The Daily WTF

Ever get some special letter, card, or picture from a friend or loved one that you held onto, maybe even taped to your cube or office wall? Is it something you still look at fondly, something that lifts your spirits whenever you're down? Certainly, a thoughtful card or letter is much nicer than a thoughtful email.

Now imagine your special keepsake being scanned, censored, and converted into a digital file that you can only view from a tablet — assuming you can afford the fee to access the tablet. The original has been destroyed; it's gone forever. You'll never get to see or feel it in your hands.

It sounds almost too cruel, like something you'd find in a Fallout game. Unfortunately, it's reality for more and more people incarcerated in US prisons.

I've been writing to an incarcerated person for a while now myself. I find the process incredibly rewarding; I think about my friend all the time and wish them well. Unfortunately, the scanning and processing takes absolutely forever, so in a given year we only exchange 3 letters per side. The digitized files that I receive have names censored out of them; I have no idea what's removed from my letters before my friend receives them. For me, this is all too reminiscent of exchanging letters with my grandmother in Iran before she died. Agents there would straight-up open the envelope, confiscate any valuables inside, marker over anything they didn't like, then re-seal the envelope and send it back on its merry way.

Over 30 US states now digitize the mail passing in and out of prisons, relying on AI to judge what's kosher and what isn't. If you thought AI was great with resumes, just wait until you task it with threat detection! It's been working so well that one nonprofit organization had to change its name: the word fight, used in any context whatsoever, gets flagged.

Once mail is scanned, it's only accessible by tablets that have to be paid for. Incarcerated people are already nickled and dimed for a ridiculous number of things and surely don't need more fees.

It doesn't stop at mail, either. The latest tech is also being used to eliminate physical visitation. Because if there's anything the pandemic taught us, it's that nothing beats seeing your loved ones exclusively on a screen for years at a stretch.

The states justify these egregious measures by playing the drug card. They're necessary to stop drugs from entering the prisons. But these states stop short of providing evidence to show that these tech-facilitated practices are actually having the intended effect. Even if they magically solved drug trafficking forever, could any result truly justify the vast harm being inflicted upon incarcerated people, their families, and their friends? Physical mail and visitation are necessary lifelines and psychological boosts for those who might otherwise have nothing and no one to hold onto during an unimaginably difficult time of their lives.

Do I really have to explain the benefit of parents and children exchanging homework, letters, and pictures?

I'm angry about this on so many levels. If you are, too, here's some stuff we can do to fight work against this together:

• Support prison abolition with your time, money, and/or IT superpowers. Forced prison labor is slavery. The entire punitive model is cruel, biased, and far less effective than approaches like restorative and community-based justice. Moving on is long overdue and the best way to make all of this stop.
• Avoid working for companies that facilitate these practices. Tell your friends not to work for them, either. If you're stuck working for them for survival's sake, look for ways to enact positive change from the inside.
• Spread the word of what's happening. Most people have no idea. Use your knowledge to educate technical and non-technical folks. They might want to do something about this, too.
• Write to incarcerated people yourself. Like Bob Ross said, "Everybody needs a friend." Knowing there's someone in your corner who cares about you makes all the difference in the world. Sites like WriteAPrisoner.com will match you up with a pen pal.

A drop of water seems harmless, but get enough of those together and you carve out the Grand Canyon. If we all do something to help, however big or small, our massed effort becomes something powerful. As tech professionals, we are especially empowered to push back on these cruel and abusive practices. We must act now, before they move out of prisons and into mainstream society.

Do you want your post office to start doing this?

Sources:

• Abandon All Connection, Ye Who Enter Here: Digitized Prison Mail as Repression and Surveillance
• WEBINAR: Fighting for families: How advocates are resisting attacks on visitation and physical mail
• Involuntary Servitude: How Prison Labor is Modern Day Slavery
• Why Justice Systems Don't Always Deliver

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For some godawful reason, people like to explain object oriented concepts via analogy to biological taxonomies. I suppose it's easy to understand an "is-a" relationship (a cat is a mammal), but the down side is you get a complex and increasingly leaky analogy that over-emphasizes the importance of inheritance.

That's not to slight Alan's choice of using it to anoymize today's code. It's just a broad frustration on my part.

