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Majority of EU population. Even in US debit is more popular than credit in 18-25 age bracket.

(Frame of reference: US only) That's a shame, given 18-25 is just the age where a credit card skimmer or online card fraud causing a big fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back, could be devastating. This has happened to people in my family (likely from gas stations) but we only use credit cards except to pull cash from ATMs, so we only suffer a temporary dip in our available credit line while they investigate and do not have to pay the disputed charges in the meantime.

I know people with terrible credit may have problems getting a credit card, and others may have trouble not treating a credit line as spendable beyond their means, but everyone else should keep the 'debit card' at home or at least confined to their wallet.


fraudulent withdrawal from your checking account, and weeks of waiting to get it back

I've had this happen to me twice in about 25 years. Neither bank made me wait weeks.

The most recent one (with a giant megabank) issued a provisional credit in under an hour.

There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online.

U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.


> There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online.

I've been through it personally and with friends.

My experience was basically yours. I am a relatively highly paid professional with a large amount of assets with my bank. I get pretty good service, even at my giant national retail bank. I call, make a demand, they tend to just do it without too many questions.

My more low income friends have also gone through it, and I've assisted with them since they were panic'ing. Their experience is absolutely nothing like mine. Every single one spent days to weeks being sandbagged by sometimes the same bank I dealt with on my issue.

Your experience will very greatly depending on how "valuable" of a customer your bank feels you are to them.

> U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.

On paper, sure. In practice, no. Funds frozen during an "investigation" matter a whole lot more when it's your money vs. a made up credit limit number that wasn't real to begin with.


I have a friend that got a call/notification that her card was being used suspiciously. It may not have been from the bank. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but then very shortly after, someone else got her newly issued debit card and then used it at an atm in her area. The bank didn't believe that she wasn't involved. And despite filing a police report and giving them all the information that she could, she was out 2.5 grand, which was a big deal for her. BofA if anyone is wondering.

Every atm has a camera... So they could just check that.

Also, that means the person had the PIN too? That becomes harder to defend


They got her new card and activated it, so they set the pin. I wish I had details because it seemed very sophisticated. So she couldn't have been the only one hit by the scam.

Yikes... That's an interesting angle. Not sure how you would intercept both, I would assume/hope they would be sent separately preferably using different methods

The key with debit cards is the incentive misalignment. With credit, it’s the bank that loses out, not you. With debit, it’s you. Until the consequences are equaled by legislation, there’s no world where they get equal treatment by the bank

With credit, it's the merchant who loses out. They get bullied by the credit card provider to eat losses.

Relatedly, the credit card system is truly a tragedy of the commons situation.

It's a ~2% drag on the economy for what? For some silly points with constrained value and an excuse to not build better financial infrastructure.

The frustrating thing is that, given the current equilibrium, you're a sucker for not using a credit card - you end up subsidising those who do.


it's transaction fraud insurance. like any insurance, you pay a small amount regularly, and in return get protection in case of large sporadic loss.

points are just premiums: some insurance consumers are a greater risk, and so pay more.

any convenience features are built on top of the insurance product: _because_ all players are covered, _therefore_ i can make online purchases. _since_ (i have a justified expectation that) i am not liable for fraudulent use of my account number, _therefore_ i can read it to a customer service rep over the phone.

we can of course debate whether 2% is a good price for this coverage! but there must be some price paid here -- if the insurance broker doesn't collect it, the scammers will. this, after all, is the real tragedy.


What 2% drag? Aren't you using credit card with 2% bonus? Just see it as 2% reduction in prices.

My friend, as a rule of thumb, every additional player im a transaction takes a cut.

So assuming the rest is all the same, you just paid exactly what you would've paid with a debit card. Because the merchant had to raise prices to accommodate the fee. And that's with the credit card company not taking a cut and we all know that's not true.


The merchant chose to not offer a lower debit card / cash price because the merchant bets that people will pay a higher price if they use credit cards, so the merchant incentivizes credit card usage by asking for the same price for credit card and non credit card payment.

There are merchants that do not do this, such as Target, which charges 5% to use a credit card. Insurers/tutors/daycares/schools/healthcare providers/contractors/gas stations/restaurants/governments/utilities are also known to frequently charge more for credit card payments.

Any seller can choose to offer a lower price for debit card / ACH / Zelle payments if they want to.


Unfortunately a 2% rewards card usually costs the merchant more then 2%.

High tier cards are more expensive to accept, unless your merchant rate is a high enough flat rate that it covers the average and then some.


Even ignoring the cut taken by the credit card issuer, why do I have to go through some random card to get a 2% discount, when prices could just be 2% lower across the board by default?

