The essay Choose Boring Technology covers some of this ground. From that essay:
"One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort."
Another nice thing about the above essay is that it uses dark text on light background (as opposed to this blog post, which I had to print to PDF in order to read).
I have to say, though, that I really miss the days when I was the excited young programmer dying to use the new language, the new framework, the new paradigm or even just some design pattern. Lots of fun! Luckily, during those years, I was always in a team with a more level-headed and experienced developer who would bring me (and the other team members like me) a little closer to earth. And the level-headed developer was learning from us while he/she was moderating our technical ambitions.
I'm not worked up at all about the auto-pen. But presidents should not be pardoning friends and family (although friends seem to get pardoned quite frequently). If a president feels it's important to do so, that president should wait until they are an ex-president and petition the next person in power.
I guess I wasn't paying enough attention, for what would she get charged? I know about the illegal appointments of US attorneys, the vindictive attempted prosecutions against Trump's perceived enemies, and some problems with the Epstein file releases, but I thought all those were under the category of "incompetency". Did she lie to congress or something like that?
It's odd. My email address is included un-obfuscated in ~90 commits to a popular open source repo on github. I also use this same email address for a mailing list associated with this OSS project. As far as I can tell, I've never received a single spam email in the 8 years I've had this email account.
When I view a commit on the github UI using view source, I can see the commit author's email address just as text with no special handling. It's bracketed by "<" and ">", so maybe that's enough to confuse harvesters.
I just looked at the spam folder of one my personal accounts (where I sign up for services), and it has got tons of stuff, most recently 2 or 3 with the subject "YOU PERVERT! I RECORDED YOU!".
It seems spammers are doing less harvesting and more purchasing of email lists from service vendors.
I have a wildcard address at my domain. The most common email addresses for spam are:
- git@mydomain.com
Presumably harvested from GitHub or gitlab
- contact@mydomain.com / admin@mydomain.com
Not actually an email address ever used, presumably people just guessing these exist from convention.
- <first name>@mydomain.com
I mean, if you know my name you can probably guess this but also this has been my primary email address for outbound email and so has ended up in marketing lists etc.
- ap@mydomain.com, finance@mydomain.com
This is a very recent trend but I've been getting emails to made up addresses like these ones quoting forged emails from myself (with various titles like CEO or CFO attached) claiming to authorize payments to other parties, usually backdated, and then asking that I process their invoice ASAP because look how long ago the CEO said it should be paid. I guess my website has ended up in some list of businesses despite being a personal site.
Ironically, the address that was in plain text in my HN profile for like 15 years gets very minimal spam.
Based on this description, it sounds like someone walking past your unattended desk and bent on disrupting your day but not stealing your data, could enter in a garbage password into the lock screen a few times and lock you out of your own laptop.
I guess the same also works for cloud accounts as well. I remember, back in the mid-2000s, trying to log into my hotmail account (never having failed to log in before) and getting a "locked out due to too many bad passwords". So someone, only knowing my user account name (which was the same as my email address), locked me out of my own account. The problem was, I couldn't remember what my recovery accounts were (I eventually figured it out).
Heck, once I cycled for half an hour with my iPhone in my pocket, and somehow the phone against my leg was in just the right position that it kept interpreting my leg movements as trying to enter a passcode.
Got home, pulled out my phone, and it had a message that it was locked for several hours due to so many failed passcode attempts. Incredibly annoying.
Still, only happened once in well over a decade of owning an iPhone.
I was mostly frustrated that there wasn't some alternate way of regaining access, like via my Mac or iPad logged in with the same Apple ID. Or that the failed passcode attempts didn't start eventually playing a loud alert sound or something on each failure.
Yeah I used to get this a lot because I have my phone in my pocket when I'm doing land maintenance around the place here. It's massively annoying. That and watch gestures firing off and interrupting the music I'm listening to while I'm using powertools.
I've had to turn off a lot of features. All of the "raise to wake", always-on screens, gesture controls, movement controls on the watch, live activities on the watch, all sorts of stuff, anything related to movement or waking up the phone other than by a button press. Also had to turn the watch so the buttons are on the left to stop my gloves pressing them constantly.
It's a bit sad really, I think I've missed out on some decent features there. But compared to being locked out and/or having random actions trigger, it's an improvement.
On my pixel 4a, I had to turn off a "call 911" feature that I think was initiated by shaking the phone. I took a couple of walks with the phone in my front pocket, and the movement from my leg called 911 (which I would only find out when the police would call me back to ask if everything is OK).
Yeah that is unfortunate and embarassing. I think I nearly called them a couple of times before I flipped my watch around.
Current gripe is that every so often, usually when my hands are busy, Siri interprets my "Hey Siri fast forward" to skip an ad on the podcast I'm listening to as an instruction to call Troy. Troy is a roofer I got to quote some work last year! He has picked up twice to me going "Sorry, really sorry, my robot called you ..."
Remember entering password to one service I subscribed to. It was Friday evening. I typed it wrong 5 times and my account was locked out with a message to contact customer service. Customer service was open from Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. So I was unable to use it for a couple of days. It was painful experience. I found an alternative though and on Monday cancelled it.
The description is misleading. What made the OS create a new keychain was resetting their login password, not the failed password attempts.
(The login keychain is encrypted using the user's password, so it's reasonable to create a new one when the password is changed - otherwise, you end up in a situation where applications constantly pop up prompts for a password the user doesn't know every time they try to access the keychain, e.g. to load saved passwords in Safari. I've seen this happen on older versions of macOS and it's positively infuriating.)
