@mdc Absolutely. I've even seen codebases so bad, but also so critical that they've calcified into a format where it's the backbone of a product, but no one is able to modify it anymore.

@ifixcoinops Have they 'innovated' hard enough to result in one of those websites where the back button breaks everything?

@doctormo Do you accept rants about drawing vectorized cheese mid application? :p

Who in their right mind decided that unzip -f was (effectively) unzip --freshen???

@th @janamarie

@patcharcana I have to imagine a large part of the problem is apathy. Could they do better? Likely. Do they want to do better? I don't think so.

@mdc It would be interesting to see how often 'backdoor' is used in prompts given to these coding agent models. I can't imagine though COBOL is any easier to read than FORTRAN and that language gets painful fast.

@capitainesam Fun bit of trivia for fingerprints is that there are known approaches of using fingerprints to generate pub/private style keypairs, so you can use that biometric in a safer manner (in theory). In practice your point absolutely stands.

@jwcph A similar concern is the ongoing availability of a tool. Building up your workflows around a tool with sustainability issues or one which is solely controlled by subscriptions to one manufacturer has hurt other crafts time and time again. (e.g. Adobe products)

@philpem Wouldn't you want to run it outside of a host via a setup like lv2apply?

@leaf I'm going to guess you're an expert at "Being visible, but not too visible" if you've lasted that long.

@oz1lqo and I just remembered pulse counters are built into some MCUs these days as well (e.g. ESP32), which simplifies things to a once per second value grab+reset loop in software (while the rest is in proper hardware).

@oz1lqo Depending on how prebuilt you want the solution to be I'd make a guess that a high speed schmitt trigger -> MCU interrupt pin might be a good DIY option?

@gvy_dvpont hope that they used a reputable payroll processor like ADP who should still have the data even if the company vanished?

@ve7fim Thank goodness there's no ram in that part of your computer :p

@siriusfox Supposedly the normal workflows over there are closer to them receiving a bill and then it can be corrected if there are any unusual situations or mistakes.

Coding hot take: Even if you use a squash workflow that doesn't mean you should put up a sequence of commits where an individual commit is buggy, put in place without a meaningful commit message, etc.

@toddgreener Watch out on the handle. At least my stock of hickory was a splinter generating machine.

@nervous_jesse Usually octave is great, though there are some rough edges around various toolboxes. I'd say it's a bad sign that the code is in matlab these days since it has lost favor in academia...

Today I built a setup where I'm spinning baking trays using my oscilloscope. Somehow this feels more sane than the software stack that motivated the physical hack.