The Tech Random Crap Thread

They insisted on teaching us J++ instead of C++ when I went to A&M. I'm fairly confident this is what derailed my youthful fantasies of being a game designer.
Ha! All WSU was offering the three years I was there was Cobol, Fortran, and C; so I got to take C. Unfortunately, our professor was a complete and utter dip who spent - and I shit you not - three weeks of class going through how arrays iterate. For two dimensional arrays. Three weeks, three days a week, two hours a day of "If X = 1 and Y = 1, Z = 1; if X = 2 and Y = 1, Z = 2; If... " followed by a midterm that didn't even mention arrays. The highest grade in the class on that exam as a C-, and I pulled a D. The C- I got for that class was harder to earn than the A I pulled off in Honors Micro-Econ.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Yeah, I think teaching java as a standard language is/was a mistake. Hindsight is 20/20, though, and there was a time many moons ago when everyone was betting on Java.
There was someone on staff who was just dead set opposed to C and all its flavors. He said teaching students C++ would just "get them into trouble." He only begrudgingly agreed to J++ as a compromise. I don't know what language he would have preferred.

The funny part was, right after that in 2002, Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, became the CS dept chair. So, I imagine whatever obstreperous knucklehead had a hateboner for that language got to eat crow. Makes me wish I'd waited longer to take the course :p
 
You would think programming would be an easy class to teach. I mean, you're supposed to be programming your students with how to program.

--Patrick
 
Agreed. The half of my college degree taught in Java was much less enjoyable than the C# (faculty was pretty much evenly divided).
 

fade

Staff member
whoa. I used to use that so much. even as recently as my last job. But yeah, I had forgotten about it. Google Talk/Hangouts took over the role it and ICQ used to play.
 
AIM was the first one to have actual voice chat that worked decently over 56k...until they mysteriously deleted that feature.
Kati and I took heavy advantage of that while we were still dating.

--Patrick
 
It migrated to RRIM (which I had when I was in TWC's service area in the early 2k's). I suspect AIM is a victim of the TW-Charter-Brighthouse merger.
 
What in the Seven Hells is YouTube even doing now?! I was just watching a video showing the complete and utter devastation of the Virgin Islands post Irma, and it kept recommending "Disney Princesses is gone to the evil side," and "This Tattoos will take your breath away," and some random anime shit. Have they gone completely fucking insane?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
What in the Seven Hells is YouTube even doing now?! I was just watching a video showing the complete and utter devastation of the Virgin Islands post Irma, and it kept recommending "Disney Princesses is gone to the evil side," and "This Tattoos will take your breath away," and some random anime shit. Have they gone completely fucking insane?
Probably just another symptom of the "we don't want to have to pay any people to deal with Youtube stuff, we want it to be an algorithm end-to-end" malarkey Google's always trying to push.

A semi-related video that just came out last week:

 
What in the Seven Hells is YouTube even doing now?! I was just watching a video showing the complete and utter devastation of the Virgin Islands post Irma, and it kept recommending "Disney Princesses is gone to the evil side," and "This Tattoos will take your breath away," and some random anime shit. Have they gone completely fucking insane?
"This destruiction and stuff is going to make you feel miserable...But we've checked your browsing records, we know what'll make you feel better - wink wink nudge nudge. What'll it be today, Disney princesses, tattoos, or anime?" I can see how that works :p
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Ha ha ha, and guess what? I just got notified that several DOZEN of my videos are "not suitable for most advertisers."

Ironically, only TWO HFA2 videos got flagged for this. How they decide this seems completely arbitrary and bullshit, but as they didn't flag any of my space engineers videos, I'm not gonna bother with filing all the manual disputes.

Even my Overwatch Basket Montage got flagged, which I'm guessing only happened because @Dei said the word "cameltoe" in it.
 
Then I guess you should never upload pubg videos to YouTube, because I really enjoy referring to the Quarry as a vagina.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
But all of your 10s of dollars!
It's been space engineers all along. Nothing else really makes any money. And I can still collect my nickels on that without posting anything new.

