#wired article

[twobitsandanibble]

I feel like not enough people here saw this absolute banger of a line on brandon's reddit account

[my-personal-hellsite]

[atalltallman]

Oh my goodness, was that wired guy that upset Brandon Sanderson is just a guy?

[frog707]

error rates in software

If somebody asked me how many bugs there are in my Heart library, the honest answer would be that I don't know. Currently the library's GitHub issue tracker shows no open issues. The library is about 21000 lines of code (excluding blank/comment lines), and most of it has never been systematically tested. An optimistic estimate would be 1 bug per 100 lines of code, so about 200 bugs. (A more realistic estimate might be 400-500 bugs.)

How can I justify publishing a piece of software with hundreds of bugs? Well, mainly because I think it satisfies a need. I use it every day. And when I find a bug, I fix it promptly. I haven't encountered a bug in the library since January, and the bug in question was discovered by code inspection, not testing. To me, Heart seems like good, reliable software.

How is it possible for a library with hundreds of bugs to appear reliable? Well, I started writing Heart in 2017, and it hasn't changed much in the past year, so the commonly used codepaths have been heavily tested. While it's entirely possible for software to exhibit bugs that pass unnoticed by the user, it's likely most of the remaining bugs occur in unusual situations.

A user other than myself might use the Heart library differently, exercising code I rarely (or never) use. To them, Heart might not seem so reliable.

Now according to the article below (citing Wired magazine from 2012), a modern high-end car "has" about 10 million lines of code.

It's unclear whether all that software runs on the car itself, or if that number includes software used to design and test the car. During the 1990s, Microsoft applications sold to the public averaged about 5 defects per 1000 lines of code, which was remarkably good IMHO. I can't imagine the software quality of a Lexus is any better than that. So a modern car probably has at least 50000 software defects.

It's mind boggling.

Even if all that code is actually running on the car, it doesn't mean the car is unsafe or unreliable. The Wired article hints that most of that code is for entertainment, not safety or reliability. Still, there are certainly bugs in every large software system, and the more you deviate from the conditions under which the software was tested, the more likely you are to encounter them.

Are there safety-critical software bugs in every new car? You bet there are! Caveat emptor.

[bitcoinversus]

Pierre Rochard Corrects Misinformation About Bitcoin Mining

Senior Bitcoin mining expert Pierre Rochard took to Twitter today to correct a widely shared Wired article that claimed ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator, pays Bitcoin miners to curtail during high demand periods. The false claim suggests that miners were financially incentivized to turn off their operations to ease grid stress. Rochard, pointing out the misinformation, clarified that ERCOT does not,…

[atalltallman]

Vin literally headbutts a man so hard his head explodes

It's so funny to me that that Wired author said all of Brandon's characters are "overly good, optimistic, and only save people." when Kelsier literally murders people for sport

[kropotkindersurprise]

Escalating Insurgency: An Interview with the Spokesperson of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB)

The decades-long insurgency in the Papuan provinces has been intensifying. The TPNPB has now become a significant security threat for Jakarta. In this interview from late January, Militant Wire speaks (again) to Sebby Sambom, the spokesperson of the TPNPB.

[intravenous-agnostic]

📸: Valerie Phillips

[smashorpassgilf]

B52 Flying Fortress. It’s gonna outlive us all anyway

[twobitsandanibble]

not sure if this'll help out anyone else, but if you end up viewing that wired article on mobile, make sure you're on wifi, it used like 700mb of data on my plan

[anotherpapercut]

literally insane seeing "experts" hand wringing and losing their minds over the "mainstream" memeification/general approval of the CEO shooting by acting like it's the exact same as your average school shooting or whatever

[b-skarsgard]

EXCLUSIVE: Myha’la (HBO’s Industry), Cary Elwes (Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning), and John Robinson (Elephant) are joining Gus Van Sant’s hostage thriller Dead Man’s Wire, which is currently filming in Louisville, Kentucky.

[frog707]

How arcade games were created in 1978.

[noodledesk]

Wanting the “perfect build” or “personality,” anyway, is textbook girlified. Wanting to be seen doing it—well, even more so. You could say that platform-determined behavioral design, with its vectors of attentional capture leading to the illusion of monetary reward, is simply forced feminization. To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us “girls online” regardless of gender.

Everyone is a Girl Online, Alex Quicho

[aspd-culture]

Well, WIRED posting one of the only articles on why psychopathy is bs and personality disorders can't predict criminality was not on my 2023 Bingo Card.

But here we are. As someone who doesn't engage in criminal activity, but has ASPD, much appreciation to WIRED and the specific author of this article (I believe that would be Eleanor Cummins). This is a really great article; it doesn't pretend it knows more than it does, but it methodically goes after the term psychopathy and all the issues with the term, the purpose of it's invention, and the researchers who both use it and try to study it.

It's by no means an article just about ASPD, but we do pop up in here and they even make both meaningful mention and a link to source in-sentence about the way ASPD research ignores the history of trauma associated with it.

[hide-your-bugs-away]

CALL MY ROOM A ZOO BECAUSE THERE ARE A LOT OF ANIMALS IN HERE.