Daily Archives: 2021-01-24

Our infrastructure is being built based on past climate data

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's an interesting issue. How catastrophic a climate model should we be building for? From Fukushima to Rotterdam we've clearly been under-estimating in big ways, but it's definitionally hard to deal with modeling exceptional conditions.
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Chinese railway station knocked offline when Flash stops being supported

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: Oh legacy technology in production, always such a fun time.
Screenshot of dialog box asking to uninstall Flash

The railway depot in the city of Dalian, China, was thrown into chaos on Jan. 12 when Adobe triggered a kill-switch to end its support of Flash. It turns out … it was critical for a bunch of their systems!

However, the techs who run IT for the station appeared to have quite a sense of humor about it, though, because as they scrambled to revert to an earlier version of Flash, they posted real-time WeChat updates about their struggle — "in the style of a military thriller, written with all the self-awareness of Dwight from 'The Office'," as David Cohen and Yue Sun quipped on Technode. — Read the rest

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