historicaldocuments

joined 4 months ago

I agree with your sentiment, and that the world should work like your hypothetical.

how could they possibly ever know

Lawyers doing lawyer stuff. As to why, you said it:

I made mega money and they found out

We'd have to have real lawyers weigh in, but for the most part I think unless you found an undiscovered market then they won't care. Programming isn't unique in the respect that the tools you need to do world-changing work aren't that different between what you might have at home versus a well funded computer science research lab, but you're much more likely to stumble into a marketable app than you are a quicker FFT.

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don’t get how anyone could EVER enforce a law or agreement or rule that says something I wrote at home on my device on my time is theirs.

Check your employment terms. I'd wager the first step of that is seeing if you have a paper copy. I know I don't for all the places I've worked or acquisitions I've been through.

Something like an ALCU or Second Amendment Foundation that focused on nothing but that would be a nice-to-have. I think it overall destroys creativity in the industry.

Websites have to search for new revenue streams. They don't just walk into a corner of the internet and think "drat, someone already has a forum for that!" and walk away. They come up with some unique twist people won't have normally thought of and run with that until it stops working. See this guy's comment below:

With reddit they need to be able to show that their advertisers aren't just serving ads to bots (although we're seeing ads for bots now apparently). They have to prove a certain number of real human beings saw something thus the login requirement.

Now, people used old reddit because new reddit sucks. New reddit just shows you the top few posts, and makes you expand replies, thus proving you're something they can bill for. This also serves the purpose of pushing nuanced, long running discussion down to where people don't see it. Just look at the cat picture, upvote it, and move on.

And for the record reddit has been crap for a very long time. At least since whoever that lame ass admin was who went into the backend database and edited someone's raw post, and if not then, then Victoria getting the axe should've been a red flag to everyone that you weren't a member of reddit...not really. I know there were some local meetups in that timeframe. How awkward do you think the AMA local BBQ was? Do you think reddit cares?

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It’s depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.

And depending on the details of your employment, if you code for fun, on your own time, at home, using your own equipment, the company still owns it.

I did a quick google search, and there's a C++ boost library and a Windows API if you needed to do that. Might have a harder time finding english documentation about it, though.

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Sure.

For a while now, if you needed the time from your computer, and it was running UNIX or a variant, you'd use something like gettimeofday() (it's clock_gettime() now) which would hand you seconds since the epoch at midnight January 1, 1970 in UTC and microseconds/nanoseconds depending. You'd take the seconds, wash it through localtime_r to adjust for the local time zone, and you'd have a struct you could feed to strftime() for formatting.

So my beef with time formats, and what I presume ChickenLadyLovesLife's beef is, is that when the time format is "wrong" for whatever reason, given the similiarity between the backends of modern time systems, it's "wrong" for reasons other than technical limitations. You've got a count in seconds since the beginning of time, and a function that's been around for decades that can do whatever stupid stuff you want. Military time, month printed out, day of week printed out, two character years, four character years, seconds, julian day, Doing something silly like day of year, hour of day, and am/pm ("%j %I %p") is just as easy as something practical like a large fluffy timestamp, or a minimalist four characters military time ("%H%M"). The hard part was getting the time from the GPS or cell phone tower or wherever. The easy part is the time format. Windows also exists, and uses something similar. Modern programming with C++ or Python will have libraries ( and datetime, respectively) that work the same way, and both those examples use strftime() semantics.

So, if you're unhappy with the way your device prints out time, the reason behind it isn't the clock part of it, it's the display part. There was some rationale on Android's behalf for adopting the hour over minutes style, but it wasn't because their available horizontal character limit dropped from four (five if you count a colon) to two. Maybe they can get more data widgets displayed around the time in a little halo? I don't know, I don't use android stuff anywhere. If it was apple I'd assume they did UX testing about half height characters and readability.

So, now to the "end goal" part of what I wrote before. The hard part is done and a solved problem, and most time formats work fine for what they do. tmux is giving me ("%H:%M %d-%b-%y") which works fine, and my desktop environment (DE) is using ("%a, %b %d %H:%M") which is fine. The other DE is using ("%b %d %H:%M") which is fine. All perfectly usable, all used the three character representation of the month avoiding problems between dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy, and all of those are adjustable to an extent with two of the three kicking back to strftime() if I needed it. So what did android get when they paid developers to make the change to hours on top of minutes? Is there a study I missed that of a group of people who'd never seen a clock before and had no concept of time found the "%H\n%M" style more easy to read? If that's true, then was it worth irritating the subset of people who are going to care about the change to pick up the other group? I personally don't see a point in paying to make the change unless they're expecting to make more money from it, which at the core of a lot of things in the world these days. Here's something that worked fine, but now it's being changed to work differently but no better.

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Try needing Julian day. If you're coding then strftime() has supported it since 1989. All you need is "%j" and there it is, with leap year handling, etc.

The end goal isn't a good/flexible/powerful user experience for the person who bought the device; it's a larger user base that can be marketed to The Machine for more money out the back end.

There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

It's harder for users as well. Even youtubers I've followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as "WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS" with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They're all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it's the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn't answer it. We'll end up with a new Betteridge's Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we'll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we're all getting ripped off...

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

So to sweep all of the water systems in the country in advance isn't doable in any time frame?

IR isn't an acronym I'm familiar with.

So are we just kind of admitting that there exists no way to expose any networked device to the internet securely?

It's done all the time. It's not a product you can buy, though, it's a process. There's probably a good "go by" for how to start the process for citywide infrastructure, but it's just one more document for people to ignore.

[–] historicaldocuments@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

If budget weren't an issue, how many clones of your teams would it take to do that for all the water systems in the US in five years?

What are the odds that the average muncipality understands the security implications of just existing on the internet these days?

"No, their platform doesn’t support any real secure protocols and won’t route over a VPN, it needs to be on the same subnet as the devices. [...]"

They won't know that much. They don't understand that their job isn't running a water department, it's running the computers that maintain the water department and that includes security. For someone familiar with computer security it's easy to recognize negligence, but until the law sees it as criminal negligence nothing's going to change.

Small town municipal water departments aren't going to be able to afford the guy holding the shield against international state actors.

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