I wonder if the reason why the screensaver process doesn’t exit has something to do with the live wallpapers they added to macOS a few versions ago.
The live wallpapers become your screensaver, playing the video. Then when you move your mouse, the video continues until it finds a “good” stopping point.
Might explain why the screensaver process lives on forever for seemingly no reason.
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.
I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.
The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.
Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.
I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.
I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.
I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.
Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.
They do so with exactly no fuss.
I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.
Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.
I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of the support chain."
Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of someone who is not limited by stupid rules.
Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.
I had issues too that they sent a tech support out for while warning me "If they find it's your fault, you will be assessed a charge". The tech came out, climbed my local pole and then went down the street and climbed another one. He said it was a busted port and he moved me to a new one, and put in a service request to upgrade as it was out of ports.
CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".
After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.
TikTok’s recommendations are based off as much info as it can get, really.
Approximate location, age, mobile OS/browser, your contacts, which TikTok links you open, who generated the links you open, TikTok search history, how long it takes you to swipe to the next video on the for you page, etc.
I don’t think it's really possible to say what TikTok’s algorithm does “naturally”. There’s so many influencing factors to it. (Beyond the promoted posts and ads which people pay TikTok to put in your face)
If you sign up to TikTok with an Android and tell it you’re 16, you’re gonna get recommended what the other 16 year olds with Androids in your nearby area (based on IP address) are watching.
I have some friends in game dev who have shipped some pretty big titles (and still do). They have very similar sentiments with regards to constant self-inflicted breakages and (lack of) testing and code reviews as well.
It’s given me an appreciation for the kind of code quality everybody just naturally agreed on and did back when I worked at a FAANG. Nobody needed to be convinced to write/maintain tests for their change, or be told to keep the mainline branch building cleanly.
I wonder if any of the large studios out there today have a culture of testing and reviews?
Reviews are fairly common but unit tests not so much, in my experience. CI is commonplace in all but the smallest studios, and automated testing (such as running the game after building and performing checks) is quite common; some productions use bots to simulate players.
It varies by company and project and also the stage of development. Avalanche sounds particularly chaotic though.
I wanted the same, so I hacked/bolted on an LLM to Morrowind (the open source recreation OpenMW).
The biggest problem I faced at the time (during ChatGPT 3 era) was that, without a good context, LLMs are the most vanilla roleplayers you’ve ever seen. By themselves, LLMs are just not interesting enough for a player to choose to talk to in-game.
If you want them to be “interesting” to talk to, you must provide (or generate and keep track of): a backstory, chat history, the scene, NPC inventory, the NPC’s current emotional state, the weather, literally everything needs to be given to the model before it generates messages for the player.
At which point you’ve got a big task. You need a way to automatically get the relevant data to the model for the specific conversation you’re having. There might be tools to pick appropriate text documents from a db given a conversation topic, but I didn’t/don’t know how to make that work for games.
I’m sure there’s a way to accomplish this with more modern tools and models. (Maybe instead of providing all that data up front, you would now give the model tools to call to retrieve that data on-demand?) But that’s what made me give up in 2022.
Of course it would require the game engine to provide context to the LLM, it certainly is quite a bit of work but nothing technically impossible and the result are endless possibilities and endless replayabilities. You could very well let the LLM decide if an npc should agree to give an object to the player or not, even let the player try to convince the npc.
I mean it looks like to me the next big step in gaming after 3D and yet this is being ignored.
They don’t have great North American peering. If you happen to be there and are unlucky, you won’t be able to get a very reliable/fast connection to the server.
I tried to use one for Borg backups a few years ago and just ran into endless transient connection issues.
I was a windows build engineer at Microsoft. I am unfamiliar with this specific UI for managing build tools (I think it may have been added after I left), however I would be surprised if it was actually RCE-capable.
I notice that it requires the tool to be pulled from NuGet. While it looks like you could enter any package and NuGet source, I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a locked down whitelist of allowed sources (limited to internal Microsoft NuGet feeds).
Locking down NuGet packages was one of the primary things we (the Windows Engineering System team) were heavily focusing on when I left years ago. We were explicitly prevented from using public NuGet packages at all. We had to repackage them and upload them to the internal source to be used.
The live wallpapers become your screensaver, playing the video. Then when you move your mouse, the video continues until it finds a “good” stopping point.
Might explain why the screensaver process lives on forever for seemingly no reason.
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