Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.

We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.

It’s their fault for being born into a world where antitrust laws stopped being enforced a quarter of a century ago. They should do better.

How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.

Normal ones? But as infrequently as possible.

Part of the reason for the rise of AirBnB is that hotels suck too:

• “Your $225 per night hotel”, oh sorry, all those rooms are booked, we do still have these $250 per night rooms though…
• Oh, you didn’t want to be next to the ice machine and hear that crunch sound all night? There’s another room here but that will be $275…
• Not next to the elevators? Well, there’s this $300 room down the hall
• Yes, the room has a mini-fridge. Oh, we didn’t tell you but it’s 100% full of overpriced things, and if you touch one you bought it. No, there’s no way to put your own things in the fridge.
• Oh, you wanted to use the TV? Well, we have HotelTV and every time you turn it on it goes to the HotelTV channel, you can get all the local TV stations too. HDMI? No, sorry, we don’t have that feature.
• Of course we offer a free “continental breakfast”, it’s offered between 4:35 and 5:20 AM, and consists of reconstituted dehydrated eggs, malk, cereal, taste-free muffins, and pancakes. We’re out of pancakes.
• Internet? Of course we offer Internet. Just sign on to this captive portal and you can use Google. Send emails? You should be able to get to gmail… Play games? You mean like backgammon? I think we have a backgammon set in the back here. VPN? That sounds like hacking…

I just really hope that Amazon at least has it set up so that the really important stuff goes to actual, trained SREs. They could set it up so there are queues for things that aren’t business critical and have a very loose SLO that get assigned to the new grads. Or, the new grads get paged when the error rate for the service is 1% and if it gets above 3% someone who knows what they’re doing is woken up. If say all issues with Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service is shunted to new hires, AWS would be going down constantly.

Probably, it’s also why Google has 100 different chat clients.

Amazon puts all new hires on “on call” status for like a week every month

That’s insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you’d just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you’d be the “shadow” on call. The primary would get paged and you’d get paged too. You wouldn’t actually do anything, but you’d watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you’re world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there’s no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you’d be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.

I think they’d be relieved looking at just how far we are from AGI.

Judgment day was originally supposed to be August 29, 1997. It has changed a lot due to all the time travel. But, every date has passed and now the techbros are going nuts over a form of “AI” that can’t count the number of "r"s in “raspberry”.

Ok, so what’s the rule for those 3 examples?

What if it’s a loan word from another language, like “the facebook” (El Feis) or “playstation” or “hentai”?

It would be like in English if someone says the “I took the fono to the storage but he didn’t have batterons for it” when you mean “I took the phone to the store but he didn’t have batteries for it” Without the correct-gendered article it sounds wrong, and sometimes it changes the meaning so it’s a different word. But, if there’s enough context often you can figure out what someone is trying to say. But, if you’re the kind of foreigner who doesn’t know the genders for common things, you also probably have a very strong accent and are making all kinds of other errors, like using the wrong articles, getting the word order wrong, etc.

In the end, a lot of it is about context and how else you’re trying to communicate. Like, if you’re holding the phone and say “fono” it will be obvious what you mean. If someone knows you were trying to get a replacement battery, then there will be enough context to understand batterons.

Spanish is also easier than French because you can mostly guess the gender based on the ending of the word. Most often if the word ends in “a” it’s female (la marca, la hora, la vida, la ventana). If it ends in “o” it’s mostly male (el teatro, el dormitorio, el niño…) And for the nouns that don’t end in “a” or “o” there are often patterns. When there are exceptions, it’s often because it’s a borrowed word or a shortened word. Like “la moto” for the motorcycle, but the full word for motorcycle is “la motocycleta”, same with “la foto” -> “la fotografia”.

French also has some patterns, but not the easy a -> female, o -> male rule that Spanish has.

Sure, and learning surgery could let them do their own operations.

So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.

What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.

For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:

So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.

As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.

I I I I IV IV I I V IV I IV

Baking is not chemical engineering. Chemical engineering doesn’t even have much to do with chemistry. It’s mostly about temperatures and flow rates, pressure, etc.

Saying “the baseline of programming knowledge could be more than zero” is meaningless. The baseline of chemical engineering knowledge could also be more than zero. It’s also a fundamental part of our society. But, the average person doesn’t need to know how to program, just like the average person doesn’t need to know how to design a refinery.

People do learn some basic computer skills. They should learn more. They should know about files. They should know how to back up their data. And, more importantly, they should learn how to restore data from a backup after something goes wrong. They should know how to properly update their devices, how to tell if their devices are infected, and the basics of managing a home network. They sometimes learn how to do basic functions in excel spreadsheets. That’s about as far as they do, or should need to go in programming / IT. Beyond that, why should the average person need to know how to do recursion, or how loops work?

the general public has failed to learn programming

That’s like saying that the general public has failed to learn surgery, or the general public has failed to learn chemical engineering.

There are certain things that it just doesn’t make sense for the general public to ever be expected to learn.

It never actually seems to work out that way though. Sure, for Y2K there was a short period where there were decent contracts fixing that bug in various codebases, but it wasn’t something that lasted very long.

Managers and owners would much rather pass off a terrible PoS and have their users deal with it, or somehow get the government to bail them out, or hire a bunch of Uyghur programmers from a Chinese labour camp, or figure out some other way to avoid having to pay programmers / software engineers what they’re actually worth.

I did that myself back in the day. Not overly complicated, but a SQL builder.

I think it’s because SQL is sort-of awkward. For basic uses you can take a SQL query string and substitute some parameters in that string. But, that one query isn’t going to cover all your use cases. So, then you have at least 2 queries which are fairly similar but not similar enough that it makes sense just to do string substitutions. Two strings that are fairly similar but distinct suggests that you should refactor it. But, maybe you only make a very simple query builder. Then you have 5 queries and your query builder doesn’t quite cover the latest version, so you refactor it again.

But, instead of creating a whole query builder, it’s often better to have a lot of SQL repetition in the codebase. It looks ugly, but it’s probably much more maintainable.