Tag: Software

Software Problems and Flight Delays

Southwest’s Debacle, Which Stranded Thousands, to Be Felt for Days
Bad winter weather led the company to cancel more than 60 percent of its flights for Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving many travelers frustrated.
NYTIMES

Union leaders said a main cause of Southwest’s problems was inadequate computer systems that they said had failed to efficiently match crews with flights when cancellations started to accumulate. “They had committed to us that they have spent time and money on the infrastructure, but it has not been enough,” said Ms. Montgomery, the union leader. “The house of cards has fallen.”

Analysts also said Southwest had been slow to introduce new systems that would help it run its business. “Southwest has never viewed technology as a strategic priority,” Mr. Harteveldt said.

from reddit:
hiph0pan0nymus
What software does SWA scheduling use? CrewTrac?

flyingcircusdog
Apparently it’s a single excel sheet on a Windows 95 pc.

tostilocos
Have they tried rebooting it?

Geo-Nerd
By shutting down 90% of the flights for two days, that is essentially what they are doing.

Captain Kirk vs AI – Couple Commenters on Artificial Intelligence

A.I. has been oversold for years. It’s mostly fantasy—movie stuff. Look at the car industry, promising autonomous vehicles that would save lives by never having accidents. And yet that’s precisely what shut them down. The sensors on robot cars cannot possibly duplicate the eyes, brains, and knowledge of even your average driver, especially not on twisty roads in poor weather. Autonomous cars will never happen, except perhaps in very controlled circumstances, in which case they’ll be more like trains. Life is messy, and computers do not like messes. Watson can play chess and Jeopardy because they’re rule-based. The rules of life, or cancer, or anything with infinite variations, will send computers into overheated illogic. That’s how Captain Kirk always defeated them.

Cheer up Watson, there’s still hope for you in music. Now that Bob Dylan’s songs have been sold over you can now sing them for him and for the first time we can finally hear the words. What good is genius when it’s unintelligible so that’s where you come in.

Don’t believe the misinformation (Propaganda.) The Original Watson is alive and well and in the hands of the CIA. It worked too well but no one told you the truth.

From the comments:
What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson?
IBM’s artificial intelligence was supposed to transform industries and generate riches for the company. Neither has panned out. Now, IBM has settled on a humbler vision for Watson.

Software Bugs and Arizona Prisons

One of the software modules within ACIS, designed to calculate release dates for inmates, is presently unable to account for an amendment to state law that was passed in 2019.

Senate Bill 1310, authored by former Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, amended the Arizona Revised Statutes so that certain inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses could earn additional release credits upon the completion of programming in state prisons. Gov. Ducey signed the bill in June of 2019.

But department sources say the ACIS software is not still able to identify inmates who qualify for SB 1310 programming, nor can it calculate their new release dates upon completion of the programming.

“We knew from day one this wasn’t going to work” a department source said. “When they approved that bill, we looked at it and said ‘Oh, s—.’”

…

The sources said the ACIS software also makes it difficult for employees to correct errors once they have been identified.

“In one instance there was a disciplinary action erroneously entered on an inmate’s record,” a source said. “But there’s no way to back it out. So that guy was punished and he wasn’t able to make a phone call for 30 days. Those are the kinds of things that eat at you every day.”

Whistleblowers: Software Bug Keeping Hundreds Of Inmates In Arizona Prisons Beyond Release Dates
Jimmy Jenkins, https://kjzz.org/

Decision Making Software

She doesn’t remember exactly when she realized that some eligibility decisions were being made by algorithms. But when that transition first started happening, it was rarely obvious. Once, she was representing an elderly, disabled client who had inexplicably been cut off from her Medicaid-funded home health-care assistance. “We couldn’t find out why,” Gilman remembers. “She was getting sicker, and normally if you get sicker, you get more hours, not less.”

Not until they were standing in the courtroom in the middle of a hearing did the witness representing the state reveal that the government had just adopted a new algorithm. The witness, a nurse, couldn’t explain anything about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a computer scientist. She couldn’t answer what factors go into it. How is it weighted? What are the outcomes that you’re looking for? So there I am with my student attorney, who’s in my clinic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-examine an algorithm?’”