In any case, Alan has been working in a C++ codebase that's written by people who maybe don't fully understand all the key object oriented concepts. That's why you get code like this:

/* * If possible, steal tentacle from the given animal. */ void Animal::StealTentacle(Animal *animal) { // only Octopus and Squid can have tentacles if (!IS_INSTANCE_OF(this, Octopus) && !IS_INSTANCE_OF(this, Squid)) { return; } Limb *limb = animal->mLimbs->GetFirstTentacle(); if (limb) { limb->AttachToAnimal(this); // . . .

This function takes a raw pointer to an Animal object. If that pointer is not an Octopus or a Squid, we bail. Otherwise, we're going to take its tentacle, and do stuff with it.

Now, this is a pretty clear example of the type switch anti-pattern. Instead of using the type system and polymorphism to enforce restrictions, we instead do runtime type checks.

But wait a second, what's going on in that IS_INSTANCE_OF?

// I've noticed that dynamic_cast always returns a valid result when // casting an "objectPointer" of type "className". // Try casting it to a [Organism *] to force it to work. (?) #define IS_INSTANCE_OF(objectPointer, className) ((bool) (dynamic_cast<className *>(((Organism *) objectPointer)) != NULL)) #define IS_MEMBER_OF(objectPointer, className) IS_INSTANCE_OF(objectPointer, className) // temporary macro alias

This code attempts to take an objectPointer and first, force it into a pointer to our base type (Organism), using a C-style cast. Now, in C++, C-style casts are a shorthand, and the compiler will, based on the context, attempt to do the best cast which fits the situation, starting with a const_cast (which only alters the constness of the type), and failing all the way up to a reinterpret_cast- which just ignores type information entirely and assumes you know what you're doing.

Which this developer clearly doesn't.

In any case, we pass the C-style cast result into the dynamic_cast function, which attempts to cast that pointer into an instance of className. If no such conversion is possible (because they're not part of the same inheritance hiercharcy), it returns NULL, which is what they're checking.

Their comment highlights their misunderstanding of the function; dynamic_cast can be used to crosscast. In other words, dynamic_cast<Dog*>(my_cat) will actually work, because (in this example) Dog* and Cat* share a common base.

From the docs:

Otherwise, if expression points/refers to a public base class subobject of the most derived object, and the type of the most derived object has an unambiguous and public base class of type Target, the result points/refers to the Target subobject of the most derived object. In other words, dynamic_cast can be used to crosscast (or side-cast) pointers/references, between two types derived from the same base.

You shouldn't be using dynamic cast to solve this problem. Hell, you sohuldn't be doing any of this in the first place!

In any case, in actual usage, the developers responsible do stuff like this:

if (IS_INSTANCE_OF(animal, Felid)) { Felid *cat = (Felid *) animal; // Yes another C-style cast - this time (hopefully) devolving to the same dynamic_cast hidden inside the expansion of the previous macro.

I love when a comment says "hopefully". "This hopefully does what I think it should do".

I'll let Alan summarize the problems:

Used prudently, the dynamic dispatch facility that object oriented languages provide their users can be a valuable tool for capturing the domain model in clean, elegant code. However, as even C++'s designer Bjarne Stroustrup acknowledged, in "The Design and Evolution of C++", the introduction of support for Run-Time Type Information makes it possible to spurn such assistance and write RTTI-based code for which a verdict of "combines the syntactic elegance of C with the run-time efficiency of Smalltalk" is just "too kind".

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Matias shared a standard sort of flubstituted fail-merge error'd; not really egregious, just routine. "I am {{emotionType}} to hear this."

And another mail-not-merged from Reinier B. "When the package from [SELLER] seemed to be lost in the mail, I was very [EMOTIONAL_STATE] with the refund of [AMOUNT]. I can now buy another [ITEM] instead."

Dave A. didn't care for this mail flub, though it's hardly egregious in my opinion. He suggested we just label it with "A short description of snarky comments."

"I've_missed_you_too" Willy wrote in response to this earnest email. "Long lasting relationships with car dealers are built on the personal touchÖ."

"This is a title" Peter said about a polyglot web page. "This is a comment."

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Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened.

Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement car missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel.

