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The problem solver [workchronicles] (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 197 points 1 year ago

That's one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn't a problem in the first place.

Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem...and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.

[-] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 11 points 1 year ago

what's Y2K bugs exactly?

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Dates with the year stored as two digits only (say, 1995 was stored as "95"), which worked fine for things like comparisons (for example: "is the year in entry A before or after the year in entry B?") which were just done by numerical comparison (i.e. 98 > 95 hence a date with a year ending in 98 is after a date with the year ending in 95), until 2000 were the year being store would become "00" and all those assumptions that you could compare those stored years as numbers would break, as would as all the maths being done on two digits (i.e. a loan taken in 1995 would in 1998 be on its 98 - 95 = 3rd year with that system, but in 2000 it would be on its 98 - 00 = - 98th - so negative - year which would further break the maths downstream with interesting results like the computer telling the bank it would have to give money to the lender to close the loan).

Ultimatelly a lot of work was done (I myself worked in some of that stuff) and very few important things blew up or started producing erroneous numbers when the year 2000 came.

[-] Crazyslinkz@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

Generic summary: Two digit clocks hitting 00 thinking its 1900 not 2000.

[-] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I wonder why they didn't think about making computers and clocks count past 100 when creating them? Did they not expect to ever get to the year 2000?

[-] ylph@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Early computers had very limited resources, RAM, storage, etc. (first computer I worked with only had 4k of RAM for example) It often made sense to only use the last 2 digits of the year as an optimization in many common tasks that computers were used for, as both the 1800s and the 2000s were far enough away that most basic date calculations worked fine. Also, the industry was changing rapidly, and few people expected their software to be used for more than a few years - certainly not for decades, so focus was usually on solving the immediate tasks as efficiently as possible, without much consideration for the distant future.

However, it turned out that a lot of the code written in this period (70s and 80s) became "legacy code" that companies started relying on for far longer than was expected, to the point that old retired COBOL programmers were being hired for big $$ in late 90s to come and fix Y2K issues in code written decades ago. Many large systems had some critical ancient mainframe code somewhere along the dependency chains. On top of that, even stuff that was meant to handle Y2K was not always tested well, and all kinds of unexpected dependencies crept up where a small bug here, or some forgotten non-compliant library there could wreak havoc once date rolled over into the 2000s.

A lot of the Y2K work was testing all the systems and finding all the places such bugs were hiding.

[-] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

that's interesting, thank you!

[-] jarfil@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

It's similar to the Y2K38 bug:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[-] stebo02@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

damn someone should fix that

[-] danque@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

The year is 2038, nothing happened. Seems like a lot of nothing. (Meanwhile behind the scenes. Developers are happy they prevented a major problem).

[-] jaspersgroove@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/preparedness_paradox

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Happens at work so often.

Put energy into building robust systems organically (A lot of problems get solved because they where experienced, not because they where predicted) and then a year later you have folks asking "Can't we just simplify this and remove XYZ? Do these problems even exist? Can you show us how often edge cases a, b, c happens to justify why this needs to operate this way?"....etc

Should have just let it fail and fixed the issues once pagerduty got involved instead 😒

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 86 points 1 year ago

The message at the bottom sounds like pretty shitty move.

[-] skulblaka@kbin.social 98 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Message at the bottom sounds like someone trying to distance themselves from reddit and Twitter. It's an excellent move that I support completely. It's free, the content gets delivered to you directly upon it being uploaded, and a newsletter doesn't want any extra data out of you other than an email address to send your letters to.

Also the comics will probably end up posted here anyway, since it doesn't ask you not to repost them, so why does it matter?

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 70 points 1 year ago

Why not just post the comics on the website like every other comic author does. Even this comic is normally posted on the workchronicles.com website, but for some reason, the author added this to the website:

📣 ANNOUNCING

NEWSLETTER NOVEMBER!

For the entire month of November, the comics will be posted only on my Email Newsletter.

Join now. It’s free!

Stopping posting on website and posting only in newsletter, which many people including me find extremely annoying and not the right tool for the job, can't be excused by distancing from twitter or reddit.

[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 23 points 1 year ago

at least posting on website means it shows up in my RSS reader …

[-] ares35@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago

newsletters can have trackers and shit built right in, and this is especially true when using a service to do the mailing. this is, of course, on top of the contact info and anything else requested at 'signup'. none of which needs to be 'required' when reading a web site or an author-submitted post somewhere. there's basically two reasons to lock content behind a 'newsletter': a paid sub is coming, or selling readers' data.

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[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

other than an email address to send your letters to.

No big deal! Totally not key to your digital identity or anything.

Also click tracking is a thing so this perceived boost in privacy isn't even real.

[-] qooqie@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago

Glad I’m not the only one that saw that, seems like a super terrible move unless you have a huge audience on your newsletter anyways

[-] ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 16 points 1 year ago

Not really, as the Oatmeal put in their comic.

The newsletter means you are not behold to the almighty algorithm and have to pay money to a corporation to encourage your content to be promoted to followers.

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 27 points 1 year ago

Please see my response to similar comment. They specifically stopped posting to their website to force people to sign up for the newsletter.

[-] Whelks_chance@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It's their content, they can do anything they like with it. The "shitty move" is demanding someone else's effort be delivered to to for free in exactly the way you define, and insulting them for not doing so.

[-] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

I was going to disagree with you, then I realized this author has a full website. So yeah, I agree.

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Why?

If I put work into making entertaining material, it's 100% within my rights to publish it where I want to publish it. It's mine, I made it, if I only want to post it on my personal website or newsletter who are you to say I cannot?

Calling that a shitty move is in itself an entitled, shitty move.

[-] stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 2 points 11 months ago

Please see my responses to the responses to my comment. I agree it's 100% within the author's rights, but that doesn't mean it can't be a shitty move.

[-] Blackout@kbin.social 47 points 1 year ago

I think in real life, the manager ends up taking credit and the worker gets a pizza party.

[-] tryptaminev@feddit.de 22 points 1 year ago

pizza party? We just had a terrible incident take most of our profit margin, money is tight right now. I want you all on brain storming sessions how thos happened and how we can prevent this. Unless your solution involves management listening to workers warnings three month before the problem got out of hand. I won't here any of this, while enjoying my salary increase for quick and decisivie actions against serious threats to the company.

[-] Nahdahar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Wow this is exactly my company right now

[-] patrick_holmes@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago

The accuracy in this comment is making me cry.

[-] lugal@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

There is no glory in prevention

[-] Anonymousllama@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

I'm sure someone will repost old mates comics, bit strange to signup for newsletters just to get a comic that could easily be delivered on their website, the way every other artist does it.

[-] phorq@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I understand wanting a more devoted/consistent following, but I think it would probably be better to have an incentive like an extra panel or behind the scenes information in the newsletter if you wanna attract people and not lose your casual audience.

[-] Zehzin@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

Protip: Cause the fires yourself

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

From personal experience, this is exactly how things work in big companies.

[-] Shareiff@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

My coworker

[-] Shardikprime@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We are assuming equal vision here for both, and risk tolerances which seems unlikely, also, assuming the fire isn't moving, and no heat is being felt at that burning skin distance, bro is probably worried that some thermodynamics laws are being broken and had to be sure.

At that point you sure have a big problem

[-] spudwart@spudwart.com 4 points 1 year ago

Ah yes, except instead of the fire going out, it would just engulf them both.

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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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