Posts by Paul 195

Re: "JetBrains' own developers are, well, developers"

I've been a developer working for a software vendor producing IDEs (it wasn't Jetbrains BTW). And I've also spent the last few years as a consultant developer working with enterprises to produce the sort of business software that the world runs on.

Those two groups developers view the world through very different lenses. The developers in the first group are smart talented people who like to do interesting things and are always trying to find ways to make their product better. But they live in an ivory tower, they aren't allowed to meet customers often, and sometimes they can run off in weird directions. The second group of developers have a mess of bureaucracy, process, and governance to deal with. Their world is very different.

To the first group of devs, sticking a bit of AI in there gives them fun work to do, and they think of all the ways it might make their own job easier.

For the second group of devs, as the article points out, the AI is a potential governance nightmare.

All I'm saying is, don't just blame management for this one.

Re: Getting 'Dangerous' Info from GPTx

I think the wider point is not whether this example is useful or not, it's that the protections built into LLMs are so easily bypassed. Putting these systems to work in the real world brings a whole category of brand new, hard to mitigate, set of vulnerabilities to software. None of these have made the OWASP top ten yet, but they are not going to be as easily fixed as perennial favourites like SQL injection and CSRF.

Re: Yup.

It can be pretty hard to do development work on a locked down machine you can't manage yourself. However, system updates should remain under control of IT. It's possible to have both of those things on a MacOS laptop. And also on a Windows PC I believe.

Love, A Dickhead Developer

Re: Discipline! Discipline! Discipline!

There's a lot to be said for keeping your baseline infrastructure in-house to contain costs, but using the hyperscalers for... when you need to scale up in a hurry. It's also easier to do new development and run experiments on a hyperscaler because you can provision what you need and then switch it off when you're finished. But it does, as you say, require discipline. And education. Left to their own devices users will provision large and expensive compute instances they don't need, and then leave them running for months.

Re: I'm sorry, I just can't dump Zoom.

>> Sounds like make-work to me. Has anybody actually done a cost analysis? I have.

No you haven't. To have any validity, such an analysis would require collecting a lot of data from different enterprises, and you would need to be able to calculate the value had been generated by work done with and without collaboration tools. It's the kind of analysis that would require.... wait for it.... a team to do. And you'd need to be able to charm all those different enterprises into giving you valuable and commercially sensitive information. Stop saying stuff to make yourself seem clever. It's having the opposite effect at this point.

People who don't get it

A lot of people here seem to think that "hate speech is just things the left/the wokeratir/the liberal elite" don't like. It's not. It's speech that can have unpleasant consequences in the real world for real people.

If you are claiming that denigrating refugees as rapists and criminals, or claiming that Muslims are busy forming child grooming gangs, or any of the other evidence free abuse dished out against minorities is fine, you've probably never had a brick chucked at you because someone didn't like the look of you, or been sworn at on a bus for having the temerity to be visibly not white in public. So carry on being a proud free speech warrior, safe in the knowledge that someone else who isn't like you will be the one who bears the brunt of the hate speech you want to defend.

Re: with 49,500 employees, all of whom are applicable

Java (and the JVM) remain popular because of the huge ecosystem around it. I like C# as a language (it's benefited from avoiding most of Java's mistakes), but there is nothing in the dotnet ecosystem that compares with Spring Boot and the Spring framework for productivity. And the JVM offers good performance - not as good as languages like C, C++ or Go, but far better than Python, Javascript or Ruby.

But I would obviously echo the advice to stay as far away from Oracle as possible and stick with a 3rd party or OpenJDK distribution.

Re: SQL injection flaw

You've described very well the kind of teams we try to build and foster when coaching organizations in being effective at software development. Agile's main problem these days is the industry that's grown up around it pushing all sorts of convoluted practices. The other big problem is Jira.

Re: Missing half the population?

Although there are plenty of female trolls out there, it is nearly always men who are ready to bring their trolling into the real world and attack, injure, or kill people. And the misogyny of some of these groups also feeds directly into harassment and worse of women.

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"t one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK. and a market trader got prosecuted for it. "

Nope. This is an example of history being rewritten by known liars, like Boris Johnson. You can sell any quantity of bananas you like under EU rules, including a pound. After all, you can still buy milk by the pint in most supermarkets.

What you *can't* do, is use a system other than metric as the measurement on which you base your prices and tariffs. So you can sell a pound of bananas, providing you also label clearly that what the customer is getting is .454 Kg of bananas. And this is to stop monkey business and chicanery with weights, a favoured method for wide boys to cheat customer since time immemorial.

Re: Luxottica payback

Boots will sell you an excellent pair of sunglasses for about £20. They will protect your eyes as well as a pair of Raybans or Oakley sunglasses costing 10 times as much. (Icon to indicate thermonuclear protection)

Re: Sometimes they're just not interested

"Pre-1970s required either card punching...."

It also required an ability to solve problems and think at different levels of abstraction, just like it does now. The card punching was not generally done by the programmers, but by cheaper clerical staff. Don't confuse the input method with the skills required to do the job. Maybe women are quitting infosec jobs because they tire of being patronised and belittled by their male colleagues.

Admiral Grace was indeed one of the primary movers behind COBOL. Since we are playing "fun games with history", let's ask the question, would a male engineer of that era have had the thought: "We need to make this accessible to people who aren't computer programmers"? This was one of the drivers behind the COBOL language design. It's fair to say no-one would build a language that way now, but we've had decades of learning since those early experiments in high-level languages.

Re: Trussed Up

It really needs to happen in the next couple of weeks, while there's still any commerce left to save.