100÷. I used to work for a bank and the lending team didn’t even know how to calculate loan repayments. They just deferred to what the core banking system did.

The core banking system was written in a proprietary language in the 70’s and machine translated into another (slightly newer) proprietary language in the 90’s. At the time I wouldnt be surprised if management was patting themselves on the back for a modernisation job well done. Just get the computer to do the conversion, right? The sales guys of the new platform assured us they could migrate everything automatically and we always trust a sales guy!

Of course the machine translation is like reading machine code so very difficult to understand / follow / change. The developers working on it were in maintenance mode and everyone was afraid to touch it incase some calculation broke.

The point is that it’s exactly what you described - the users were trained to push buttons and trust the system output without actually knowing what they were doing and if it was correct.

Pretty sure the bank recently got fined for compliance breaches as well. It’s not because anyone there was bad, they just had no idea how anything was meant to work

I can make up numbers too!

France is a safe haven for foss media codecs because its law does not consider software patentable

TIL there is a country that sees reason about software patents

If I was a bot author intent on causing misery I’d just use the user agent from the latest version of Firefox/Chrome/Edge that legitimate users would use.

It’s just a string controlled by the client at the end of the day and I’m surprised the GPT and OpenAI bots announce themselves in it. Associating meaning on the server side is always going to be problematic if the client can control the value

Eugenics is how we turned wolves into dogs and selectivity bred specific working instincts into them. It’s how we bred disease resistant crop varieties or crops with heavier / larger fruits.

Wait, if it works everywhere else, surely it works on humans too?