IHeartBadCode

For hardware folks: Using RISC-V.

Legit, some dude in US Congress is wanting to crack down on China via… RISC-V exports, because oh no, the technology is too open and might give China some of our IP. Oh and by the way, dude has a pretty big Intel portfolio, but nevermind that!!

As an aside, why the hell are lawmakers allowed to trade stocks?

Or you can make multiple accounts. The app makes it super simple to swap accounts on the fly.

Nah, much like shit gets tested on mice, tobacco is the goto for testing on plants.

Yeah, there’s time we need to test on pigs and whatnot. But mice are usually good enough in multiple domains, cheap to get a lot, and are pretty easy to handle in a lab. So that’s the usual selection for testing shit on.

Pretty much same deal with tobacco, checks enough boxes for interesting things to test against, is super cheap, and pretty straightforward for dealing with in a lab.

You do initial testing on dummy cheap shit. Once you work out the bugs on the cheap thing, pretty much you do roughly the same thing on the expensive stuff that you’re actually going to sell.

Tobacco is super cheap and editing the seed gene on it is pretty similar to the seed gene in grapes. So you do most of the work on cheap ass tobacco. When you’ve got tobacco down switching that same process over to grape only requires a few tweaks.

So you’ve got seedless grapes, but say this one flavor of grapes you really like is seeded. Boom! Now you can make it seedless. We’ve got seedless oranges, but say you really like the taste of Valencia oranges (which are seeded). Boom! Now you’ve got seedless Valencias. And you go from there.

It’s a motion to dismiss that was granted under rules of the court. The rules cited by the defendant (The Secretary of State) in the motion to dismiss:

• Rule 12(b)(1) — The plaintiff did not present enough evidence to show that they have standing to bring the matter before the courts.
• Rule 12(b)(6) — The plaintiff did not present sufficient factual matter to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face .

The court sided with the plaintiff that sufficient evidence was indeed presented before the court to indicate that the plaintiff did indeed have standing, BUT their argument brought before the court failed to state a claim under either the APA (the Administrative Procedure
Act) or the First Amendment. Thus the court has accepted the motion to dismiss the case, citing:

A concrete injury is “foremost” among the standing requirements

Plaintiff could state in concrete terms the injury to be suffered by those affected by the two avenues of injury they (the plaintiff) had indicated. The plaintiff is the one who brought up the first amendment and the APA but failed to follow through on the argument before the court in terms of actual injury (a court CANNOT assume injury even ones that sound pretty obvious).

More importantly the first amendment issue brought before the court couldn’t be held. The court indicated that the Government has a vested interest (in the name of national security) to be all up in the business of people traveling here for work. But that the plaintiff did bring up a point about how that might also hurt their ability to work here, but failed to qualify it in their original argument (that basically means, “I don’t think this is a first amendment issue but you’ve got a point if you want to try something else.”)

The motion to dismiss is granted with perjury. The plaintiff cannot bring it back before the courts and cannot usually appeal the decision.

So yeah, the Judge sounds like he was interested in the issue being brought but the arguments that were critical to their case fell apart at the whole “for foreigners traveling here, the US has every right to monitor your social media accounts”. The argument that seemed to pique the judge’s interest was how that information might be used to remove business opportunities from people traveling here. Which is a good point because once a person is approved to work here in the US, the information obtained by the Visa application cannot be used to taint the work environment the person works in.

However, the plaintiff wasn’t able to provide a concrete way of how that would happen (that was outside of the “we’re arresting you and kicking you out” which the Government has a right to do). The thing is the plaintiff would need a way to connect the dots on how information obtained in the Visa might get back to their employer and then the employer keeps the person but alters their job based on that information released by the Government. If there is a manner by which that might happen, then yeah, that’s a no-no.

but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won’t make people switch to Firefox

Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.

For those not reading the story, which appears to be many, the company that services the implant went bankrupt. The implant was experimental. There exists no one to service it any longer. It will pose a health risk down the road without someone servicing it.

The only thing that forced her to have the implant removed is the fact that it would eventually lead to her untimely death if it remained in with no one to take care of the device.

Correction. Excel DOES NOT HAVE PYTHON. Your python is sent to Microsoft’s cloud instance of Python and the result there is sent back to your Excel sheet. No actual python is being executed on your machine.

For those who have never worked on legacy systems. Any one who suggests “we’ll fix it in post” is asking you to do something that just CANNOT happen.

The systems I code for, if something breaks, we’re going to court over it. Not, oh no let’s patch it real quick, it’s your ass is going to be cross examined on why the eff your system just wrote thousands of legal contracts that cannot be upheld as valid.

Yeah, that fix it in post shit any article, especially this one that’s linked, suggests should be considered trash that has no remote idea how deep in shit one can be if you start getting wild hairs up your ass for changing out parts of a critical system.

IBM hawks new conversion tools all the time. None of them are amazing sliver bullets, all of them require humans to comb over the resulting output. And every single one I’ve ever used chokes on any weird case.

From the RPG fixed form to free form, DDS to DDL conversion, and so on all of them are usually more trouble to use than to not use.

IBM does this kind of stuff all the time. And for some folks it’ll work some of the times. But at this point, I just skip any WS tool they put out and have a snippet on RDi and RDz that does all the required plugging away to call web services from the COBOL module.

This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.

The problem isn’t a conversion of what may or may not be complex code, it’s taking the time to prove out a new solution.

I can take any old service program on one of our IBM i machines and convert it out to Java no problem. The issue arises if some other subsystem that relies on that gets stalled out because the activation group is transient and spin up of the JVM is the stalling part.

Now suddenly, I need named activation and that means I need to take lifetimes into account. Static values are now suddenly living between requests when procedures don’t initial them. And all of that is a great way to start leaking data all over the place. And when you suddenly start putting other people’s phone numbers on 15 year contracts that have serious legal ramifications, legal doesn’t tend to like that.

It isn’t just enough to convert COBOL 1:1 to Java. You have to have an understanding of what the program is trying to get done. And just looking at the code isn’t going to make that obvious. Another example, this module locks a data area down because we need this other module to hit an error condition. The restart condition for the module reloads it into a different mode that’s appropriate for the process which sends a message to the guest module to unlock the data area.

Yes, I shit you not. There is a program out there doing critical work where the expected execution path is to on purpose cause an error so that some part of code in the recovery gets ran. How many of you think an AI is going to pick up that context?

The tools back then were limited and so programmers did all kinds of hacky things to get particular things done. We’ve got tools now to fix that, just that so much has already been layered on top of the way things work right now. Pair with the whole, we cannot buy a second machine to build a new system and any new program must work 99.999% right out of the gate.

COBOL is just a language, it’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the expectation. These systems run absolutely critical functions that just simply cannot fail. Trying to foray into Java or whatever language means we have to build a system that doesn’t have 45 years worth of testing that runs perfectly. It’s just not a realistic expectation.

In July, Musk tweeted about Twitter / X’s financial situation, saying, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

Advertising could be up two fold for all it matters. You sack a company that last turned an annual profit in 2019 with $44B in debt, it won’t matter if Musk is shitting gold bricks. You can’t pay that size of debt off fast enough. To just get started on that debt Musk would need to make Twitter twenty times more profitable than their 2019 profit. And even then that debt is going to be a monkey on his back for forty years in ideal conditions.

That $44B isn’t chump change for Twitter, like maybe if Tencent took a sudden $44B debt they’d make good on it, but they’re wildly profitable. Twitter barely gets by and has only gone on this long because of the Tech Bro funding that all but dried up when the interest rates were going up.