Heck, despite so many videos losing their monetization, my income actually went UP this last month. I've cleared $20 in the last 28 days. All but a buck fifty of that has been SE. $1.25 came from my "how to tension your fan belt" summer car video, and I got another couple dimes from my Fallen Enchantress review back when it was part of a humble bundle.

Dolla dolla billz, ya'll.

But really, Twitch's "highlight clip" feature serves 90% of my "I need to show this to people" needs.
 
Well, I guess I can stop worrying so much about the bluetooth vulnerability that allows people to take over my cell phone/tablet/computer now that we've apparently discovered that the WPA2 protocol itself is vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Well, I guess I can stop worrying so much about the bluetooth vulnerability that allows people to take over my cell phone/tablet/computer now that we've apparently discovered that the WPA2 protocol itself is vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks.
Ugghh... what a headache. At least (like the bluetooth vulnerability) it still requires physical proximity to attack, so it's not like this is something that russian and chinese hackers will take advantage of from afar.

But I'm not looking forward to having to patch all the damn routers.
 
Well, I guess I can stop worrying so much about the bluetooth vulnerability that allows people to take over my cell phone/tablet/computer now that we've apparently discovered that the WPA2 protocol itself is vulnerable to key reinstallation attacks.
Ah good, I wondered where I was going to post this, but someone else already did.
As I understand it, the attack doesn't reveal the network password, it just allows an attacker to view all encrypted traffic. So...yeah, VPNs.

--Patrick
 
Yeah. I remember way back when the very first internet providers were starting up - one of the biggest ones in Belgium was called "Skynet". Now, that was a bit of an on-the-nose reference. But this...I mean, it might be a reference, I guess, but I've heard "neural net" and "neural networking" a hundred times before. And the name "Nervana" isn't a reference to Terminator, best as I can tell.
 
Wow. Both neutral nets and CPUs existed before Terminator. They are such common phrases both, especially in AI, that this could easily be a non reference.
Oh I absolutely believe they don't intend a reference, but it's the fact that putting something in your headline that reminds people of a negative thing isn't a good thing either, even if it's critical to the description of what you're doing.

Similar to what Bubble was referencing, IMO if you make a net, that's in the sky, and has anything related to AI as part of it, you do NOT call it "Skynet" no matter how appropriate. Neural nets are critical to how this chip works and what makes it different, but keep that out of your own headline on your own website. Plenty of 3rd parties will do it anyways when reporting on it, but you can at least control the source.
 
I wasn't sure where to put this one, so here it is: Canada's 'super secret spy agency' is releasing a malware-fighting tool to the public
But as of late, CSE has acknowledged it needs to do a better job of explaining to Canadians exactly what it does. Today, it is pulling back the curtain on an open-source malware analysis tool called Assemblyline that CSE says is used to protect the Canadian government's sprawling infrastructure each day.

"It's a tool that helps our analysts know what to look at, because it's overwhelming for the number of people we have to be able to protect things," Scott Jones, who heads the agency's IT security efforts, said in an interview with CBC News.

On the one hand, open sourcing Assemblyline's code is a savvy act of public relations, and Jones readily admits the agency is trying to shed its "super secret spy agency" reputation in the interest of greater transparency.
Here's the page on CSE's website.

TL;DR; CSE is basically the Canadian NSA.

I applied for a job at CSE last year. Got through the hiring process to a certain point (wrote their written exam), then found my current job. 5 months in, not at interview stage yet. But I never got a "we're not considering you anymore" letter like has to happen for government stuff. When I sent in my "I found another job already" they responded thanking me for telling them. Would probably have been neat to work there, but when you're unemployed, waiting 6+ months for something isn't a thing you wait for when there's no certainty.
 
This is funny IMO: Microsoft employee installs Chrome mid-presentation because Edge keeps crashing
This is truly half-brutal, half-hilarious. A Microsoft employee was forced to pause his Azure presentation in the middle of a live demo session in order to install Google’s Chrome… because the company’s own Edge browser kept crashing.

But here is the best part: this comical occurrence was recorded and uploaded to YouTube – by none other than Microsoft itself.
It's that last line that really sells it.
 
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