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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: January 31st, 2025

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  • Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.

    What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?

    • “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
    • “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
    • “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.


  • sturger@sh.itjust.workstoFunny@sh.itjust.worksMy personal hero
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    2 days ago

    So, have any of you ever been in Ikea during a fire alarm?

    We were shopping in an Ikea a year or so ago, in the furniture section. It’s just a bit past the entrance to “the maze”. A screeching fire alarm goes off. For about 10 minutes, everyone – including the Ikea employees – just ignore it and continue doing whatever. Then the Ikea employees start saying, “Please exit the store” or somesuch. That’s when I dawns on me that exiting the store is not as easy as it sounds. We could see no marked fire exits. The employees just said the “follow the arrows”.

    Everyone knows how hard it is to get through an Ikea at the best of times. What about during a fire alarm? Well, I’m looking for the “shortcuts”, but they are not clearly marked. We do make it to a stairwell (I’ve been in this store a few times) and manage to avoid traversing the entire top and bottom floors. We’re faced with a pair of big doors marked, “Not an exit” or somesuch. We push through those doors and they dump us out at the front of the store, near the registers.

    Now we’re at the front of the store, with no idea how to get out. Toward the front of the store, we see some exit doors. We try to push them open, but they’re blocked by carts on the outside. We finally get the carts pushed out of the way and people pour out into a small parking area. Note, that this Ikea has a parking garage under the store, so if the building were actually on fire, we’d be fucked because this second-level parking area we’re standing in is very close to the building and gives no easy exit to the ground and away from the building.

    If there was actually a fire with smoke, people would have panicked and it would have been a deadly shit-show getting out.

    Fuck going to that Ikea again.





  • "It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain. We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation.”

    Translation: “We have no information whatsoever. Based on our complete lack of information, we feel confident is saying this isn’t our fault. This sort of leak could not have been foreseen by anyone, it’s not our fault. While we ‘investigate’, we’ll continue business as usual – taking in large sums of money, demanding all customer private information for even the most trivial service, store that PII insecurely, paying our C-Suite insane amounts of money for failing to keep customer data securely and claiming that there is nothing else we can do. Regards, Customer Service.”





  • You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

    • “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
    • “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
    • “No, you don’t want to do that.”
    • “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
    • etc.

    I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.




  • Honest question: I haven’t used AI much. Are there any AIs or IDEs that can reliably rename a variable across all instances in a medium sized Python project? I don’t mean easy stuff that an editor can do (e.g. rename QQQ in all instances and get lucky that there are no conflicts). I mean be able to differentiate between local and/or library variables so it doesn’t change them, only the correct versions.



  • That sounds like a good plan, except for the cautionary tale of the Golgafrinchams from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

    Golgafrincham was a planet, once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The descendants of these poets made up tales of impending doom about the planet. The tales varied; some said it was going to crash into the sun, or the moon was going to crash into the planet. Others said the planet was to be invaded by twelve-foot piranha bees and still others said it was in danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat.

    These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

    /s