Now, given that this is in a region of the world with a fairly robust train network, this represented a hiccup of thirty minutes in a many hour trip. Not a particularly big deal. But Robert didn't want to get stranded any longer than he had to, so he took out his phone, fired up the train company's app, and made sure he had a reservation on the next train. He got the confirmation, and grabbed a coffee while he waited.

Not quite thirty minutes later, Robert boarded the train and went towards his reserved seat. Another passenger approached from the opposite direction, and they met at the seat. "Excuse me," Robert said, "but I reserved this one."

"No, I reserved this one."

Being reasonable people, they both pulled out their phones and pulled up their apps. Sure enough, each one of them was confirmed for that seat. Since the email confirmation had more details than the app provided, they both pulled up the email. Same seat. Both confirmed. The timestamp of the reservation? The same, down to the second.

"I don't think the conductor will let us sit in each other's laps," the other passenger said.

As it turned out, there was enough room on the train that no lap sitting was required. Everyone got a seat, even if it wasn't the one they reserved.

But the story stuck with Robert. A major transit provider had a reservation system that clearly had a race condition. It seemed like the most basic example of race conditions too, the kind you're shown in college to explain the basic concept.

"Check if the seat is reserved, and if it's not, reserve it." Because that sequence isn't atomic, two different threads could do the check, see it's not reserved, and then reserve it. I suppose it's at least something that one reservation doesn't overwrite the other, which at least indicates that a reservation is its own record.

The real question is this: this has to happen with some frequency, so how has nobody fixed it?

The real answer: they probably just don't care, either because they literally don't care, or because their software is such a trashfire that this doesn't even rise to the top ten bugs. It's likely a mix of both.

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A junior dev on the team had a simple question: in Java, how do I correctly read user input from the CLI and act on it?

Now, we can wonder about a junior dev not having such basic knowledge, but maybe they're new to Java specifically. Who knows. But Robert's team has a senior on it who "likes to mentor". This senior has strong opinions about how to write software, extreme confidence in those opinions, and has somehow been around the company long enough that he knows where the bodies are buried and no one will fire him.

Here's his sample application for reading input.

import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets; import java.util.*; public class ScannerTool { public static void main(String[] args) { Map<Optional<Character>, Map.Entry<String, Boolean>> map = new HashMap<>(); map.put(Optional.of('A'), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered A.", true)); map.put(Optional.of('B'), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered B.", true)); map.put(Optional.empty(), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("You entered nothing.", false)); Optional<Character> input; do { System.out.println("Please enter A or B:"); } while (!map.getOrDefault((input = nextCharacter()), new AbstractMap.SimpleEntry<>("", false)) .getValue()); System.out.println(map.get(input).getKey()); } public static Optional<Character> nextCharacter() { String l = new Scanner(System.in, StandardCharsets.UTF_8).nextLine(); if (l != null && !l.isEmpty()) { return Optional.of(l.charAt(0)); } return Optional.empty(); } }

Look, I know Java is verbose, but this is entirely next level. Giving this to a junior has to constitute an attempt to drive the youth out of the industry, because any sane person being told, "your job is to write this" would realize they've committed a grave error in their career choice and needs to escape now.

nextCharacter in this case actually returns the first character of the next line, not the next character. And if there isn't one, it returns an empty optional. Which, fine, we only expect one character per line of input for this exercise, so that's not wrong, I just don't like the name of the function.

Of course, using Scanner here is a wrecking ball fly swatter- that class is a full on parser for reading out common data types from a file. Worth showing to a junior, but a little out of scope of this question.

But the real overengineering is the map of maps- well, a map of map entries. The key to the outer map is an optional of the character that was entered by the user. The value is itself a map, the key of the map is the message we want to output, the value is whether or not the loop should continue. They've reinvented tuples using map entries. Which, in their defense, mainline Java doesn't have tuples (enterprise edition seems to have them in the javax namespace, but I'm not even certain those are meant to be general purpose tuples anyway). A quick search indicates that their absence is a perennial source of heated discussions in forums and Stack Overflow.

Robert writes:

It is remarkable in its creativity and execution and still has me in awe. When I tried to unpack it, my brain just started to pack up its things and left, haven't seen it since.

Bon voyage.

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Many years ago, DJ got his start doing odd web development jobs for a low hourly rate. He was only 19 when he got started, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in being cheap to hire.

