This is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work).
I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.
If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.
The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?
The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.
The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.
So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.
Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.
I work for a bank. There is a strategic focus on the mobile banking app over the web app. Younger generations are doing everything through their phones. Including applying for home loans. Many banks are moving towards being digital only as contactless payments means people are using cash a lot less to the point that physical bank branches don't make sense anymore.
As I teenager and then poor uni student, I rode a number of bikes or bike parts to failure.
I first snapped the top tube of a stell framed BMX near the stem after many years of using it for a local paper round with a milk crate roped onto the handlebars. The weight of the papers was certainly a contributing factor.
I've snapped a chain while out of the saddle, accelerating a road bike. Nothing too serious, just banged by knee on the bars. Still, do not recommend.
While riding up a long steep hill, I snapped the nut off the outside of a clipless pedal. Luckily the pedal didn't slip off the axle and I could get to a safe stopping point.
I had a carbon top tube delaminate from some aluminium lugs near the stem. Something felt off with the handling so I glanced down and could see ~1.5 cm of the lug showing. Decided to walk the bike the rest of the way to work that day. Got a local carbon repair specialist to re-bond it and it lasted a few more years.
That carbon frame eventually developed a crack in the bottom bracket and frame from front to back right next to the seat tube on the chain ring side. When it failed, the bike started feeling "noodly" to ride, so I looked down and saw the crack opening and closing as I pedaled along.
Somehow I snapped the rear suspension pivot in a Trek Y3 without realising it until the next time I went to ride it. I jumped on it to ride to uni and something felt off. Then I noticed the front and rear wheels were both tracking straight but significantly offset from each other. Took a while to get it repaired as it was a custom part.
When borrowing my brothers (pre-suspension era) MTB I tried a little jump up a kerb. The front fork folded in half. I bent it back straight enough to get sufficient wheel clearance to finish the ride (slowly).
I have buckled many rims over the years on BMX, MTB and road bikes. The early aluminium rims were expensive and really easy to buckle compared to steel rims.
Had the freewheel pawls fail in a rear cassette suddenly one day. They would catch once every few pedal rotations for maybe 1/3 of a rotation. Initially I thought I'd dropped the chain. It was a long walk home.
I was having trouble keep my front QR wheel on a road bike from vibrating mildly as I rode on it. I thought the bearing were loose, so I took the wheel off then found the hollow QR axle had snapped in the middle.
From riding with many others over the years, I'm also aware that larger (taller) riders can break stuff more easily as well. One work colleague who was probably 6'3-4" snapped a cog off the rear cassette almost perfectly in half while accelerating. He wasn't a strong rider, he'd started bike commuting a few months earlier. Maybe the crank length he needed brought extra torque.
Another very strong 6'1" guy I rode with for a few years cracked 3 carbon Bianchi frames within the first few months of owning them. All replaced under warranty. I think he was just heavier and stronger that the frames were generally designed for.
Frames are typically weakest at the joins as that is where the stress is concentrated.
Any rotating part will eventually wear and fail.
Ride a bike long and often enough and something _will_ give out.
I know this is a late response, but for anyone curious you would need to use an official Oracle or Sun JDK/JRE from Java 8 or older. OpenJDK doesn't include support for applets.
You also need a browser that has NPAPI. IE 11 was the most modern browser I am aware of that still supported applets.
The old GUI framework mentioned in the GP might have been Swing. It is still included in most JDKs and allows for cross platform desktop GUI application development with no other dependencies outside the JDK. Finding documentation on how to do GUIs in Swing is getting increasingly difficult though.
Using your restaurant example, if the restaurant closes it may not have much obvious effect on other nearby businesses. However, that restaurant would have given business to various food and consumables suppliers, to waste management companies, to an accountant etc. All those businesses have now lost a source of income and may be less profitable.
Perhaps the restaurant was leasing the premises from a landlord. The landlord may still have a loan for the business premises. That loan could be at risk of going into arrears if no other person decides to try their luck running a restaurant in a location that doesn't have sufficient patronage.
Consider now that the office workers who have refused to RTO work for the bank that holds the loan for the business premises. There is a risk to the bank now that the premises is less valuable because it can't be leased and is less attractive for a future purchaser.
The point is that most businesses don't operate without having other businesses as suppliers or clients. When one business does badly it can affect other businesses in their network. A small number of isolated businesses failing doesn't cause knock on effects. However, if a larger number of smaller retailers, dependent on foot traffic close in the same locality it will have a ripple effect out to many other larger businesses.
Business owners and executives have an interest in trying to maintain a healthy business network. Some will believe that pushing for RTO should help other local businesses in their business network and thus will be beneficial for their company in the long term.
There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays.
Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage.
For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were.
Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.
You are probably thinking of dowels used as loose tenons, where a blind hole is drilled into the mating pieces of wood and the dowel is not visible once the joint is together.
Sometimes people glue a butt or mitre joint, then once the glue has set, drill a through hole for a through dowel from an outside face of the joint.
