FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

trying to sell an upright piano to a scotsman, but when i tell him the price he says it's grand

One of the areas hit hard in Patreon’s layoffs was security, at least one of their security teams was laid off entirely. Unsurprisingly, the current blunder seems to be because of an automated system for flagging fraudulent entries being a bit overeager at flagging entries

(Paraphrasing John Gall in The System’s Bible: the most common failure mode for a system is for it to do exactly what it was designed to do, just in an unexpected way.)

“Patreon issues are causing paused payouts and canceled subscriptions - The Verge”

We’re seeing an increase in tech co blunders—exactly what rational people would expect a few months after a mass layoff. Patreon has laid of over 17% of its workforce in the past year or so. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818598/patreon-payment-blocked-processing-declined-subscription-canceled

Modern media has no notion of consequences. Otherwise we’d be seeing a reminder of the mass layoffs every time one of these blunders happens.

And they’re only going to keep happening because layoffs like what tech has been doing will always have a serious detrimental effect.

programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types with one sentence per page, like

"GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale Woodchips playgrounds.

GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can get right to the chipping.

See why Microsoft, OpenAI and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips workflows."

and you get to the bottom and you're like I want this I guess but I still don't know what it is

most accurate hacking representation I've seen in a game, i feel seen #NintendoSwitch

Ahh :( I guess I will not use my parents printer :( with USB :( the port it does not have :(

ME: The Earth is 71% water
SCIENTIST: Yes. True.
ME: And practically all of that water is uncarbonated
SCIENTIST: Okay, sure. Not sure where you're going with this but
ME: So the Earth is flat
SCIENTIST...
ME: ...
SCIENTIST: Listen here you little shit

Look, I get that I need to “complete tasks” and “answer emails”, but have you considered: I am literally so tired and sleepy

"streetwear" is when you make a T-shirt out of asphalt and paint "give way" on it, right?

“...We have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

“But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

there's 2 wolves inside of you, one wants to write the most performant code and the other doesn't want to do pre-optimisations

“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.

my chatbot is so efficient it only needs one $2000 GPU per user https://awful.systems/post/4296

you can just be a fox on the internet. nobody can stop you

This is, by the way, why you should trust *nothing* Google says about how "Web Environment Integrity" has safeguards against abuse. The pro-user safeguards are there to be removed! The moment the users have bought into the program, the safeguards aren't needed them! That's how these things work! That's the only way these things work!