I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)
In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.
Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.
It really wouldn’t be all that bad. If they’re dropping $2m/y on a database admin, then their BCDR plan must be rock solid with crazy fault tolerances. I’d imagine outages are extremely rare.
But, if they’re dropping that kind of money, you’d have to be an expert in the field. Or know someone.
If you labor there’s only two ways you get paid your full worth: you own the means of your production or your boss is a chump. However much the job pays, you are going to have a larger impact than your salary (hopefully).
And the data they want is the entire FY, is 3,000,000 records and they need every single data attribute making the file like 250 MBs. Then you put it in their SharePoint and they get mad they can’t just view it in the browser despite the giant “This file is too large to view online, download it” message.
Newspaper: Hackers are announcing a trove of personal data leaked from [company] after a forwarded spreadsheet inadvertently contained more data than the sender realised.
I liked the idea so i asked bing to write a movie synopsis about it. What’s fascinating is that bing knew which xkcd comic i was referring to from my horrible description of it. Anyway, here’s next year mindless, generic Hollywood blockbuster action movie :
Server Down
Jack Bauer is a nerdy and obsessive system administrator who works in the basement of a high-tech skyscraper. He loves his servers more than anything else, and he will do anything to keep them running smoothly.
When a group of terrorists take over the building and hold the employees hostage, they cut off all communication lines, disable the security cameras, and demand a ransom from the government. But they didn’t count on one thing: Jack.
Jack notices that his servers are offline, and decides to take matters into his own hands. He crawls through the ventilation ducts, walks across broken glass, and kills anyone who stands in his way, just to reconnect his servers to the internet. He doesn’t care about the hostages, the terrorists, or the ransom. He only cares about his uptime.
But as he reaches the server room, he realizes that he has unwittingly become the only hope for the hostages. The terrorists have planted a bomb in the building, and they are ready to detonate it unless their demands are met. Jack has to use his skills, his gadgets, and his devotion to duty to stop them and save the day. He is the sysadmin, and he is the hero.
Server Down is a thrilling action-comedy that parodies the genre of Die Hard and pays homage to the geek culture. It is a film that celebrates the power of technology, the importance of passion, and the absurdity of heroism.
Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn’t even in the technology). It’s not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it’s a far cry from “Server Down” we have here.
I like the idea but I think it would be more fun to reframe it as a thriller movie from the terrorist’s perspective. They’re being hunted down one by one by an angry sysadmin and they can do nothing to stop him.
This is starting to make sysadmins sound like John Wick.
“And then my son, a few days after his wife died, you steal his 3d printers and smash his fcking Apple 1.”
“The sysadmin will come for you, and you will do nothing because you can do nothing,”
It would be a great action comedy if the story was set in japan and the sysadmin used to be a feared yakuza member. Kinda like GTA (great teacher onizuka).
Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:
The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.
Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.
The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.
The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!
If I had the willpower or time to go through a multi-thousand line (not including the html templates) legacy Angular 6 codebase where almost every property is typed ‘any’ then I assure you I would have, it’s driving me insane 🙃, also why I prefer backend
I kinda feel your pain. A project that I helped launch is written in Typescript technically, but the actual on-the-ground developers were averse to using type safety, so any is used everywhere. So, it becomes worst of both worlds, and the code is a mess (I don’t have authority in the project anymore, and wouldn’t touch it even if I could).
I’m also annoyed at some level because some of the devs are pretty junior, and I fear they are going to go forward thinking Typescript or type safety in general is bad, which hurts my type-safety-loving-soul
In theory I’m a fan of the inferred but static typing systems that most modern languages use (kotlin, rust, TS, etc.) where most local variable types can be inferred and only return types/object fields/parameters need explicit types.
I just despise typescript because it feels more like someone put a bandaid over JavaScript and all of its oddities instead of making a properly fleshed out language, and allowing the option for an ‘any’ type to be used freely by default emphasizes that.
Based on your description it sounds like you haven’t given it a fair shake. I’ll take TS over JS any day, at least there is room for improvement. I will say however I personally haven’t been unlucky enough to run into projects that abuse the any type. The worst I’ve run into is a JS library with no typings I have to manually type.
