See the UK Post Office accounting scandal, in which a persistent computer error went unfixed for decades and caused hundreds of post office employees to be fired and dragged through courts for corruption that never happened. A good chunk of them committed suicide.
The database is the least important part of the system: the organizational structure, rules, and procedures are way more important, because they actively help or harm people.
no no, it’s an input to a Palantir database
While the stats vary depending on who’s measuring, the story is consistent: web publishers, who provided the content that trained these AI models, face dramatically diminishing visitors, which means lower advertising and subscription revenues, even amid overall growth in search impressions.
AND MY AXE!
Your example didn’t mention the use of the function keyword. Instead, it seemed to be questioning the placement of the return type - placing it after the argument list seems pretty common in newer languages.
Rust and TypeScript use the return-type-at-the-end convention as well.
In modern BASIC variants, DIM has become a backronym: “declare in memory”.
TIL. I always thought it was a backronym for declare in (yo) momma.
only the linter gives a hoot - the interpreter will happily leave that footgun for later
Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.
There’s definitely scenarios where that is the case.
Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”
I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It’s my characterization. I didn’t mean to imply that you said it.
Agreed.
Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.
Generally, Hanlon’s Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity user error.
There’s a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we’re under attack.
I’ve got a lot of unassigned schadenfreude I could put to this.
I felt a great disturbance in the Roadmap, as if millions of unit tests suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere
Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I assume hope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings.
I feel like Rust would be some complaint from the compiler saying that some apparently unrelated struct can’t be Send/Sync for some inscrutable reason. Or something about pinning a future.
I guess that’s why you pay your soldiers.
In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development.
…
The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.”
…
Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.
help --help
That’s how I roll.
We’re already seeing them do that without a database. 🤷♂️
Other countries are able to maintain internal databases without using them to screw over their own citizens (except when they do). The problem isn’t the database.