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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?

As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.

Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.

I think people drastically overestimate the competence of software developers. There is far, far, far greater demand for software development than there are competent developers able to meet it. And even the best of the best devs make security fuckups periodically, so if the median dev is below basic competence then the enterprise dev fuckwads and/or criminally incompetent offshore Pajeets that would be tasked with writing an online voting system would make orders of magnitude more security mistakes.

Again with the random epithets. Stop it. Have some decorum.

Would you have the same complaints if I referred to Russians collectively as Ivans, or Brits collectively as Nigel, etc.?

Probably not? Maybe?

I mean, if you try hard enough, you can make anything sound insulting. You don’t have to try very hard with “pajeet.”

Software development is weird because you start running into the inherent limitations of how much logic the human brain can even process in a way human beings haven't quite figured out how to surpass (amphetamines can help, but not that much) outside of just trying to build better tooling (and we haven't actually attempted to do that in a long time).

This kind of job is actually really hard, and it continually amazes me that software in general works as well as it does. And it doesn't even work that well.

AI code completion is a new tool that works great

For a rather questionable definition of "works" and "great".

Most code I've asked it for (that I couldn't otherwise have written myself) has been wrong. It still can't make a functional regex statement.

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