That is not tacky design.

I would call this malicious in and of itself. That is insane.

Plug and Pray!

They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.

Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.

They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.

I never understood that pull.

One of the very first things I always do in any OS is to set the desktop background to solid color, usually black. I almost never ever will see it, coz there's always going to be a window on top of it, except upon startup for some brief period of time or if I accidentally minimize everything.

I work with full screen windows. Always (tiny number of exceptional cases maybe). I switch between windows with Alt+Tab when necessary. I also have a relatively small screen, both for work and personal stuff (14" for at least 10 years now).

You do you of course.

For me, its a distraction from the corporate world. A token of my outies existence in the innie world.

That isn't the cars fault in that sense. Compare a lot of Europe with a lot of America.

Both locations have cars.

Exceptions in both locations prove some rules.

Icelanders want a word with you :P

Wait. Somebody else who uses the dwarvish name for Gandalf?

Had to do a double take, as that's my steam handle.

I wanted to see what your own tool says about this very comment of yours. But vetter reports a 403.

Yeah I'd sorta second that actually. I can't "judge" on everything they say in the blog post. But some things I definitely recognize as "bad-faith".

    Datadog RUM (browser-intake-datadoghq.com) - real-time user monitoring. every click, every page load - on a FedRAMP platform processing PII and biometrics.

Well duh, yes, DataDog does have those capabilities. Doesn't mean you use all of it, just coz you use RUM in general. We also use DataDog and RUM. But we also use filtering, including filtering out the known PII sources we have in our specific case (non-FedRAMP) and we don't have entire session recording enabled for example and we only sample.

Yet no mention of that in the post. They just assume that they must be sending PII from a FedRAMP site to DataDog. No proof of what data actually does get sent.

You would need an army of thieves going around and physically pointing thermometers and the ROI isn't there.

VS. just checking your computer once and going to the correct place. Heck, set up alerts and get notified where to break in next.

The odds of a house with a smart thermostat also containing cameras is pretty high, though.

This is probably true, though I think the most important part of planning a break in is just ensuring people aren't there.

Sure, there are cameras and the cops can respond and that's certainly a deterrent, but a few masks and a quick getaway renders them moot.

I mean, what did you expect?

    Copyright © 1978-2025 Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

did Warren Buffet code this himself?

Yes, he used punch cards and a System 360.

We have this in some of our projects too but I always wonder how long it's going to take until it just fails. Nobody reads all those memory files for accuracy. And knowing what kind of BS the AI spews regularly in day to day use I bet this simply doesn't scale.