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.
what’s Y2K bugs exactly?
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
Generic summary: Two digit clocks hitting 00 thinking its 1900 not 2000.
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?
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.
that’s interesting, thank you!
It’s similar to the Y2K38 bug:
damn someone should fix that
The year is 2038, nothing happened. Seems like a lot of nothing. (Meanwhile behind the scenes. Developers are happy they prevented a major problem).
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 😒
The message at the bottom sounds like pretty shitty move.
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?
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.
at least posting on website means it shows up in my RSS reader …
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.
Just because they CAN have trackers doesn’t make them all bad. You do not know this mailing list does, so it is blatant fear mongering.
You may as well be complaining about how web cookies can be used for bad things. Is it true? Yes. Is it true everywhere? NO! And writing rules around it so ignorantly is how you get the GDPR clause where EVERYONE has a cookie warning popup and hides the tracking cookie options a couple pages in, so they STILL use tracking cookies, and now with legally “informed” consent!
The fear mongering made the situation WORSE because ignorant fucks were more afraid than informed.
Stop being an ignorant fearmonger.
Doesn’t sound like you’ve been paying attention the last 20 years if you think this highly of tech companies
My opinion is about email, not tech companies. If they’re tracking you, it’s most likely not through email.
…tech companies use email all day long to link digital data together. Most people who manage a newsletter do not write their own newsletter software. In fact practically none of them do. Ergo, you get tracked via newsletter also.
“They don’t use their own service” is not the same as, “this is evidence they do in fact track via email.”
What you don’t seem to realize is, the signup ITSELF is the data they want, and click through rates. You being on a mailing list is already ample tracking compared to what most people are bitching about… You’re GIVING them the info, then whining about them having it…
GDPR requires companies to offer a “only neccessary cookies” option that is easily accessible. Anytime you find a site that works as you’ve described you can and should report them.
Also, there are plenty of options for blocking those popups and/or auto selecting only neccessary.
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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.
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
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.
Please see my response to similar comment. They specifically stopped posting to their website to force people to sign up for the newsletter.
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.
I was going to disagree with you, then I realized this author has a full website. So yeah, I agree.
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.
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.
There is no glory in prevention
I think in real life, the manager ends up taking credit and the worker gets a pizza party.
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.
Wow this is exactly my company right now
The accuracy in this comment is making me cry.
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.
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.
Protip: Cause the fires yourself
From personal experience, this is exactly how things work in big companies.
My coworker
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
Ah yes, except instead of the fire going out, it would just engulf them both.
deleted by creator
This looks nothing like C&H. Even if it did, the humor style is completely different.
I mean it’s not like they themselves invented putting a circle on a rectangular body.
Yeah I was wondering on that comment. If someone uses stick figures are they ripping off xkdc.
![The problem solver [workchronicles]](https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/e2bf50ef-e9bb-4041-874f-ad9702addd4b.jpeg){kind=link}