As I said, that was many years ago, and he has since learned a lot. But he still has some code from his very first "someone paid me for this" project. This particular function needed to pick a random bit of content from their database to display in the "right side" banner area. This is how DJ implemented it.

// Create an array of all the ID's used $int = array(); $query = $sql->query("SELECT * FROM rightside"); while($row = $sql->objects('',$query)) { $int[ $row->id ] = $row->id; if ($row->id > $max) { $max = $row->id; } } // Find a random ID that has been used $x = false; while ($x == false) { $rand = rand(0,$max); foreach ($int as $thing) { if ($thing == $rand) { $x = true; } } } $query = $sql->query("SELECT * FROM rightside WHERE id = ".$rand);

We start by building an array. Then we query the database for all the content. We get all the rows and columns, butw e only are interested in one- the id. We create a sparse array, where the index of the item is the item's value. We also track the max.

Once we've got that, we start a loop. Inside that loop, we generate a random number, check if it's in our array by doing a foreach across the array, and if it is, we break the loop- we've found our random content. If it's not, we keep trying until we score a hit.

Finally, we construct our query with string concatenation and grab the content we want to display.

Now, as a true confession, there's an element of caveat emptor here; if you're hiring the kid from the local college and paying them a few bucks an hour, this is the kind of thing you get.

Is the code terrible? Yes, even by early-00s PHP standards. Is it really DJ's problem, though? No. I'd hope any of us would look back at the code we wrote when we were 19, and shudder. It means we've learned something in the interim.

For this confession, I say there's no need to atone. Hopefully everyone learned a lesson, especially the company trying to hire programmers on the cheap.

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Today's anonymous submitter sends us some legacy Java code.

The task is this: check what time it is. And fortunately, even in the older Java datetime libraries that were terrible, this was an easy task. You just needed to do something like new Date(), which constructs a date time object set to the current time. getTime() picks off just the time portion.

Or, you could do this.

Timestamp current = new Timestamp(new Date().getTime()); Date date = new Date(current.getTime());

This creates a date, picks the time off, populates a timestamp, gets the time from the timestamp, and constructs a new date object.

The old Java date classes were awful, but they never needed you to do this. This is entirely home grown ugliness.

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We have for you this week a full set of the Error'd we most love to hate: the perverse password policy.

An anonymous reader drops this, with little to say except to note "Speciaal passwords". Evidently they supplied a password which satisfied each of the five green critera, but still it was rejected. It would be nice to know where this offense originated,

Intrepid Michael R. explains "note: Handy is the German term for mobile phone (UK) or cell phone (US)."

Sacha R. observes a secret policy at play, saying "Oracle try to do the right thing by showing you the password policy requirements when you manually reset a password in their Fusion applications. It's just a pity that it doesn't show you the *correct* password policy requirements."

"Faith, here's an equivocator," reports Matthew S. "Pick one, Staples!" I bet it's the ampersand that offends.

"At least letters or numbers?" questions a final anon. "Just a little head scratching moment. After removing all special characters from the password I was able to register." This looks like partly a translation wtf and partly a software design wtf.

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Today's anonymous submitter shares with us the function their company uses to validate authentication tokens.

public bool IsTokenValid(string token) { //TODO return true; }

This is running in production. So that's fun. The user they've authenticated as is tracked separately at the start of their session, which makes it at least marginally harder to pretend to be someone you aren't, but for authentication, any token will do.

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Fritz's team needed to see if one point was within a certain distance from a center point. You or I would likely try and answer this question using a simple distance calculation, since that's the question we're trying to answer. But what if you didn't understand distances at all? Then you could write this little piece of genius.

private bool IsWithin(Point point, int radius) { for (int x = -radius; x < radius + 1; x++) { for (int y = -radius; y < radius + 1; y++) { if ((PositionX == point.X + x) && (PositionY == point.Y + y)) return true; } } return false; }

This limits us to integer point values, which itself is fine. This iterates across every coordinate from (x-radius,y-radius) to (x+radius,y+radius) and checks if any of them are equal to our center point, (PositionX,PositionY). Notably, this means we're not checking a radius, at least not in a traditional metric, we're checking a box (or using the taxicab metric). Which if we wanted to check a box, we actually have even easier math than the distance equation- we could do that with pure bounds checking.

