271–280 of 405 posts
Just because you think differently about a trade off it doesn't mean decisions you don't like are "imaginary."
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I did almost exactly the same thing at my last job. I'm a game dev and they provided us all with woefully underpowered MacBooks that didn't even have a dedicated GPU. The game engine was constantly crashing while working and making it very difficult to get anything done. I recorded the amount of time wasted on these crashes over the course of a week. I then proved to management that there was about 5 hours a week bei…
Why would anyone ever do game development on Apple hardware? You're making iOS games?
The best way to deal with stupid corporate policies is to ignore them. Working remote when you're not "allowed to" is a big one to ignore, and if you don't have the access credentials you need, it might not even be possible. There are other policies that are much easier to ignore, though. Don't like the dress code? Dress however you want. Don't think the status meeting requires your attendance? Don't go. Mandatory of…
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> but getting to the reason might require un-peeling a few org layers to since the people enforcing the policy will not be the people who wrote the policy. The issue is that all the policy documents often only contain the One True Way to achieve their goals, while the goals remain unstated. The documents should always come with a rationale. And appending "exceptions may be granted for equivalent or better processes"…
> The issue is that all the policy documents often only contain the One True Way to achieve their goals, while the goals remain unstated. The documents should always come with a rationale. A reason can be argued against while a policy must just be followed. It's probably by design, because as soon as you put a reason that becomes a target and people start to get ideas about why it doesn't apply to them. Much like whe…
In my Mega Tech corp, we have security team that has created hodge podge of conflicting policies. For example, they ask some applications to be internal network only and other are accessible via web. But they can never provide their reasoning and get annoyed when we ask any details.
The worst part is that some of their policies directly contradict with each other. For example, policy is to never run as root inside docker container but then there are some applications provided by them that runs as root in docker. And every time you use it, you have to remind them that these are their apps or else they will ask you to stop running it as root.
Finally, I had pleasure of talking with one of their Security and Compliance expert. They could not even knew how to list file perms in Linux, and other a lot of basic ideas. This person clearly had memorized interview questions but had clearly no understanding of those concepts.
Only way to hide their incompetence is act elite and don't explain their reasoning.
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Mathematically speaking though, infinity is not the correct answer to x/0 anyway. It's just a usefully incorrect result in a lot of situations.
Well, it’s incorrect when dividing by 0, yes. But when you do the limit as the bottom factor approaches 0, it makes sense. So, below, the first one is defined, while the second one isn’t. lim_{x->0+} 1/x == +Infinity 1/0 != (anything)
lim_{x->1+} (x^2-1)/(x-1) == 2
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several levels of auditors were effectively asking us to downgrade to comply with their policy without even understanding the difference The auditors' policy? Are you sure? An auditor's job is to check if you're doing what you say you should be doing. If you're arguing with an auditor then you're essentially arguing with your own organisation without any hope winning the argument.
Not really a fair assessment. An auditor's job is often to check if you're doing what an external standard says you should be doing (SOC 2 => AICPA trust principles; FedRAMP => NIST 800-53, etc.). Unfortunately, these external standards may be written vaguely and while you may have policies that define X as Y, the auditor doesn't have to accept your answers. For example, when PCI requirement 5 says "Deploy anti-virus…
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So every team gets to argue with the auditors? Seems like the people writing the policy should do that so there's one argument instead of n.
Sounds like you've mostly worked in perfectly-sized and structured corporations, where the auditors and policy-writers were perfectly connected to changing product, business and technical needs; well-staffed with policy writers and architectural governance committees who have the time, skill and background to have regular, even-handed tradeoff conversations when these issues occur, and where the engineering teams are…
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An example, I'm unable to resolve so far: ISO 26262 includes the requirement to prevent “implausible values, execution errors, division by zero, and errors in data flow and control flow” (8.4.4). I'm confident the division by zero aims at integer division because the result is undefined. For floating point, division-by-zero is perfectly fine and well defined by IEEE 754. Nevertheless, our safety folks require us to e…
Somewhat recent experience doing robotics work really highlighted the dangers of dividing by small numbers. As a robot arm approaches a singular configuration, the matrix used to calculate motor torques starts to get very bad and, left unaddressed, will likely result in some pretty wild behaviour. I would argue that dividing by very tiny numbers is also something that you should probably be catching, since the output…
There are some cool videos of wrist flips online, and I’ve heard of a pickup truck being thrown by an articulated arm on a factory floor due to it.
Sounds worth the precaution, given the right context!