> The amount of deceit put out into the world and gobbled up, on purpose, in business is obscene and seriously depressing.

In business, politics, everything. It almost seems like everyone is quietly agreeing that "if we pretend the pesky truth doesn't exist for long enough, we can literally change reality to be what we want".

I feel like I'm going crazy. There's no way that's how things can work for long, right?

You're not going crazy, they are. But even once things start falling apart, inertia alone can give the appearance of productive movement for years to come.

This is probably why when somebody looks to try to find the cause for e.g. the collapse of the Roman Empire there were a surprisingly large number of potentially serious issues all happening simultaneously.

The reason is that the empire probably collapsed decades before its fall and so the stupid decisions and actions all continued to pile up, seemingly without consequence. All until the inertia finally ran out and suddenly the entire house of cards came crashing down.

By all accounts it was like this at the end in the USSR too: infinite nepotism, no accountability, crashing standard of living near the median, deaths of despair attached to crazy levels of dangerous substance use.

This is what happens when bad people capture the levers of power.

https://youtu.be/IUJMyTJ9gyI

There has never been a time in the history of the greater Russian Empire when good people captured the levers of power.

I didn't watch this talk but I read the article it's based on.

When an Iraq War supporting Tory like Niall Ferguson criticizes the US military for being both bloated and stretched thin by underfunding, it gives away that the critique is just disingenuous contrarianism.

... and look how well that has turned out for the average Russian citizen (or journalist, or competing business-person who stands too close to a window anywhere but the first floor)...

It's not about pretending. Truth is the first casualty of war. If someone is trying to deceive you, they are actively exposing you to some kind of risk, usually for their own benefit, which is a hostile act.

We've kicked the can down the road for a while, but no worries, we will pick it up soon and recycle it ;)

Yeah, even at companies with a lot of red tape and procedure, in the end it's just a group of people and people make stupid oversights.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be public shaming, but usually stuff like this isn't some nefarious plot.

Source: have worked at large institutions and seen stupid mistakes almost go through except for sheer blind luck

He means that he thinks the only reason why these generative AIs ever get info wrong and causing misinfo is because the businesses that write them are too woke and holding them back.

Tbf getting all of the engineers and leadership online to figure out what is going on, write and authorize a public statement is a pretty quick turnaround

Don't use coinbase, but this seems like the sort of thing they'd stick a warning about in a flash message on the account page itself. "We've recieved reports of our page incorrectly reporting account balances. Please standby for more info..." Maybe there's some useful procedure in place preventing them from doing that quickly? Seems like something most sites with authentication would have? I usually build it into my front-ends... it doesn't have to look good (if you're running a reliable site, anyway,) it just has to be visible.

They did exactly this. I see $0 balance and big red banner on top with the same message as on the status page.

EDIT: looks like a scaling issue. Refreshed the page and balance reappeared. Refreshed again and it is gone, but the chart below with the balance history still has correct data.

Ah, ok that makes more sense, especially because this would almost certainly trigger a whole lot of people logging in on every device they have to make sure it wasn't a device artifact, and maybe the APIs/systems were both affected by the same problem. My gut says an investment platform should have a more fault resistant messaging system, but I can't think of a reasonable fundamental security or stability threat they'd face without one, so maybe that money was better spent in other areas.

Edit: Entirely theoretical, but I wonder if there's a bank-run sort of threat for a financial institution getting communication about a system like this wrong enough.

Thank you, this was probably my biggest concern

I don't know if you're trolling or not.

When you get good at it, it is much easier to skim through 10 lines of fluff to find the answer (that is usually visually distinguished in a code block) then it is to parse through 4 really dense, terminology filled sentences.

If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.

I'm not trolling. From my perspective mastering a language includes mastering its included library (for things like python where its standard library is indeed what everyone is using). Thus, it is always preferable to read the complete documentation for some functionality and pick up every detail along the way instead of having an idea in your head how to do the thing you want and picking only the exact use case you wanted from an example.

> If I need to know exactly how all the options work, sure the docs are the place to go, but 90% of the time I just need a quick example to go off of.

You will almost never get to the point where you'd need to know "exactly how all the options work" because if your routine is "search example, copy example, continue", you won't even know what options exist and that there is a way you could do things different (maybe more efficient? simpler?).

Php docs get this right in a way that works for many more people than Python does.

Agreed. For all of the hate PHP gets, the state of their respective docs was a big pain point for me in trying to learn Python after years of writing PHP.

However, the PHP docs, especially for older, less-used functions, are riddled with subtle errors and inconsistencies related to the typing of arguments and handling of edge cases. But the way they're structured is fine! I particularly enjoy how you can type php.net/sprintf and land directly on the doc page you're looking for.

Honest question, do you complain that USA implemented this same type program in 2008/2009? Or do you just care now because this affects US travelers?

I mean both ways. US implemented it first, Europe implemented it in return. Idiotic and unnecessary and political and, apparently, unavoidable now.

I wasn't aware EU travellers had to get a visa to enter the US.

When I flew to the EU and eastern Europe in 2019, I didn't need a visa. I didn't need to tell anyone my exact dates and itinerary. I paid for a ticket, had a passport, and went.

Yes, we have needed an ESTA for a long time now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_System_for_Travel...

$20, but you have to apply regularly. They do "something" and you may or may not be approved, and everyone including children need their own one.

I've also worked in a highly technical customer service role and you are absolutely right. 95% of our time was spent on 5% of our customers.

Even though they spend millions of dollars a year on support, they easily cost us more than that to help them. Simple issues that we had documented solutions for (and explained to them dozens of times preciously) were just as critical as outages to them.

We had to throttle the support we gave them in order to provide a better experience for everyone else and try to train them to be better customers.

I'm looking at you Tata and Vodaphone >:(

> Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?

That's the TAM he's mentionioning.

> The answer is "both of them". Pick a client that makes it the easiest to connect to separate instances on separate accounts, then choose the same-ish username.

That actually reveals even more complexity: having to understand what federation is, researching and experimenting with clients, how to find different communities across the fediverse. Each added complexity cuts how many people would be willing to make the switch

I feel like there's a need for a client application that makes signing up and connecting to both appear to be unified network to the end user

Absolutely, the only way for these to take off is if you have a single place you direct people that makes the whole process braindead simple.

Sign up has to be simple. Finding content has to be simple. Keeping updated has to be simple. The branding also has to be really welcoming as well.