The Factory Floor - 2019-01-21

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12:16 AM

I'm in

sorry got kinda distracted. lol

12:46 AM

@Mithrandir24601 I've managed to get ~25 pages in, and it's giving me interesting thoughts about (of all things) spaceship design.

8 hours later…

9:15 AM

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Questions

How tall can a wall be built? My ancient golden dragon has a lot of time, since he doesn't die of old age in my world, and a lot of magical constructs that will tirelessly built a wall for him. This wall will just be blocks stacked on each other. There don't need to be any rooms in it apart fro...

4 hours later…

1:01 PM

Hi @Shalvenay

1:34 PM

@NexTerren Eh, I personally wouldn't bother upgrading what you have right now, but I'm also still using a 3 year old i5, so what you have looks really nice.

2:30 PM

So I'm trying to think of an aggressor nation/movement in the past few centuries that wasn't also a totalitarian regime... So far as I can tell it seems to be a prerequisite for large scale evil.

You could say the US was during Vietnam.

@AndyD273 War of 1812 was instigated by the USofA.

Although, the US point of view is it was the USSR conducting a war against our allies and we were defending them...

Britain was very aggressive for years, although they were arguably a totalitarian regime.

@AndyD273 Also, totalitarianism is definitely not a prerequisite for large-scale evilness. See: Japanese internment during WWII, American slavery, etc.

I'd say Britain only stopped being aggressive sometime after Falkland Islands.

If then...

2:34 PM

And I'm not sure where to draw the line between aggressive and evil.

@AndyD273 I'm gonna go with aggressive is whereyou make noises about attacking/attack someone after following proper protocols/declaring war, etc. and evilness is where you do that, and then commit war crimes.

What's a war crime?

You have the obvious cases: Nazi Germany = Totalitarian nationalism: >20 million innocent dead. Global communism = Totalitarian socialism: >150 million innocent dead. (probably way more

I mean, is it wrong to kill someone after they surrender?

@Hosch250 slaughter of the innocent is a big one

2:39 PM

Special forces do that all the time, because they can't take prisoners.

And they can't let them go because that means death for them.

War crime is a defined legal term

@AndyD273 That happens by all sides in every war, and only the loser gets punished.

For example, Britain prosecuted Germans after WWII for executions of prisoners of war.

But they did it themselves even after the war ended, when people wouldn't cooperate.

List of war crimes

This article lists and summarises the war crimes committed since the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the crimes against humanity and crimes against peace that have been committed since these crimes were first defined in the Rome Statute.Since many war crimes are not ultimately prosecuted (due to lack of political will, lack of effective procedures, or other practical and political reasons), historians and lawyers will often make a serious case that war crimes occurred, even if there was no formal investigations or prosecution of the alleged crimes or an investigation cleared the alleged...

Then, just like Germany, they'd announce they'd been shot while trying to escape.

@Hosch250 So people are hypocrites. What else is new?

2:42 PM

Nothing.

I'm just saying, I'm cynical about prosecutions of war crimes and crimes against humanity because the prosecutors are as guilty as the defendant.

@Hosch250 Well... often not guilty on quite the same scale. Unless you've uncovered evidence of a British Holocaust or something.

Their involvement in the Irish Potato Famine and India was pretty close.

@Hosch250 Less intentional though. I mean, starvation kills you just as dead as gas, but it makes it a lot easier for the people at fault to say "I didn't know this would happen".

Agreed, but I seriously doubt it was unintentional.

They were just trying to cripple the nations so they couldn't resist.

Hard to fight on an empty stomach.

@Hosch250 Also hard to exploit people with empty stomachs.

If you don't have food, you probably don't have much else, either.

2:48 PM

They didn't want to exploit the people so much as the land.

Be it the land for bragging sake, or the minerals, spices, etc you can extract from it.

user image

@AndyD273 That's fair, that's fair. Ended up getting a new smartwatch instead to replace my Chinese spyware.

3:05 PM

@NexTerren ah fun. What did you go with?

I've never been a fan of the Great White Saviour British Colonial character. It's always rubbed me the wrong way in movies and such. I'd definitely argue that it was a highly totalitarian period for Britain. We know best, and we're going to make sure that you do it our way, whether you like it or not.

@AndyD273 In other words, 1800's John Bull?

3:22 PM

Don't know that character. I'm talking about the stereotypical "british officer in india" or something where they are there to bring civilization to the local savages.

Maybe not that one... hold

1 hour later…

4:49 PM

@AndyD273 Samsung Galaxy Watch. It's the (relatively) new successor to the Samsung Gear series. I was going to stick with Wear OS (Google's native) but Google stopped putting real effort into it.

5:07 PM

@Hosch250 Also, reading up on that a bit, and a large part of the problem was the East India Trading Company that was pretty shady, and not all that popular among the british public, to the point where they were eventually nationalized, though none of their war crimes were punished unfortunately.

@AndyD273 Granted, that wasn't done by the government, they just turned a blind eye to it.

My family has an obsession with Victoria and Albert because of that new TV series, or whatever.

