Probably, it’s also why Google has 100 different chat clients.

Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month

That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.

Sure, and learning surgery could let them do their own operations.

In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.

What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.

For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:

So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.

As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.

I I I I IV IV I I V IV I IV

Baking is not chemical engineering. Chemical engineering doesn’t even have much to do with chemistry. It’s mostly about temperatures and flow rates, pressure, etc.

Saying “the baseline of programming knowledge could be more than zero” is meaningless. The baseline of chemical engineering knowledge could also be more than zero. It’s also a fundamental part of our society. But, the average person doesn’t need to know how to program, just like the average person doesn’t need to know how to design a refinery.

People do learn some basic computer skills. They should learn more. They should know about files. They should know how to back up their data. And, more importantly, they should learn how to restore data from a backup after something goes wrong. They should know how to properly update their devices, how to tell if their devices are infected, and the basics of managing a home network. They sometimes learn how to do basic functions in excel spreadsheets. That’s about as far as they do, or should need to go in programming / IT. Beyond that, why should the average person need to know how to do recursion, or how loops work?

the general public has failed to learn programming

That’s like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.

There are certain things that it just doesn’t make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.

It never actually seems to work out that way though. Sure, for Y2K there was a short period where there were decent contracts fixing that bug in various codebases, but it wasn’t something that lasted very long.

Managers and owners would much rather pass off a terrible PoS and have their users deal with it, or somehow get the government to bail them out, or hire a bunch of Uyghur programmers from a Chinese labour camp, or figure out some other way to avoid having to pay programmers / software engineers what they’re actually worth.

I did that myself back in the day. Not overly complicated, but a SQL builder.

I think it’s because SQL is sort-of awkward. For basic uses you can take a SQL query string and substitute some parameters in that string. But, that one query isn’t going to cover all your use cases. So, then you have at least 2 queries which are fairly similar but not similar enough that it makes sense just to do string substitutions. Two strings that are fairly similar but distinct suggests that you should refactor it. But, maybe you only make a very simple query builder. Then you have 5 queries and your query builder doesn’t quite cover the latest version, so you refactor it again.

But, instead of creating a whole query builder, it’s often better to have a lot of SQL repetition in the codebase. It looks ugly, but it’s probably much more maintainable.

The canonical video which demonstrates that truth.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

And in that case the advice should be “start looking for a lawyer”.

Yeah, it’s how blatantly illegal it is.

With illegal things, there are always going to be lawyers who will bend over backwards and contort all the facts to try to make it seem legal. John Yoo was famous for doing that to justify literal torture. And not only did he get away with that, he’s now a law professor at Berkeley. So, even if it’s pretty obvious that attacking random boats on allegations of drug trafficking is illegal, it’s illegal in a way that would be difficult to prove in a court of law. In the court of public opinion it’s obvious, 95% of the world would say that it’s absolutely obvious, and even 67% of the US would agree. But, you get a creep like John Yoo in front of a GOP judge and who knows what might happen.

But, in this case they did the thing that the actual Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual (2023) gives as an example of something that would obviously be illegal:

18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations. The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.

And that example has a footnote with both a legal case, and with an explanation:

Judgement in Case of Lieutenants Dithmar and Boldt, Hospital Ship “Llandovery Castle” (Second Criminal Senate of the Imperial Court of Justice, Germany, Jul. 16, 1921), reprinted in 16 AJIL, 708, 721-22 (1922) (“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”).

This is so obviously against the law that they used it as an example of an illegal order. They also clearly identified the precedent. Then they spent more text in the footnote than in the paragraph itself, carefully explaining that there are some things that are just so obviously illegal that a member of the military can’t pretend they didn’t know it was a crime, and that shooting shipwrecked sailors is so obviously one of those that no sailor could ever claim they didn’t know the order was illegal.

Yes, because we all have our own lawyers.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

Nobody thinks it could happen while the US congress is dominated by Republicans, Trump is the president, and the Supreme Court is 6-3 GOP.

But, if the Democrats win big enough in the 2026 midterm elections to overcome all the dirty tricks that the Nazis are going to use to try to stay in power, then maybe in 2027 there’s a chance they could start holding Trump to account. But, Trump would still have executive authority and unless he were impeached and this time they actually had the votes to remove him from office, they still couldn’t get his Justice Department to investigate his War Department. Even if they did impeach him and remove him from office, he’s just be replaced by Vance who is part of this whole signal chat.

So, at a minimum it would probably be 2029 before anything could happen, and would require that the Democrats got a congressional majority in 2026, and held or improved it in 2028 while also taking the presidency. And even then, the Supreme Court would still be 9-3 GOP unless some of the GOP members quit or died. So, it would probably require something radical like expanding the court to get any attempted convictions of higher-up GOP members past that court.

And, that’s even assuming that the democrats grew a backbone. If they did, they couldn’t do anything to Trump because the Supreme Court already decided the president is immune from anything up to, and including ordering Delta Force to kill the Democratic presidential hopeful. They could maybe go after Hegseth and down, but realistically would they? How many times have the Democrats had a chance to nail Trump, and instead decided that in the interest of national unity to let his crimes slide.

Then there’s the International Criminal Court. They might risk indicting Hegseth or even Trump for war crimes. However, the US passed the Hague Invasion Act, effectively saying that if any American were ever put on trial for war crimes, the US would invade The Hague. That might deter them from even trying. Under Trump, they’ve already made life hell for a prosecutor who was going after someone who was merely a US ally. If a Democratic president were in office and a Democratic congress were in charge, they probably wouldn’t actually invade, but they still might just ignore any ICC ruling. The US has made it abundantly clear that they’re the world’s only superpower and that international law doesn’t actually apply to the US. And if anybody disagrees, they’re welcome to take on the US military.

It’s not necessarily a “bulk storage” drive, it’s just not the main system drive. It would probably have less activity than the “C” drive, but other than the OS, plenty of other things might be installed on that drive. If it happens to be where someone installed their web browser, there could be plenty of churn there.

On some filesystems the data is still there but the filenames associated with it are gone or mangled. That makes it harder to recover things. In addition, while it’s true that the contents are only overwritten when you write data to the disk, data is constantly being written to the disk. Caches are being updated, backup files are being saved, updates are being downloaded, etc. If you only delete one file the odds are decent that that part of the disk might not be used next. But, if you nuke the entire drive, then you’re probably going to lose something.