I often wonder how I survived going for a random drive or even simply leaving the house from 1980 through to the advent of smart phones. Was I simply more brave and self-sufficient back then?
But then I note that there was some infrastructure and also some attitude differences back then that don't exist now.
When my car would break down in the 1980s or 1990s, typically there would be a pay phone nearby. One time in the early 90s, I just knocked on a random door and the resident let me use their land line to call a tow truck (I'm not sure anyone would let a random stranger into their home now, but maybe they still do). Breaking down in the boonies was no fun, but likely someone would come by eventually and help (or murder you, but probably help).
I was reminded recently of this when I went to park in the city in a garage that I frequently patronize only to find they had removed the payment terminal, which was replaced by a sign that said "use our app!". I have a low-data phone plan, so if I had to install their app, I would probably blow past my limit for the month. Also, there was no signal in the garage. So I just left and found another place to park (and was almost late for my appointment).
Also I don't like having to pay just to print my boarding pass at the check-in kiosk. Maybe I am not less brave but just more cheap.
> Was I simply more brave and self-sufficient back then?
Probably! A good reason to exercise those skills again
> (I'm not sure anyone would let a random stranger into their home now, but maybe they still do).
Curious what makes you think that. Perhaps as an exercise, do something that requires asking a favour of someone. You might be pleasantly surprised. Despite all the ills in society, faith can be restored be some amazing interactions with people offline
> So I just left and found another place to park
That's exactly the right response. Being late sucked but hopefully just a once off .
> Maybe I am not less brave but just more cheap.
This is honestly unsaid in a lot of these discussions! The non phone methods can be a bit more expensive. It's a good point but sometimes the difference isn't huge
At one point, I worked in the labs division of a big internet company, where I was a regular software developer surrounded by people with the title "scientist" (basically, programmer/statisticians with PhDs who were running engagement and revenue experiments on our user base).
In the first group meeting I attended, I jokingly asked why no one was wearing a white coat, but my colleagues didn't get the reference, so my joke fell down with a thud.
>Increased speed only gets us where we want to be sooner if we are also heading in the right direction.
I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing, allowing you to iterate more quickly.
I think “iterating more quickly” is good for the company doing the building. But if you’re the customer, having a new piece of shit foisted on you twice a day so that some garbage PM can “build user empathy” gets old really fast.
Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.
> Before AI, I worked at a B2B open source startup, and our users were perpetually annoyed by how often we asked them to upgrade and were never on the latest version.
And frankly, they were in point.
Especially in the B2B context stability is massively underrated by the product.
There is very little I hate more then starting my work week on a Monday morning and find out someone changed the tools I'm using for daily business again
Even if it's objectively minor like apples last pivot to the windows vista design... It just annoys me.
But I'm not the person paying the bills for the tools I'm using at work, and the person that is almost never actually uses the tools themselves and hence shiny redesigns and pointless features galore
Yes, but only if you have an ax to sharpen. With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress. You can take this pretty up high too - sometimes it takes building multiple products or companies to get it right
> With a lot of things it takes trial and error to make progress
Way too often that is used as an excuse for various forms of laziness; to not think about the things you can already know. And that lack of thinking repeats in an endless cycle when, after your trial and error, you don't use what you learned because "let's look forward not backward", "let's fail fast and often" and similar platitudes.
Catchy slogans and heartfelt desires are great but you gotta put the brains in it too.
Without commenting about the frequency of negligence myself, I suspect at least that you and GP are in agreement.
I doubt GP is suggesting ‘go ahead and be negligent to feedback and guardrails that let you course correct early.’
Plugging the Cynefin framework as a useful technique for practitioners here. It doesn’t have to be hard to choose whether or not rigorous planning is appropriate for the task at hand, versus probe-test-backtrack with tight iteration loops.
I see indecision and analysis paralysis far more. And yes, you do need to thing about things, but far too often I see people not do something because they're worried it's not optimal. But not doing something is far worse than doing something sub-optimally!
> I suppose there is an argument that if you are building the wrong thing, build it fast so that you can find out more quickly that you built the wrong thing,
A lot of people are so enamored by speed, they are not even taking the time to carefully consider the full picture of what they are building. Take the HN frontpage story on OpenCode: IIRC, a maintainer admitted they keep adding many shallow features that are brittle.
Speed cannot replace product vision and discipline.
Tech very quickly shifted to a industry of marketers instead of hackers. And with salesmen, you want to advertise as many features as possible, not talk about how quality one good crucial feature is.
This won't really stop until investors start judging on quality and not quantity. But a lot of those are thinking in finances, and the thought of removing their biggest cost center is too tempting to not go all in on. So they want to hear "we made this super fast with 2-3 people!" instead of "we optimized and scaled this up to handle 400% more workload with double the performance".
The outcome of that approach depends entirely on the broader process. Imagine golf but you refuse to swing with anything less than maximum strength to avoid wasting time.
Discovery is great and all but if what you discover is that you didn't aim well to begin with that's not all that useful.
Given that you hear frequently (even on the front page of HN today)
- people getting locked out of their cloud accounts and then facing a Kafkaesque faceless bureaucracy
- physical products turning into bricks because the cloud account disappeared with the company's failure
I would certainly hope that a cloud account is optional.
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