ObsidianNebula

For a physical book, I'm reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm not too far in yet, but I'm enjoying it so far. I am having some issues keeping track of names, which usually isn't a problem for me, and I'm not sure why.

For my drive to work, I'm listening to "Words of Radiance" by Brandon Sanderson. I'm not sure if I'm really enjoying it or not, but I'm giving it a chance. For the first book, I thought it was just okay until about the last third of the book, so we'll see how this one turns out.

I'm from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don't interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren't great. I wouldn't hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.

I watched a video a while back about this, but the details are fuzzy. I think it was the one I linked below if you want to look more into it. In essence, there aren't a ton of cases where kids are actually being forced to work. However, there are strong incentives for kids to work on Roblox projects that the developers themselves push. The devs want a constant stream of content and money coming in, but they don't want to pay adult workers at adult wages, so they offer Robux to players who make games. It is difficult for people to convert Robux to actual cash, and the money they receive is often significantly less than they would if they put the effort into any other form of work, so many of these kids are essentially making content for the developers for free or significantly less than they should earn. If there was no payout for content creators and the kids were doing that development just because they had passion for the game, it might be a different situation, but there are quite a few kids that believe they can make serious money doing this and don't understand that the developers are exploiting them and paying very little. Adults can probably do more research and better understand the situation they are getting into, but kids often don't have the same critical thinking skills as adults and will accept the lie being pushed by the developers and community that they can get rich by contributing to the game they love.

Video: https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

Follow-up: https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

I'm sure most people knew it was Russia from the start, but I saw a comment earlier today that apparently Russia was saying that it was a Ukrainian defense missile that fell out of the air. They are likely just confirming that it was indeed Russia.

I'm not sure why these comments are so negative so far. If I'm understanding the article correctly, it is an optional setting to automatically open the app as soon as it is done installing. The Play Store isn't just installing and opening apps on its own.

To add onto this for anyone interested, the reason it and many businesses are incorporated in Delaware specifically is because it has a very pro-business legal and judicial system. Many businesses benefit from choosing that state over others and can find loopholes that allow them to save money (though there have been efforts to eliminate those loopholes in much of the country).

Phil Edwards recently released a video on this, which is how I found out about it: https://youtu.be/b4q99EuZF_Q

And this is the article that inspired the video: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corporation-trust-center

I had an issue where a client reported a crash on login. The exception and stack trace reported were very generic and lent no clues to the cause. I tried debugging but could not reproduce. I eventually figured out that the crash only happened for release (non-debug) builds that were obfuscated. I couldn't find the troublesome code, so I figured out which release introduced the issue, then which commit, then went change by change until I was able to find the cause. It turned out to be a log message in a location that was completely unrelated to login. That exact log message was fine a few lines up. Other code worked fine in that location. For some unknown reason, having that log message in that specific location caused a crash in a completely different area of code.

I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

It was obfuscated only in the release build. The issue is that they have a system to send certain logs to an API so they can refer to them if a user has an issue that needs further investigation. Unfortunately, their target audience is not very tech literate and have a hard time explaining how they got into a situation where they experienced a bug, so the remote logging was a way to allow us to try to retrace the user's steps. Some of the logs that get sent to the API have JSON values converted from class data, will refer directly to class names, etc, and those logs had the obfuscated names.

I have a somewhat related real world story. I had a client that was convinced that tons of people were going to decompile their application and sell their own version of the program, so they insisted that they needed their code obfuscated to protect company secrets and make it harder to reverse engineer. I tried explaining to them that obfuscation wasn't that big of a deterrent to someone attempting to steal code through reverse engineering and that it would likely cause some issues with debugging, but they were certain they needed it. Sure enough, they then had a real user run into an issue and were surprised to find that their custom logging system was close to useless because the application was outputting random obfuscated letters instead of function and variable names. We did have mapping files, but it took a lot of time to map each log message to make it readable enough to try to understand the user's issue.

I have a Funko Pop of the "This is Fine" dog on my desk at work because there are times where I'm really feeling that way.