ColinDabritz

Adding a single element from each other office would be a neat way to tie them together. For example, the new wave wall with a single lavalamp, hanging rainbow, and dual pendulum.

"Kuszmaul remembers being surprised that a tool normally used to ensure privacy could confer other benefits."

It was surprising to me too! But reflecting on it more closely, most performance isn't about "faster" in a literal sense of "more instructions run per time", but about carefully choosing how to do less work. The security property here being "history independence" is also in a way stating "we don't need to, and literally cannot, do any work that tracks history".

It's definitely an interesting approach to performance, essentially using cryptography as a contraint to prevent more work. What properties do we need, and what properties can we ignore? The question becomes if we MUST ignore this property cryptographically, how does that affect the process and the related performance?

It certainly feels like it may be a useful perspective, a rigorous approach to performance that may be a path to more improvements in key cases.

It's an example of "non-euclidean" space, and yes, it is a bit different than the article.

That is a simple but clever technique. These sorts of approaches feel like they will be part of a more formalized software engineering profession.

There are a lot of crazy people in industry, unfortunately. Not as much at the big flashy tech startups or places you hear about in the news, but there are still plenty of 'work a day' businesses in corners of industry that do not have expertise in these areas that absolutely should.

I helped my current employer make this transition and it was similar to the description in the article. Controlling database change in source was foreign to them.

Jail time for bugs that should have been preventible and caused harm to users. Mistakes and bugs happen, but we also have methods of mitigating them. Standards, quality controls, tests, analysis, and other care. I specifically said jail time for gross negligence because that means not taking care and allowing harm to users.

If you had an error that leaked private information, it's worth an investigation. If it made it through despite controls, that's understandable. If they find you failed to do analysis on the risk to users privacy, if you failed to have controls in place, if you didn't code review or test the code, then you have made specific choices that harmed users. That should be criminal.

We need to take software engineering seriously as a discipline. We have the potential to do more wide scale aggregate harm than any structural engineering collapse. We need to start acting like it.

software bugs cause mass harm. We can't ask people to never make mistakes, but we can ask that they have appropriate practices, standards, quality controls, and care. Not taking appropriate measures to mitigate risks that can significantly affect millions of users is willful negligence, and should be a crime.

Not the op, but meaningful fines, executive jail time for gross negligence and especially for intentionally taking inappropriate risks, breaking up or closing companies that are shown over time to be unable to safely handle sensitive information. Proper regulation. Consequences that can't be cynically taken as the cost of doing business.

For me, in Chrome, I could not find "Show In Viewer", but the static preview image on the left side has a "launch" text splash when hovering. Clicking it opens a player with play/pause/step and other functionality.

The cue I learned for that was "the stick man is standing on the line | and leaning forward / or backward \ " (Which is of course western reading direction sensitive)

This threw me off for a bit.

The \1 is from the original puzzle, and refers to the value of the first (capture group). I ran into this issue while filling out the puzzle. The \1 is required to 'propagate' the value in that square to other places. The puzzle is ambiguous without this fix.

Thanks for the pointer, I've added the note in the comments. Hopefully the puzzle is editable.

Lovely puzzle, and it's a great quote. :)

This is a wonderfully complicated mix of in game rewards, but they aren't DLC, some have exclusive in game rewards you can't get elsewhere. You can buy some Amiibo retail, but others which unlock exclusives in a brand new game are locked behind owning collectibles which aren't retail-available any more (and expensive from third party resellers). Some of the items are cosmetic, nice callbacks to older games and similar. Others provide in game advantages.

That makes the ethical questions very challenging to address. Personally I feel more 'ok' with hackery for the items that aren't available retail, but I hate 'pay to win' in games as well. It's hard to articulate how I feel about the situation. I think the article is spot-on that making these available in DLC packs or something as well would clarify the situation a lot.