I've never thought to try and brute force distance checking, and that feels like a failure of my own creativity. Fritz's team mate at least was able to WTF in a way I wouldn't have considered.

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Nikolai M's team had a flaky CI/CD build. About 0.5% of the time, one of their tests would fail: frequent enough to be annoying, but not so frequent that it motivated management to assign anybody to investigate. Nikolai eventually dug in, taking the initiative.

Microsoft's implementation of UUIDs calls them GUIDs. The GUID is, per the docs, really just a wrapper around UUID algorithms, and supports a variety of different UUID variants. I'm sure at some historical point, this wasnt't true, and Microsoft had some weird internal algorithm. That's not really here nor there, but the test that was failing was failing because of an assertion relating to GUIDs.

Assert.DoesNotContain("000", transactionId.ToString());

transactionId is a GUID. This line converts it to a string and checks if it contains "000". They're attempting to check if it's an empty UUID, and they've assumed that three sequential zeroes in the output would be an impossible event. This is untrue. Nikolai measured it, and found it happens 0.5527% of the time- 1-in-181.

So this is a bad test, and could be made better with a more thorough check. Or it could leverage the built in constant GUID.Empty, which is a UUID where every bit is zero.

And it's that which really bugs me, honestly. Even if you didn't know about the constant, the idea of constructing an empty GUID seems like the obvious choice. Though I suppose you'd have to check the docs to find out how to construct a GUID directly, and if you're already reading the docs, the chances of you seeing the built-in constant are probably higher than 0.5527%.

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Our submitter Tim C. is back as his bureaucratic nightmare continues. Read Part 1 here.

After I'd thrown the WTF Exchange (WTFX) for a loop, they managed to eventually right the ship. But then I faced another hurdle: I had run out of disk space. The software was not live, we were still developing the customer-specific customisations, but I was a bit stuck without a few more gigabytes.

The exchange went something like this:

"Hey Margritte, I need more disk space."

"Oh dear, what's happening?"

"Nothing is happening. I'm just developing the software. I need more disk space, not much. Can you get me another 20Gb? Wait, make that 40Gb."

"We can't just get you more disk space. These things need to be planned!"

"I just need a tiny amount, really. No need for any meetings. Just tell your IT guys to give me another NFS drive or expand one of the existing ones."

"Tim, that's not how things work here. We need to discuss your needs and it's important to us to know what needs you might have in future."

"Um, okay ... ?"

"I'll try to call an urgent meeting."

"Really? For 40Gb?"

"Well, how do we know 40Gb is going to be enough?"

"Because it's double what I really think I need."

"Why on Earth didn't you tell us before that you needed this disk space?"

"I'm telling you now!"

"Why didn't you do projections months ago?"

"At no stage did anyone ask me how much disk space we need! We obviously need some disk space! I have literally never given anyone an estimate! We are not even at the point yet to even estimate how much we'll need on project go-live."

"Well, I'll try to get an urgent meeting going. But it won't be today."

So at lunchtime, I went to the local computer store and bought an external hard drive. I asked Margritte to give it to the IT guys to stick somewhere in their computer room, or at least somewhere on their network.

That just seemed to make things worse.

"We can't take this! We have procurement processes!"

"Take it! This is a freebie from me to you. It'll help unstick a blockage in the project."

"It's not our standard hardware vendor. God knows what stuff is on it. We can't take the risk."

"I have literally not opened the plastic sealed wrapper on the outside of the box."

"Yes, but you could have re-sealed it. When we go via our trusted hardware partners we don't have to worry about things like that."

"You realise I'm making software every day which is running in the heart of your systems?! I work on this laptop here, and at the hotel, creating software, both C++ source code and Windows executables, that run inside your systems!"

"But it's not in the asset register. We need to record the warranty details every time we install hardware. What happens if it fails after you've left?"

"Well, how about we just agree I'll take it with me when I go?"

"Okay, I'll see if I can make the meeting happen tomorrow. To get you more disk space. Using our preferred hardware. Not that ... thing." (Said with disgust.)

Well, I finally got my disk space ... after a couple of days.