TBH, I think they had a very large part in setting the stage for WWI and WWII.

@Hosch250 At times it would have been hard for the government to do much. The East India Trading company were powerful.

Yeah.

It's just frustrating, feeling like you are watching the past from behind a glass panel.

Also, operated really far away, and the main conduit of information

Wanting to yell "Don't do that! You're going to cause ABC."

And then finding out someone actually said that and got killed for their trouble, or exiled, or whatever.

5:10 PM

It's sometimes hard to remember that it used to take a letter weeks or months to get around, assuming that it wasn't intercepted by pirates or sunk in a storm

Yes.

Hello friends!

Hi, @Green.

I'm waiting at the DMV

LOL.

Well, I need to get back to work. We are shifting our time storage to UTC, and everything is breaking.

5:11 PM

@Green The Dread Magical Vortex?

And when I say everything, I mean everything. I've had to apply a few major patches already, and lots of little ones are pouring in.

@Bellerophon precisely though I think the Gods of Luck are with me as there's only one guy ahead of me in line.

Then, half our resources are working on shifting us to the cloud instead of on-prem, so you can just imagine things.

@Hosch250 oh dear! Wow.

How many cloud accounts is your company trying to manage?

One.

We are moving from 100% on-prem to Azure.

5:13 PM

That's not bad.

Are you going hybrid or pure cloud?

We are dropping some bad clients related to server-management.

Pure-cloud.

We are dropping other clients since Azure's stuff is cheaper and ties in better.

Are you getting redundant internet access to go with it?

We got MS to cover the initial cost of moving.

Not sure, probably.

Sweet!

So, we'll be set up for some great stuff in the future, but it's hard to get there.

And I'm the most junior in the company, so...

In the software-backend side, that is.

5:16 PM

I'm curious to hear your observations about what's hard to do in Azure; what's most annoying.

... When you have them.

I like Azure.

I host personal sites there occasionally.

Mostly temporary to share with acquaintances.

I've not been involved here at all, though.

5:41 PM

@Green Greentings!

@Green Universal truth alongside death and taxes.

@NexTerren I'm going to steal that for Earth Day.

@Hosch250 Consider it officially published under Stack Exchange's open-use license. ;)

Also, some of the issues are automatically resolving themselves as the script(s) finish running on our staging site to finish shifting the dates to UTC.

6:00 PM

Unusually quick trip to the DMV. All done!

6:30 PM

OK, now I'm thinking of a really weird idea.

Where people die, their souls have to get processed by a sort of DMV-like organization.

Kind of like purgatory, except there's no way to get out--just go through.

Or, here's another twist:

The people running it have no concept of time since there isn't time in the afterlife.

@Hosch250 Purgatory isn't much like the DMV, but whatever.

But the people being processed don't lose their sense of time.

@Gryphon I just meant they had to wait to get to where they were going like the purgatory.

@Hosch250 Fair

OK, back. Work got me.

So, the processors don't realize how long it seems to the souls being processed.

@Hosch250 cue mental image of a screaming man being dragged backward by a tentacled being, with that phrase as the caption

6:36 PM

LOL.

So how long would it take for the souls to be processed? Would it change based on how good/evil they were (e.g., everyone gets into heaven eventually, but bad people take a few universe-lifetimes to make it there)?

No, it's just everyone takes months at a minimum.

And heaven help them if their passport isn't in order (maybe they sold it to the devil!).

Oh, and identity thieves "lose" their passports for an obviously forged passport.

And the devil actually can buy passports, which he distributes to his followers.

Fortunately, they are easily caught because they get a sort of mark on them.

I mean, the followers get the mark.

Or maybe the mark only gets picked up when they send them through a sort of "metal" detector.

Basically, make it like a sort of immigration nightmare, with the one side not having any sense of time.

Man, time flies when you are busy.

6:52 PM

@Hosch250 That's... actually kinda horrifying. Reminds me of those sloths from the Zootopia movie.

I should really write it as a short story.

I'd read it. You could put it on the blog.

I'm a reasonably good business writer, but other stories are harder for me to do, even when I have the idea.

It's like I start putting the story down, then I get shy.

But, I'll try.

I know the feeling. I wrote a few things for the blog, and they all read incredibly badly to me, but other people say they like them, so either they pity me and are telling me nice things, or the stories aren't too terrible.

I really enjoyed your dwarf stories. I told you that before.

I really liked that daredevil dwarf.

If I was in the dwarf kingdom, I'd have signed in a heartbeat.

TBH, if I ever have to go into combat, I'd honestly prefer a suicide mission.

I don't know if I could live with myself afterward.

6:57 PM

It'd definitely be difficult to convince me to sign up for a war.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I'd hate it, but then I'm not any more valuable than the people who do fight and die.

So, in a way, you could say I have survivor's guilt.

@Hosch250 It's less that I don't want to go and die, and more that I don't want to go and kill someone.

Same.

That's another really weird thing about me I can't reconcile.

Life doesn't seem very valuable--we've got maybe 80 years, then we die.

And at the same, that fleetingness makes it so valuable.