The blind holes approach is tricky to get perfect alignment on where dowels are being added across a longer length. As a hobbyist I've tried a few cheaper dowelling jigs and had mixed success. This challenge lead to other loose tenon solutions like biscuits or dominos which allow for some side to side misalignment while retaining the ability to keep the visible faces aligned.
The through dowel approach avoids the misalignment problem, but comes with the visibility of the end grain of the dowel on one exposed face. Some people are ok with that.
Dowels are still one of the "strongest" options for end-grain to long-grain joints. Many professional woodworkers now favour dominos simply due to who quick it allows them to work and the additional allowance for some side-to-side alignment.
Some pedestrian crossing buttons play different audible beats so blind people know when they can cross. Famously the beat of one in Sydney was sampled for a Billie Eilish song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zeJRjP6xA skip to around 4:00 mins).
However others have no indicator or sound. To make things even more confusing is the pedestrian crossings can also be programmed to happen automatically at peak times with no button press, but absolutely need a button press outside of peak hour.
Due to my age and work experience, I'm also familiar with archiving involving storing physical documents in cardboard boxes. My current job really is paper free and graduate employees joining will never deal with archive boxes.
Similarly, the icons on my mobile for making a call, answering a call and hanging up are all based on the shape of the handset for a corded phone.
The Save button icon in many applications is based on a 3.5" floppy disk.
I sometimes need to save data as a PDF, which in many cases involves "printing" to PDF. The icon is based on a paper printer, but the action I am using it for doesn't include any external device or paper.
This makes me wonder about what icons we could use in the future where so many actions are done via a touch interface on a phone/tablet. There are less physical objects involved in common actions. So the skeuomorphic approach to icons for buttons is becoming less valid over time especially for younger people.
I'm ok with adding more functions to the titlebar, it's something I experimented with myself for a desktop app some 15 years ago. I found there was a heck of a lot of special behaviours tied to the titlebar and that overriding them meant a lot of work to fix edge cases like - being able to move windows. So I never followed through with it.
Maybe the addition of dedicated Move button next to the minimise, maxmimise and close button would be a reasonable compromise?
That would provide a consistent target to click on with your mouse. Obviously a button is a lot smaller than the entire titlebar for clicking on, so there would be some efficiency loss for people that regularly move windows (I am one of them). Getting move use out of the titlebar space would be worth the minor inconvenience of a more accurate click-drag to move operation.
Java has been around for a longish time. Around the early 2000's there was at least a perception that you should avoid creating too many objects as that carried performance overhead for construction and garbage collection.
Immutable objects often require you to construct a new object to store an updated value and garbage collect the now unused previous object. So a lot of early Java code was written with mutable objects to avoid performance issues.
In my current role I work as a developer in the finance sector. We are interested in secure coding. Every year we have to complete a secure coding course and pass an assessment.
We have a team dedicated to performing security reviews for most code changes. Your change can't go to Production until it has been assessed by someone from the secure code team. They can request rework if they think you have introduced a vulnerability.
We have regular pen-testing performed.
There are various vulnerability scanners running against the code repos and blocking builds if a dependency is identified to contain a new CVE.
The project I mainly work on has been in active development for decades. It has well defined frameworks for many common actions. Most of the time we are working within those frameworks, which have been already been vetted thoroughly. Ironically, it is rare that we would need to touch code in a way that could introduce a vulnerability.
In a previous role I worked on desktop applications for engineering simulation. There was no requirement for secure coding for those projects as there was no central database. All the models were file based.
So it depends on the project and the risk and consequence of an malicious actor finding a vulnerability and exploiting it. The health and finance sectors have to take secure coding seriously. From experience, many Oil and Gas companies are also super strict on controlling data access and will often request proof that a software application has been security reviewed and pen-tested.
I regularly get apologised to by customer service people when I have been waiting for coffee of food. Usually something like "Sorry for the wait".
While I am waiting, I often retreat into my own thoughts, mentally processing some difficult problem or trying to plan out a project in my head. When I am thinking hard I adopt a "focus" face with a slight frown with lips pressed together.
The servers must be reading my face as annoyance or anger.
I always say thanks and smile when I collect my order so they know I wasn't unhappy, especially with them.
I guess most people are more "in the moment" and maintain a neutral or friendly face.
For many people, being selected for a layoff can feel like you have been judged as a lower performer than your colleagues. The thinking being that the company would always want to retain their best performers. This can cause a big loss of confidence for some people. They will be stuck thinking "Why was I one of those chosen for being laid off?"
Often though, the decision on who to lay off also considers who might be close to retirement, who might cost more to make redundant (redundancy pay in many places is based on years of service and there might also be long service leave owed), and the mixture of skills and knowledge the company thinks it will need going forward.
Also some people will have built up strong relationships with colleagues, teams and clients through their work. Their potential to continue these relationships typically drops dramatically without it being a regular part of work. That can make some people quite sad personally and frustrated that all of the work developing those relationships will suddenly not be very useful anymore.
I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.
If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.