will be similar to the distracted driver detection that is already in many new vehicles.
No, the 2021 infrastructure bill required automakers to install passive technology (passive meaning not requiring any specific actions from the driver) to prevent drunk driving by some future date. However, such technology doesn't really exist yet.
Eh, with lane keeping features I don’t think it’d be hard to at least detect someone swerving a lot. Granted, I don’t think that would detect people that aren’t super drunk, but it’s something.
I might be wrong on that assumption - I don’t drink, myself.
As is commonly commented on by cartoonists: In plenty of places driving consistently within the lines might be the actual sign you're drunk. Because the roads/potholes are bad enough that you shouldn't be, if you value your suspension.
I live in a northern state so I certainly have experience with potholes, but I've never seen a road so bad that it would cause a false positive like that.
Our local dying mall though? Phew. It amazes me whoever owns the mall doesn't at least go out there with some asphalt themselves.
Meanwhile in much of the USA registration laws aren't enforced. The last time my car was totaled (hit and run) the police didn't even show up for that either so my insurance company just ate the whole cost. DUI laws themselves are largely only enforced to the extent the accused consents to bothering to show up to court.
Not really the same. There are proposals to require OEMs to install driver monitoring, but it’s usually IR camera based rather than blow in a tube fuel cell based. These systems are probably going to be a mess but the technology isn’t really comparable to DUI interlock devices and the unreliability of those systems is orthogonal.
I was the DD for my friend's bachelor party and as we were leaving the bar, I saw this older gentleman struggling to start his vehicle. I had a hard time making out what he was telling me, but it looked like he had one of these devices on his car. Being the Good Samaritan that I am, I blew into the device, his car started, and he went happily on his way.
I assume you're joking, Either way. One morning when I took the bus to work the bus driver had repeated problems getting the bus to start due to the breathalyser. I heard him complain to the passenger behind him, about it malfunctioning. The passenger volunteered to test this theory, by also blowing into the device. The driver handed him the hose, the passenger gave it a go, the bus started, and the driver shrugged his shoulders, and off we went, only slightly delayed.
Dunno where the parent comment was referring to, but different countries have different standards. In Colombia the bus transit stations all have breathalyzer stations and the drivers have to pass the breathalyzer before starting their shifts. It was pretty wild to see as an outsider but completely unremarkable to everyone else.
Or, in actuality, the Dell business model will be designed for repairability. I tend to always advise friends who want Windows/Linux laptops to buy from the business lines, especially if a 1- or 2- year refurb will work.
If there was an IP setting users could change, all the self-hosting etc. forums would be talking about how to change it instead of explaining other options. I'd expect not just fixed hosts and an ecosystem dependent on their proprietary protocols, but also pinned certificates and secure boot so you can't change any of it.
N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.
As the founder of both projects, explaining the difference between the two projects is roughly 20% of my working day (okay, not quite 20% but sometimes it feels that way).
While he definitely went off the rails, I first caught a hint, back in the 90s, when his fanclub/e-list was named "Dogbert's New Ruling Class"... and he seemed to take it a bit too seriously.
You've missed all the posts where people complain about a terminal emulator taking 1ms longer to respond to a keystroke than their preferred one, haven't you?
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