I was shocked to learn months later what a small proportion of the overall project budget our company earned. What seemed like an enormous multi-million-dollar contract to us was dwarfed by what WTFX spent on ex-pat "Anderson Androids", all immaculately groomed with expensive suits, who spent weeks twiddling their thumbs in expensive hotel rooms waiting for us to finish our software development, because they couldn't start until we had finished.

So sayeth the Gantt chart! Amen.

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I know it's not nice to mock mistranslations, but would you believe we're laughing with them, not at them? In response to recent criticism of the difficulty of identifying precisely what is at issue, two of our readers have chosen to highlight the offending element. Thanks for saving me the trouble!"

"Bad Dutch translation, or is't?" asketh Mike V. "I visited the Dutch Dell site https://www.dell.com/nl-nl and noticed the bad translation on the "Accept All" cookies button. Then I visited the UK page on https://www.dell.com/en-uk and was not so sure anymore about the bad translation. Funny thing is that the text above the buttons refer to the buttons with a completely different text (which is an Error'd in itself)" If I squint I can almost see how this kind of translation could happen.

"Going under german" meint Matthias J.. "Trying to add info to my Euro-Tunnel France to Britain booking, seems LeShuttle does not care for my (old) german language setting anymore." Mox nix, as Kilroy said.

"Do you understand?!" rzants sztmbr "Am I a liar when clicking "Understand" under this cryptic message in Polish Glovo app?"

The Beast in Black gets two extra points for the Johnny Five meme here but minus two for the Mr Miyagi. Easy come, easy go. Beast says "I'm floored! Apparently I can improve my floor so the Roborock robot vacuum cleaner can better it. How, though? Pre-clean? Wax on wax off? Need input, Stephanie!"

"This one made me laugh today. Please provide your psychic address." Yes, humour is a strong physic! TheRealSteveJudge "Really funny. This was found at German Ebay. A Chinese seller of Makita compatible stuff. Please provide your psychic address. Please see in the last line before the orange bar. What is my psychic address? I still have to find out."

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Tim inherited a fairly antique Visual Basic application some time back. Yes, Visual Basic, not VB .Net. The application is old enough that we might consider it "vintage" or "historical"; it certainly dates from before the millennium. But it has its own unique approach to handling historical dates:

mnYear% = CInt(Year(vntDate)) If mnYear% < 1000 Then msYear$ = "0" & Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) Else msYear$ = Trim$(CStr(mnYear%)) End If

Insert obligatory complaints about Hungarian notation. What even is vnt.

Now, one important thing about this program: it didn't have to handle dates back into the middle ages, or honestly, historical dates at all. But someone decided they wanted to make sure that if someone wanted to track the founding of the Tang Dynasty in here, you could make sure it was padded out to four digits.

Unfortunately, if you wanted to track, say, the death of Caesar Augustus in 14AD, that'll only pad out to "014", which raises the question: what even is the point of this padding? And how many pre-1000 dates did the program handle? The answer to both questions is "none". Later code reformatted the date anyway, using the built in date types, even.

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Our submitter Tim C. shares his tale of an especially brutal culture clash:

I had co-founded a software startup doing stock market surveillance. In the early 2000s, the WTF Exchange (WTFX) was a major customer of ours. We were one part of a major project of theirs, a complete overhaul of their trading engine and IT systems.

Compared to our other clients, WTFX was quite bureaucratic. There seemed to be a strong focus on the process, rather than the mission or the result. They were even explicit about this, telling us, "The process is the deliverable."

I believe they made that explicit in talking to us because our culture was quite agile and thereby contrasted, or clashed, with the culture of everyone else working on the project.

"Predictability" was another buzzword they used to admonish us. We were required and expected to abide by the grand "waterfall" design and project plan and project timeline. The grand project was controlled via an enormous Gantt chart and they hated having to make any change to the Gantt chart.

There was one report which was central to the Exchange's surveillance department. The occasional opportunities I got to talk directly to end-users, they always stressed the importance of this report, and the importance of it updating immediately to changes in the filtering criteria, and the importance of the fine details such as colour-coding cells based on certain rules.

It became clear to me that we could not handle this report using a report definition file fed into our general report-writing module. It called for a custom piece of software. So over the course of the next weekend, in my hotel room, I whipped up a solution for these users: a whole new module to be added to our suite. It was maybe not perfect, but it was largely complete by the time I proudly unveiled my creation the next Monday.

