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Get used to it. All PR statements nowadays get AI treatment before going public.

Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.

Is it? Based on what I've seen online the company name was derived from a CIA project from the 1970s that the founders worked on, but it doesn't seem to be based on an acronym. There was an earlier unrelated project from the 1950s which used ORACLE as an acronym ("Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine").

If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!


I think the intention was a joke: One Rich A*hole Called Larry Elison.

Ah okay, thanks!

"One Rich A*[CENSORED] Called Larry Ellison"? : )

EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply putting this in a way I like : )


You type out Larry Ellison, but not Asshole?

this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.

> at your local mormon temple

Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.

And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.


Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique way, they are super clean in how they speak.

Well, if this helps to explain my actions a little - I have friends in Russia (and elsewhere), and very often our jokes/satires/alike come around censorship and "classified information". It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this way of writing messages - with [CENSORED], [DATA DELETED], [CLEARED] and the like - has become something of a meme (and I don't mean dunk memes, I mean cultural meme, yes) or constant joke among us. So for us, it’s a bit like a way of getting a laugh at censorship’s expense. I’m sorry if that was a bit out of context.

I enjoyed this little exchange :)

Let us not forget the poor Nasser, whose username when combined with the Scunthorpe problem becomes N***er. Text censorship is not always a win.

I'm getting so exhausted by these weird Reddit/social media posts where my brain says "wait, is 'corn' a typo? Why did they write 'k*ll'", and so on.

The algorithm did something explicit censorship never could.


I thought it is reverse of EL CARO (”expensive” in Spanish)

Nah, it's just bad engineering, period. I "like" aljazeera too - they hijack your freaking PageDn and PageUp keys.

> At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.

I am the same. I used to fiddle and obsess on customising every last thing possible. Now I just want the damn thing to work, and MacOS does exactly that.


I agree with this. At this point, Windows is like COBOL.

> prompt and pray

This is a brilliant reimagining of the old and trusted PnP acronym.


> Unit tests are very expensive and return little value

Why are unit tests very expensive? This goes against everything I know.


Unit tests very roughly double the amount of effort required to make any meaningful change to your codebase. They are also require maintenance same as ordinary code - but the customer does not care in the slightest whether or not they pass. On the other side, they can only really tell you about low level bugs that you already expected, they cannot surface system level bugs - the actual hard bugs that cause problems for you and your customers.

Then there is the danger of thinking that green=all good, an example of 'automation bias' where we learn to trust the automation even as things go wrong.

As makers, it is also tempting to believe that [all] problems can be solved by making something (i.e. code), but actually many problems are not of that nature, and cannot be solved in that way.


Thank you, that makes sense. What I meant was that today all unit tests are basically written by an AI so the "cost" is almost zero. Am I wrong?

Sorry yes. If an LLM written unit test fails, then it has to be determined whether the test was wrong or the code was wrong. This is an expense in human oversight, unless of course we believe that LLMs will get it right at a high enough rate that they can be left to code everything themselves completely automatically.

> "what if I did X in one tab, Y in another, and then Z, all with this exact timing so events overlap"

As a QA: this bug will get downprioritised by PM to oblivion.


If anyone should not exist, it's PMs.

I kid a little, I worked with some very good PMs when we did client work who made my life much easier. Working on a SaaS though, I find them generally less than useful.


Depends on what happens in that case, no?

If it messes up the UI until you refresh, yeah, I understand deprioritizing that.

If it causes catastrophic data corruption or leaks admin credentials, any sane PM would want that fixed ASAP.


Not anyplace that cares about quality.

where I work it is normally easier to fix things than deprioritize to oblivion. I can fix an issue, but priority puts a dozen people in a meeting.


> Any sort of gambling should be limited to, say 20% of your average yearly tax

How about you let people decide what they do with THEIR own money?


See you next month!

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