As someone who filled out multiple copies of the same contract by hand to buy a house recently, which had to be stamped with my seal and not signed, AHHHHHHHHHHghgghhg. On average, I only have to fax something once every several years. NTT, the main telecoms provider, STILL requires that you fax paperwork to get internet (at least for NTT East as of two years ago).
Using cash is great (except for my airline miles account), but one of the biggest banks in Japan is notorious for outages. ATMs here also, until very recently, had business days and hours. That's finally mostly gone, at least. They can still run out of money at the year-end holiday season as everyone is home with family and they're not always restocked in some locations, but more ATMs also helped to solve this. The problem with things transitioning to electronic payment is also those payment processors take a cut. We have all kinds of payment apps here, but many small businesses I know hate using it. The ones I know that use it most generally have larger foreign customer bases (anecdotal to business owners I know; may not be generally true in all of Tokyo/Japan).
Where I’m from, they know. The news have done a good job of reporting on it, and they see the cost of houses, and whatnot be worse than before. It’s kind of new from the last 5 or so years, before that they didn’t get it. But now it’s pretty obvious so long as they watch the news or pay attention to their kids and grandkid’s lives.
Paper filing is good, digital filing with proper backups is good.
At my job for a staff evaluation I have to fill out a paper checklist, scan it, then enter the information digitally, then print the digital one and file it in the employees file with the original checklist and then upload a pdf of the paper checklist AND the digital one…
Instead of just having the evaluation portal open on a tablet and doing it ONE TIME with a good backup system.
I kinda want one of those disks for my collection though… “This is my 5150, Vic 20, Nuclear Missile Launch Floppy, Thinkpad 300…” Some quality conversation starters I thinks.
Oh nononono that’s totally unacceptable. First of all, John McClane is the epitome of toxic masculinity — he smokes, he swears, he shoots guns, and he clearly cannot stop himself from stalking his ex-wife against her clear wishes to be left alone.
Second, he’s also a racist, who, in a several acts of clear and utter police brutality murders a calm and well-mannered German gentleman (played by a British actor) and his merry band of European immigrants who are merely trying to settle a dispute between themselves and a Japanese megacorporation in order to improve their local economy and feed starving children at home.
If you’re watching this movie in 2023, you’re definitely an alt-right terrorist and you belong on a watchlist.
When you think about it software development is a relatively young profession compared to medicine, law, construction, public services, the arts, and so on. This is why modern tech kind of sucks despite being so cool, I say we are in the “Hey maybe we shouldn’t build our huts right on the river” phase of writing code, still figuring out problems that will appear mind numbingly simple in the future.
Another issue is the fact that tech builds on itself and its flaws can be painted over with abstractions, while the aforementioned professions can’t get away with being subpar for too long. So the full metaphor really is after the river floods we build on top of the ruins and claim victory because we are slightly more elevated and will take less damage during the next flood.
The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn’t designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren’t features just permanent residents in your code base.
…But there is profiteering to contend with, good code takes time, time is money, good code is expensive. “Good enough” code is easy to write, so its better for the bottom line.
In the end it really is…
Developer: “Hey the river flooded and our huts were demolished, we should move to higher ground and build there”
Corporate Leadership: “No that is too expensive, just build on the ruins and next flood we should be safer, oh also you’re laid off”
I know you didn’t ask for this, but its been on my mind for a while and I felt like this was a good time to get this out of my head haha
The secret to better tech is rebuilding everything from scratch. The internet wasn’t designed with security and bad actors in mind. Plenty of corporations are running a Frankenstein system that contains code older than most millennials, botched modernization efforts, buzzword laden over-engineered applications, and bugs that aren’t features just permanent residents in your code base.
Rebuilding everything from scratch will take ages and cost everyone a lot of money, because you have to replace all your hardware (router boxes, PC s, phones, smart watches, …), because the internet protocols are often designed into the hardware itself, and changing them fundamentally means a lot of trash. Also there is no system that guarantees that the result will have fewer issues or will not required to be succeeded by something else a couple of minutes later, because some new issue was discovered.
Also software is highly complex and need to adapt to many different scenarios, while maintaining compatibility to each other, which the other disciplines of human engineering don’t have to deal with as much, they are much more purpose driven.
It is like trying to create a universal building code (for building houses) that simultaneously works on every country on earth, hell, maybe even on multiple planets, with wildly different and constantly changing environments and is guaranteed to result in save houses. Not really possible in one shot, only possible by constantly trying to adapt. That is what software has to deal with. I am talking about fundamental software like the Linux kernel here, for example.
Enough with this American take, electronic voting works fine in Brazil, only right wingers complain about it, and the American ones also complained about their paper votes when they lose.
Huston or whereever you are, you have problem. I live on other side of the pond. More specifically in certain biggest country, where Ella Pamfilova can pull out any number she wants from remote electronic voting.
electronic voting works fine in Brazil
It works here as intended too. Wins elections for Putin’s mafia.
only right wingers complain about it
4chanland, you have another problem. Putin is right wing. And he is super happy about it.
and the American ones also complained about their paper votes when they lose.
I don’t know what Americans complain about when they loose.
What does the Brazilian electronic voting system do that allows you to trust it? I’m not trying to bait or anything I know nothing about it and want to be informed.
Luckily in many European countries it is not used.
I would credit institutions like the chaos computer club and other non-profits, which where instrumental in convincing the government about the dangers. It was a difficult battle against the corporate lobbyists, and is understandable that other countries could not fight against the corporate interests or corruption and succumb to use them.
There where and still are so many issues with them, one of the most fundamental is described by Ken Thompson in his Reflections on trusting trust, which is especially effective for electronic voting machines, where no other way of verification is possible.
Yes, github arctic code vault. It seems some people just don’t get it.
Qr codes can be great but they obviously need to interact somehow (not directly I hope) with a real database.
I mean QR codes as a mean of storing lots of data on paper, in a way that does not require humam or OCR for computer to read. Basically as a joke about paper databases.
It’s like non-security tech savvy people embracing IoT devices throughout their homes - smart bulbs, smart toasters, etc - fucking disaster waiting to happen.
Keeping stuff offline with paper and floppies is exceptional SecOps. It’s obviously more work, and ease-of-use is degraded, but if we ever see real cyber warfare, having stuff on paper and/or airgapped storage is the best one can hope for
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