The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty
A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services.
Karen Hao
MIT Technology Review

Underrated Websites and Their Uses


What are underrated websites and what do you use them for? from AskReddit

ThrowRA29208
Naturalreaders.com

It’s basically a text to speech site that lets you copy and paste passages into a text box and then the computer will read it back to you. I use this when I need to type out papers, short stories or any other lengthy piece of writing as a way of proofreading. It’s nice to use this way because then you can hear your errors read aloud.

-eDgAR-
I always love an opportunity to be able to talk about archive.org because it is such a wonderful and free resource for so many things.

It has millions of free downloads for music, movies, books, software, etc. One very popular example is that it is home to a very large catalog of Grateful Dead recordings

There is also The Internet Arcade where you can play a lot of classic games along with the Console Living Room which is similar. They have access to tons of old PC games too and you can even play the original Oregon Trail online. There’s a lot more in their software section too.

It also has The WayBack Machine which has archived more than 486 billion web pages saved so you can go back and see how websites were years ago. For example, here’s reddit on July 25, 2005 a month after it was created.

gagahpangeran
https://www.photopea.com/

Online image editor with Photoshop feature.

Dd1va
www.justwatch.com

Allows me to search up a movie or TV show and tells me where it’s streaming.

ksse121q
Listen to radio around the world https://radio.garden/

bradgerkemusic
camelcamelcamel.com – Tracks the price history of something on amazon so you can see if a sale is actually a good deal.

armitron1780
wolframalpha.com I sometimes use it math calculations

MDMajor
Also desmos.com if you need a graphing calculator.

Bbng2
Ahh. Cheating in pre-calculus in high school 🙂

AinoNaviovaat
Why stop there? I still use it to calculate my shit when I’m lazy and I’m 3rd semester of Engineering

OldheadBoomer
unsplash.com

Tons of free-to-use images of damn near everything.

spatchcockfishcake
https://word2cleanhtml.com/

Paste info from your MS Word documents and it outputs as nice clean HTML. I’ve tried a few other options over the years but this is the one I go back to. Saves a hell of a lot of time editing content for the web which I get in Word documents.

venosenz
remove.bg does a pretty solid job at removing the background of any image. You can even just Ctrl + V

AccumulatingBoredom
https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

Tip of my tongue!

It’s really effective and has helped me countless times, I always seem to want a word when I’m writing but forget what the actual word is.

Cobol Programmers Needed

“We have systems that are 40-plus years old,” the governor said at a press conference. “There’ll be lots of postmortems, and one of them will be how the heck did we get here?, when we literally needed COBOL programmers.” As an unintentional testament to the language’s highly niche status, Murphy pronounced it as “cobalt” (it’s unclear if this was an error or a speech quirk).

Feldman, Brian. 2020. “NJ Governor Requests Expertise Of 6 People Who Still Know COBOL”. nymag

New Jersey Needs COBOL Programmers, Says Governor Murphy from programming

Koutou
Like people said in other thread about this. It’s not cobol the problem really. It’s the huge undocumented decades old legacy systems that goes with it that takes make it a challenge.

tepkel
I prefer to roll my own undocumented, barely functional systems in modern programming languages.

AWildRedditorApeared
So it’s really no different from any ERP system, then? Tons of undocumented / mis-documented sub flows and reports, no one really understands “why” things work, and you are expected to simply update this without breaking anything else. Somehow.

Piisthree
That is exactly what the problem is. Not that cobol as a language helps matters much. There are some ugly things you can do in cobol, and back in the bad old days, they did them all. Ever hear of a goto statement that you can dynamically change the label where it goes to? Cobol has that, for example. Still, any language lets you build these monstrosities.

gilmore606
if you think about it, is this much worse than a function pointer?

Jam0864
Yes, because there’s no type, and there’s no return.

AWildRedditorApeared
You could call it: the point of no return. I’ll see myself out.

AttackOfTheThumbs
This is the world I live in and it is slowly killing me. The amount of time I reverse engineer shit and step line by line and send probing data just so I can figure out why theis black box works.