Post AyO1f9vFu390z7fcI4 by mhoye@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by mhoye@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AyO1f4WbyFScFF6MgS by mhoye@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T14:34:00Z
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A lot of people - myself included, at times - deride "not invented here", and snark that "some people can't understand systems they haven't built themselves, but...Look at this: https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/Just... look at it. Look at the contortions involved. Hours of effort, by somebody deep enough in the guts of this specific stack to know Regedit and the utilman/cmd trick, just so they could log into a machine with a full drive.How do you trust systems, or ecosystems, like this? How?
(DIR) Post #AyO1f5d1rsBjfR70KG by mhoye@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T14:45:39Z
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How do you build a mental model of a system where "Wrong PIN" means "Your computer's hard drive is full because you bought a phone?" How?How can anyone be expected to navigate a world like this? My friend @grimalkina wrote this a few weeks ago: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/why-i-cannot-be-technical/... and you should read it, but I have to believe that she is, as she always is, being far too kind. Maybe "being technical" just means, "I'm willing to act like this bullshit is normal and acceptable."
(DIR) Post #AyO1f6VcatrCOkebQ0 by thibaultamartin@mamot.fr
2025-09-19T15:25:25Z
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@mhoye @grimalkina I was charging the EV during our long trip.The charger displayed “Please identify to finish the session.”What it meant is “Scan your credit card to unplug the car.”Why didn’t it say “Scan your credit card to unplug the car”? How do we accept that?
(DIR) Post #AyO1f7Sp2nDDMMLsh6 by dascandy@infosec.exchange
2025-09-19T20:09:02Z
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@thibaultamartin @mhoye @grimalkina Because it needs an Identity token to call Finish on the Session object, obviously. And you could identify with a credit card, or a charging card, or ...
(DIR) Post #AyO1f8NBfEIaBAitY8 by grimalkina@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T20:55:09Z
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@dascandy @thibaultamartin @mhoye Peter, what do you think the goal should be for the words that display on an EV charger?
(DIR) Post #AyO1f9591nScNVI048 by dascandy@infosec.exchange
2025-09-19T21:01:03Z
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@grimalkina @thibaultamartin @mhoye I was hoping that the suggestion made clear that it's a sentence that makes sense only from within the software, that should in no circumstance have made it out to customers. The suggestion from @thibaultamartin is definitely implementable (it knows how you authenticated and what you're trying to do) and there's no reasonable excuse why it isn't that, or something equivalently good.
(DIR) Post #AyO1f9vFu390z7fcI4 by mhoye@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T21:21:52Z
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@dascandy @grimalkina @thibaultamartin There’s no such thing as “makes sense in the software”, there’s only “within the shared tribal knowledge of the developer team”. This is one of the basic social failure cases of software development, the blind spots of an insular culture.
(DIR) Post #AyO1f9yngrypA7KRoe by mhoye@mastodon.social
2025-09-19T15:02:57Z
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Maybe "not invented here" means "this ecosystem is not trustworthy at all", and maybe, just maybe, the person making that decision is correct.Maybe "we only hire technical people" means you're hiring people who _can't even see_ the growing complexity that will eventually trip up your projects and send your organization face first into the pavement.And - hear me out, maybe - if you aren't willing to own your edge cases and failure modes, you should be in some other line of work.
(DIR) Post #AyO1fAuaE2CW3KMasi by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-20T04:40:23Z
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@mhoyeI disagree, but I think we're on the same track....Writing software is storytelling. A dual story; one to the machine, one to the human. The point of the story is to make sense to the human, which usually involves weird and ugly convolutions to the machine. "Click here and your computer is now a word processor". There's a shared metaphor of ink on paper, transformed to code to fit within the confines of the hardware. We know in the machine it's arrays, pointers and code, all angular and obtuse. Good programmer cleverness is the skill to bridge these two worlds. @dascandy @grimalkina @thibaultamartin
(DIR) Post #AyO2dTc5p03hQjT7fE by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-20T04:51:26Z
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@mhoyeBut clearly there are programmers who can't or don't do that, that kind of "identify to unplug" thing is sociopathic. How does that shit get deployed? is the interesting question. I assume in shops where effective management has been abandoned. A lot of the pushback against going into the office is based on the office having become a truly shit work environment. I was lucky that I'm nearly all of my employment, going into the office while complicated was often *fun* -- I enjoyed being around other nerd folk, the work, lunch discussions, all that. Yeah there were unpleasant people. But the goal was whatever the work was, s mostly or at least often enjoyable process.That social environment was utterly necessary to writing good code and making good electronics. I worked a lotcfrom home too, starting early 80s. But getting together with others was fun and useful. And code that particular kind of bad was not common. Bad code was! But utterly asocial, meanness, no. @dascandy @grimalkina @thibaultamartin