I recently read The Martian, and after I finished, I had an interesting thought. People spent more man-hours than the rest of Mark's life would consist of trying to save him. Is that an actual gain?

In a way, I'd say yes, because most of that could be re-used to prevent/handle the same problem in the future.

7:04 PM

Have you read the book/can I discuss minor spoilers?

No, and yes.

I'm not planning on reading it, and I read all the spoilers on Movies & TV.

OK, that makes it easier to talk about. A lot of the stuff they do, for example, taking the entire team that worked on Pathfinder and setting the entire system back up is probably not reusable in the future. Samesies for the team that did the satellite monitoring of his position (not to mention wasted propellent maneuvering to new positions to maintain near-constant coverage). If this time is still greater than his remaining lifespan, is it worth it?

I don't know.

Do they have anything else to do?

I mean, if my boss says "do this instead of that", I'd not get that time back anyway, whatever I did.

True. I guess the question in this specific case is whether that time/money could have been better spent elsewhere (it near-certainly could have saved many people if spent, say, helping people in third-world countries). The more general question is "if it takes more man-hours to save someone's life than that person's remaining lifespan would consist of, is it morally worth it to do it?"

Sounds like one of those philosophy questions with no right answer :)

It's something you'll have to find out on your own.

7:15 PM

Twas just an "I wonder..." type thought after reading a book. Kinda interesting philosophical implications though.

I'd say probably not, but not everyone agrees with me, so politicians would kind of have to do it to appease the loud disagre'ers.

Talking about which...

My mom has a friend who has a kid who is a professional temper tantrum-er (i.e.professional protester).

And my sister (the one who sleeps around that I mentioned) has a boyfriend who has a sister who, with her boyfriend, are email scammers.

You can be a professional protester?

Yes.

Who pays you? People protesting generally don't have tons of money to work with.

I'm going to turn the later two in to the government, and I've put the first on my hit list.

@Gryphon The political party.

7:18 PM

Oh, so you... get paid to show up at the opposing parties rallies and protest or something?

Yeah.

The pay probably isn't that great, but they do it.

And once they get a certain critical mass, other people just join them, I assume.

That seems both a) very sketchy, and b) very likely to backfire politically.

It is extremely sketchy, and it does backfire--among the people who already support the other party.

It doesn't get reported in the news.

Or rather, it doesn't unless it's the republican's doing it.

Why does the news not report this?

Then they are paid with money from Russia, or something.

7:21 PM

Oh, I see.

That makes sense.

Yeah, most media in the states is really left-leaning.

Except for Fox, which is equally laughable.

And up here, we've got the CBC, which stands for the Communist Broadcasting Corporation.

LOL.

Which manages to be a joke on multiple levels, given it's a communist corporation.

NVM, it's CNN: Clinton News Network.

7:23 PM

MSLSD is a good one I've heard.

I like WSJ, when I can get past the paywall.

Bloomberg has some good stuff too.

But I don't follow the news much, and actually turn the radio off when it comes on.

I generally just listen to the CBC and then mentally dial everything a couple of rotations to the right.

I like Classical MPR, and I have a large collection of music.

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Questions

Is a coral-planet feasible? Inspired by this answer and the mention of a hyperbolic plane, I've been imagining a world based on that geometry. The closest real-world example of such a geometry I can come up with is coral. I've been imagining a planet which is a coral, something which essentiall...

7:44 PM

Do I talk too much?

Seems like a lot of the chat is just me :(

I was just sitting reading it. Mainly because I don't know much about US TV channels.

8:00 PM

Nor Canadian ones for that matter.

8:14 PM

Afternoon all.

Howdy @James

whats shakin

not too much here. just tracked down a persistent intermittent bug, hopefully for good this time

1 hour later…

9:31 PM

@AndyD273 Those are the worst.

Yup. Worse bit, I got it working, showed my co-worker that it was working, but I wasn't feeling great so I took off early. An hour after I leave the bug shows up and starts making havoc so my coworker has to shut it down completely.
Fine, get in early the next day, test it out on the dev computer, no problem, test it out on the production computer, no problem, throw in a few extra debugging steps and stuff to try to figure out where it is going wrong, then leave to get out of town for the weekend. About an hour after I leave it starts acting up again.

So, is it the coworker?

Or is it the time?

I have two thoughts here. 1 is it starts erroring when some data starts coming in (potentially from a timed job or a client does a timed job). 2. It removes some sort of backdoor the coworker is using for something.

Actually, 3. Is it time related? Something about timezones could be screwing it.

Like, UTC date change was screwing a test or two of ours after 7PM.

9:48 PM

If I got the problem fixed the way I hope, it seems to be some kind of network policy thing.

I'm just tired of getting emails saying that it is still broken

4. Your computer has been possessed by an imp.

Also possible. I was trying for a possession by a code elf to write all my code for me, but it'd be just my luck to get a imp instead

10:06 PM

I'm pretty close to being a code elf :P

I'm the fastest dev I know, which is ironic since I'm also the youngest.

And I know more about architecture than many "senior" people.

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Transcript for

Jan '1921

The Factory Floor

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