I imagine what they mean is e.g. that TypeScript can tell you something is a Date, but it doesn’t attempt to fix some of the confusing, quirky behaviour with that: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/…/Date#inter…
So, yes, it’s generally better than JS, but it doesn’t actually make it good/attractive, if you’re used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.
Exactly this. I’d rather use TypeScript than regular JS, but I enjoy using almost any other statically-typed language more (except maybe C++) because TS has the potential to be just as bad as JS for codebases where it isn’t being used correctly (this is true for other languages as well but it’s usually a lot more obvious).
Not that it isn’t possible to have good typescript code, but rather that code becomes a lot harder to maintain because of problems that could’ve been prevented at a language level (truthy/falsey logic, ‘any’ type being allowed by default rather than ‘unknown,’ etc)
The boy scout technique: fix your types when you're working on a bug or a feature, one file at a time. Also try to use unknown instead of any for more sensitive parts, it will force you to typecheck.
The fuck the lemons technique: resign and seek an employer that didn’t fail at the most basic level of engineering management and development culture for years and years — because life is short and we’re all running out of time… always.
When life hands you lemons, just say fuck the lemons and bail
Yeah, seriously. What is even the context of this? We have no idea. The cops might have been like “We need a warrant to look at that footage you idiot.”
Whoever owns the camera presumably has an interest in reducing/solving crime in the area (why else have cameras?), so they would likely be happy to make the footage available to police if asked nicely, with no warrant required.
Yeah, in general, but not necessarily in that circumstance. A lot of time talking to tech people (I’m a softwar engineer) they can can be smug about this while leaving out important context.
No, I’ve been in this situation as a victim. My bike was stolen and they said it would take hours to search the CCTV. I told them about binary search, they didn’t understand.
The green Merged means that the pull request was submitted into the branch.
The DO NOT MERGE text is an instruction for automerger. Android is developed in a truly startling amount of related git branches. Automerger is the tool that propagates commits back and forth to make sure pull requests get to all flavours, versions and devices.
DO NOT MERGE tells Automerger not to propagate that pull request to newer versions of Android, i.e. it’s a fix for the currently released version that’s not relevant to the next development version of Android for whatever reason.
Also seen, although more rarely, is DO NOT MERGE ANYWHERE which tells Automerger not to propagate the pull request to any other branch other than where it was originally submitted, including branches for related products on the same version of Android.
Interesting, thanks for explaining. Like someone else was saying it is already in AOSP not introduced in lineage which makes sense since it is just a cherrypick
I’m sure it didn’t go well. If it was somehow framed in a sycophantic way where the police were led to believe it was their idea, I’m sure it would have gone better. Wait that might not be too difficult to do.
Na. If it’s British police it’s just an excuse. All they’re there for after all these years of Tory cuts is to give you a reference number so you can make an insurance claim.
You have Rust. (the knight in this panel looks very cool, wears sunglasses, and probably has a ponytail)
You’ve been told how easy it is to rescue the princess. Absolutely nothing will get in your way, they say; nobody can possibly get access to your plan, and you can even rescue multiple princesses simultaneously! (in this panel, the knight is imagining rescuing three princesses from three different castles at the same time)
You start working on your plan. It’s elegant and beautiful. You write articles on Medium to tell other knights how to rescue their princess. You tell everyone who will listen about your plan. You become a Rust zealot. You never rescue the princess. (In this panel, the knight is nowhere to be seen, and the princess looks bored in her tower. The knight is across the field, at a festival with the banner “RUSTCONF” flying overhead)
I think the text should be combined into one sentence, which would be run-on but still give the impression that both images refer to one person, as it should be.
The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.
You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.
The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.
Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?
To me, constructive criticism means that the criticism doesn’t just point out failure, but that it then also shows how to correct that failure.
By itself, “you’re doing it wrong” is just destructive: it takes something apart, it destroys it. Without a subsequent “and here’s how you would do it right,” it doesn’t become constructive, it doesn’t help in putting things back together in the correct way.
Sure, as a first step, “you’re doing it wrong” is completely justified when something is actually wrong.
But without the second step - the constructive part - it just doesn’t constitute constructive criticism. By itself, it’s just criticism.
Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).
I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…
I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?
I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.
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