This is quite untrue as a blanket statement. The problem is that there was massive cultural variation: if you installed a Perl module from CPAN you probably ran hundreds of tests. If you ran a C program, it ranged from nothing to “run this one input and don’t crash” to exhaustive suites. PHP tended towards nothing with a handful of surprises.
As a data point, my first tech job was QA for a COBOL compiler vendor. They supported roughly 600 permutations of architecture, operating system, and OS version with a byte-coded runtime and compiler written in C. I maintained a test runner and suite with many thousands of tests, ranging from unit tests to things like Expect UI tests. This was considered routine in the compiler vendor field, and in the scientific computing space I moved into. I worked with someone who independently reproduced the famous Pentium FDIV bug figuring out why their tests failed, which surprised no one because that was just expected engineering.
Then you had the other end of the industry where there was, say, 50k lines of Visual Basic desktop app where they didn’t even use version control software. At a later job, I briefly encountered a legacy system which had 30 years of that where they had the same routine copied in half a dozen places, modified slightly because when the author had fixed a bug they weren’t sure if it would break something else so they just created a copy and updated just the module they were working on.
True, it is colored by my own personal experienced. I remember CPAN, perl, and installing modules with tests. I also remember my day job: a 500,000 line C and C++ code base with literally 5 automated tests that nobody ever ran!
Yeah, I think it’s really hard to understand how much more cultural variation there was without first the internet and open source, and then services like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. converging people onto similar practices and expectations.
Here are two daily occurrences contradicting that:
1. The driver realizes out of their peripheral vision that the light has changed but wants to finish the urgent TikTok they’re watching so they accelerate, often rapidly, without looking around and fails to notice other road users. I’ve seen people hit other cars because they didn’t notice the car ahead of them had stopped accelerating due to congestion, and countless times where they almost or did hit someone (fortunately never fatally) in the crosswalk because they were in “green means go mode” before they were fully back to looking outside their vehicle.
2. The driver continues to look at their phone and fails to notice when the light changes. Someone behind them gets mad and does something dangerous to pass such as driving in the opposite traffic lane, a bike lane, or in a pedestrian space.
Yes, many people do look at phones without hitting anyone but that’s like saying it’s okay to celebrate by firing a gun in the air because only a few people get hit. It’s a statistical certainty that the more times someone engages in unsafe activity, the more people will be on the unlucky side of those odds. If you have a couple million daily car trips in London, even 99.9999% safety means someone getting hurt every day.
They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like government-provided childcare are good societal investments.
The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split. I do not think government provided childcare is a good idea since it would incentivize children to spend time away from their family.
> The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split.
Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.
Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.
I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.
That still needs a way to change users, and OpenSSH already has privilege separation. That hardens the process somewhat to reduce the amount of code running in the process which can change the uid for a session but fundamentally something needs permission to call setuid() or the equivalent.
Yea, but then we’ve recreated this CVE which is caused by calling login(1) unsafely. The point was that the person I was replying to misunderstood the problem and largely seemed to be conflating telnetd with OpenSSH.
Culture has changed a lot since the 20th century and older projects can have antiquated norms around things like testing. I was just listening to a recent podcast talking about how worrisome it is that OpenSSL has a casual culture about testing[1] and was reminded about how normal that used to be. I think in the case of telnetd you also have the problem that it’s been deprecated for multiple decades so I’d bet that they struggle even more than average to find maintainer time.
The birth control pill wasn’t on the market in the first half of the 20th century (1960) and there was more religious pressure not to use contraception (e.g. how many women faced significant external pressure to be married housewives and mothers and weren’t even allowed to pursue careers?). Lack of choice masked true preferences – but as we could see from things like the big spike in divorces when it was legalized, there were costs to that.
First, that’s a LOT of money. Very few people can afford that at all and those that can are definitely counting down the days until their last child goes to school.
Second, it’s hard to find a good nanny. Parents live in fear of not getting a good one, having something go wrong and need to scramble for a replacement without missing too much work, etc.
It’s possible but it’s not going to move the mainstream averages because only like 5% of the population does that. If we want to materially change national averages, we should be talking about government daycare filling in the gap before public schooling starts around the country.
There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?
If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.
Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.
They’re also selling a massive vehicle which was designed for macho aesthetics rather than performance. Bragging about minor aerodynamic tweaks is how they convince buyers that it’s okay to spend even more money to take the edge off of that fashion decision. It’s like the places which brag about their single use plastic using some recycled material because they don’t want to say it’d be even better if you bought something which could be reused many times instead.
It’s more that there’s a career ceiling and ageism is a looming threat. There are far more management jobs than high-level IC and for decades there’s been this thought that older engineers will be replaced with younger ones more aggressively than managers, although the big tech layoffs raise questions about whether that’s still true. I know multiple people who moved into management not because they were enthusiastic about it but because that was the best path for their career.
As a data point, my first tech job was QA for a COBOL compiler vendor. They supported roughly 600 permutations of architecture, operating system, and OS version with a byte-coded runtime and compiler written in C. I maintained a test runner and suite with many thousands of tests, ranging from unit tests to things like Expect UI tests. This was considered routine in the compiler vendor field, and in the scientific computing space I moved into. I worked with someone who independently reproduced the famous Pentium FDIV bug figuring out why their tests failed, which surprised no one because that was just expected engineering.
Then you had the other end of the industry where there was, say, 50k lines of Visual Basic desktop app where they didn’t even use version control software. At a later job, I briefly encountered a legacy system which had 30 years of that where they had the same routine copied in half a dozen places, modified slightly because when the author had fixed a bug they weren’t sure if it would break something else so they just created a copy and updated just the module they were working on.
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