However, instead of a pat on the back, I was greeted by looks of horror. This module had a whole new name, was not mentioned anywhere in the giant Gantt chart, had never been mentioned before as a concept in any specification document.

I had failed at "predictability." I had unleashed on the poor customer an urgent requirement to do a whirlwind set of meetings and priority changes and updates to the specification documentation and the giant Gantt chart.

In short, I had thrown the whole project into chaos.

This wasn't Tim's last brush with bureaucracy gone mad! Stay tuned for Part 2.

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David C sends us a true confession.

For my job, I write C++ code as if it was a scripting language (long story) to produce programmatic animations for videos. Given that these are "write-and-run-once-and-never-look-at-it-again" programs, I tend to not try as hard to make my code good. But once I wrote this line of code, I had to take a step back and reevaluate my life choices.

fade_out(scene, length4->range(0, 3), length4_3_3, length4[4], length4[5]->range(0, 3));

This is a natural consequence of passing parameters as arrays, it seems; instead of having meaningful named values in a struct or similar, we have all these things packed into arrays. We can see a long ago attempt at using variable, badly, in the John Cage variable: length4_3_3. John Cage's (in)famous composition, "4:33" calls into question what precisely even is music, just like this variable calls into question what even is a variable name- because this is clearly a range expression of size 1. length4->range(3,1), or more reasonably, probably length4[3].

Where a normal variable name might give us some indication about what its contents mean, this gives us none of that, just a statement of how we could acquire those contents if we ever wanted them again.

For disposable code, this is hardly the worst thing I've ever seen, but is any code truly disposable? You always find yourself wanting to pull some piece of it forward into the next project, inevitably. Read the third chapter of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and consider yourself absolved. Go forth and sin no more.

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On July 10 2026, a life insurance company called TruStage had a "cybersecurity incident". According to an update posted five days later, when they revealed the incident, they are "continuing to work carefully and urgently to understand the facts, and the company will communicate appropriately as its understanding of the situation evolves."

This work, according to their outage page (last updated on September 11th, at the time of this writing), is continuing. Every major business function is listed as "partially available". They have some text explaining that they can't simply turn the system back on, because safety.

They don't know what data was compromised. They don't know when they'll have everything back up. As of mid-August they had gotten so far as setting up a "clean" environment that they could start migrating services to. The only good news is that some of their services are supplied to credit unions for banking, and those were on different systems, so only their insurance packages were compromised. I also suspect the fact that they serve credit unions is the only thing keeping the business afloat, because failing to handle transactions for months seems like a terminal event for most businesses.

Obviously, this also means they're embroiled in an ever growing number of lawsuits from a variety of parties. It also highlights something about how insurance works: it's middlemen all the way down.

TruStage will issue policies, but their connection to the actual policy holder will likely be routed through a number of different partners. Like, for example, Ethos.

Ethos uses "AI" to "democratize" insurance. Feed your data into their AI, and in minutes they'll pair you up with a policy. Which, while using machine learning to do things like assess insurance risk seems like a pretty reasonable idea, in this age of AI hype, one has to wonder how this actually is implemented and how it works in practice.

But Ethos isn't the end of the chain! Other companies live downstream from Ethos, for example, Family First Life. A customer might reach out to FFL to get a policy, FFL reaches out to Ethos (or one of many other partners), and Ethos reaches out to one of its partners (TruStage being one of their largest), and boom: an insurance happens. Like I said, it's middlemen all the way down.

But now, here's the problem: TruStage issued a bunch of policies, and then stopped being able to do business. They stopped being able to do even vital things, like process payments. And you know what happens when payments aren't made on a life insurance policy? It lapses. It goes away. You no longer have insurance. And the agents who sell those policies are often paid a commission based on the value of the first few months of the policy's life (since life insurance is expected to be a long term investment). If the policy lapses, those commissions vanish, companies like Ethos (or downstream partners like FFL) get chargebacks on the value of those failed policies.

This makes some people, like FFL's President, Shawn Meaike, very unhappy.

What we have here is a pretty egregious failure of cybersecurity and disaster recovery on the part of TruStage. It's an embarrassing and potentially terminal event for them. It's awful for the customers who bought insurance policies to give themselves peace of mind, only to discover their policies lapse because TruStage can't take their money. It's creating mild chaos in the entire industry. That's all interesting, but not why I wanted to write an article about this. I wanted to write about the incredible cringe.

In this clip from an insurance industry conference, Meaike brings up all of their partners for a "carrier panel". He then proceeds to line them up from stage right to stage left, ranking them as "weakest" to "strongest". Ethos, who sells TruStage policies, is labeled as the weakest.

"You have the weakest leg," he says, pointing at the reps from Ethos, to laughter from the audience, and then indicates the other side of the line represents "the strongest leg." Meaike hands the microphone to an Ethos employee, Dylan Cummings, "We'll start with you."

"I want to start out by thanking everyone," Cummings says.

Meaike cuts him off. "Hey, hey, hey, hey. I'm gonna help you. Why don't you start by saying you're sorry."

The crowd yells out, "Yes!" and applauds this idea.

"Say 'We have a carrier that's shut down'," Meakie continues, "'and I'm mother-freaking sorry.'"

Yes, he said "mother-freaking", on stage.

So let's recap. An insurance company gets pwned so hard they can't run operations for months. People's policies lapse, simply because they can't give their money to the insurance company. Which 100% sucks for those customers, though at least with life insurance we expect very few of them are missing their payout- hopefully! This chain cascades through the network of partners, until it culminates in the president of one company publicly humiliating the senior account manager at a middleman company, during an industry conference.

Nobody comes off looking particularly good here, obviously. Meakie is a jerk. TruStage is institutionally incompetent. Ethos is in a bit of a rock-and-a-hard-place situation, and Cummings is trying to do his best to tap dance his way out of oblivion, but it seems like the AI driven insurance startup just isn't a good partner even before their main issuer died.

All in all, it feels like a Tim Robinson sketch, or perhaps a Nathan Fielder bit. We're one step away from Meakie calling Cummings a "Wizard of Loneliness."

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It seems like only yesterday we were mocking the AIs for their limits, and tomorrow they're going to be mocking ours. In the meantime, here's a look back at some humorous moments from the last year or so.

"Mathing is hard" wrote Timothy W. "I for one welcome our new AI overlords."

"AI is replicating" quipped a clever anon who styled themselves AInonymous. "I don't want AI features on my phone. And yet, I'm now getting not just one, but two AI items on my context menu."

"AI is for the birds" chirped The Beast in Black. "Looks like someone's AI tool for image classification needs less of the A and more of the I."

"Get me the ruler" demanded Marius B.. "(note it's a bit old screenshot) Bing giving great suggestions for all the bear owners out there."

"AI not so I" spake Olivier. "This translates roughly to "I'm ready to help. Can you give me the title and description of the article ?""

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Today we have more of a representative comment, from Watson. This comes from some GPL licensed code published by everybody's favorite evil empire, Oracle.

/* * Copyright (c) 2011, 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 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2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as * published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the * License. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA * 02110-1301 USA */

Line breaks added to really show the swamp.

What was the last year this file was released, I wonder? Clearly some sort of autogeneration gone wrong, but it doesn't exactly give me a lot of faith in the rest of the code in this file.

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Autoformatting your code is a standard thing to do these days. And in those days past, if we're being honest. There's no excuse to not use some kind of autoformatter. Whether you configure your editor to do it or are a weirdo like me who runs a formatter from the CLI as a build step, you've got an easy way to format your code so it looks neat and readable. And some IDEs, like Visual Studio, are pretty insistent about doing this for you. Which makes today's code sample a bit more perplexing. This comes from an ancient ASP .Net application that Austin has the misfortune to work with:

protected void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e){if (Request.ServerVariables["http_user_agent"].IndexOf("Safari", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)Page.ClientTarget = "uplevel";} protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Logic(); }

Which function is Logic() called from? The fact that I'm asking probably is enough to get you to scroll over. The entire Page_PreInit function is on a single line, followed by the declaration of the Page_Load function. A confusing and annoying choice. The real bonus is that if the browser has "Safari" in its user agent, we set a field to a mysterious "uplevel" value. A mix of user agent sniffing, strings as enums/flags, and wonderfully unclear names.

And yes, this particular pattern appears in more than one page in Austin's application. Someone thought this was not just a good idea, but good enough to do over and over again.

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