To add on to that: if someone fraudulently uses your credit card, it's the issuer's money that's now missing and they need to get it back. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card, it's your money that's now missing that you need to get back. Hopefully things don't start overdrawing your account in the meantime.

My experience with disputes isn't that....

Yes we'll open a dispute. Yes we'll give you a credit immediately. But then we just take the sellers word for it that they're trying to make it right and charge you anyway.

This is my one singular experience with a dispute but that's with a big bank getting almost all of my transactions over the course of years....


How come this is not a problem in Europe? Credit cards make same promises there, but usage is greatly diminished.

A very big percentage of credit card expenses in the US come from cards with rewards programs, so you get money/gift cards/travel discounts in exchange for using the credit card instead of the debit card. A lot of this is funded from much higher interchange fees: It's ultimately the merchant you buy from funding most of the rewards. Since those very high fees are nowadays illegal in the EU, European credit cards cannot have this kind of generosity, and incentives are very different.

How does this work when using a US credit card in the EU? I assume the merchant still pays the lower interchange fee, so are the banks just betting that customers won’t do a large proportion of spending abroad?

They exempt those transactions from rewards.

They might, and it's good they do, but they're not legally required to in quite the same way that they are with credit cards. If someone pulls $10k out of your BofA account, they're completely within their rights to do basically nothing about it.

I had a friend who had their checking wiped out by debit card fraud. Their bank issued them a provisional credit of $150. So nice. Too bad rent was due in two days and was considerably more than $150.

Slowly over the next three months the charges were slowly reversed. In the end the bank didn't reverse all of them, but my friend did get most of her money back.


It's extremely common advice to not keep large sums of cash sitting in your checking account. With capital one (and others) you can just open a free savings account, keep the bulk in there (if you don't want to invest it instead), which earns an actual interest, and then there's never a "big" amount of vulnerable cash sitting in your checking account. There's free/instant transfers between savings and checking when you need to move more into your checking.

Not a great solution to constantly have to top up your checking account with some amount between "I need this much to pay my bills" and "losing this amount would devastating" which for many people has quite some overlap

If most of your income comes from salary/wages, just have the paycheck first hit your normal checking account first and then have scheduled deposits from there into savings accounts someplace else. You generally have enough money in the account to cover your monthly stuff plus a bit of buffer, but have the pile of cash elsewhere in case something happens.

This way you're not actively having to top off your normal spending account, but at the same time have a backstop in case that active account gets hit by fraud or whatever.

I'd suggest protecting yourself even further and having those accounts be split across two different banks. This way if one of your bank credentials gets hacked or you have some issue with the bank you at least have a chance of still having an account with cash someplace else to cover the short term.


Highly recommend this approach. My personal approach has been, for almost 20 years, to have one checking account as Schwab, and the other at a credit union. Schwab has superior offerings for most things, refunds all ATM fees worldwide, and is easy to get on the phone if I have any issue, and the credit union can handle those once-in-5-years (for me) kind of in-person situations like getting a cashier's check, or if I wanted $500 in $100 bills for a gift, etc.

You can pay bills from your savings account with ACH in the US.

Interesting perspective. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the pitch here would be:

1. Paycheck DD → straight to savings

2. "Spending money" for in-person transactions → transfer periodically to checking

3. Use debit card to spend from checking.

That's an interesting idea. Actually what is intriguing to me is another angle: I'd still never consider spending with debit. But my problem is that it's essentially impossible to get an ATM card that isn't a debit card anymore, meaning if I want to be able to use an ATM, I have to carry this stupid card around that would be easy to use to drain my checking account. With your approach, if I can get a savings account that is not linked to a checking account, I could use that as my default place where I pay my rent and credit card bills from. But it's a big if, because a lot of savings accounts have limits on how many withdrawals they can have per month, probably a residue of that regulation that someone else said was recently repealed.


While Regulation D was lifted a few years ago, there are often still restrictions to the number of withdrawals one can do from a lot of savings accounts.

I wish I could scream this from the rooftops. People should keep their debit cards locked/frozen, and only use them to get money from ATMs when needed.

All other spending should go onto credit cards, for numerous reasons that have been bought up throughout this thread.


Most banks/CU will issue you ATM only card that cannot be used a credit card. Might require some wrangling with the bank.

These are increasingly harder to get, sadly. My credit union won't anymore. I have to keep a debit card locked

Stay on your own rooftop please. That is a very US only view.

There's nothing wrong with debit cards being used.

If I can shout one thing back up to your rooftop:

Why on earth do your transactions cost 2 or 3 percent. For what? For basically verifying an RFID chip and adding a single entry to a ledger?

Don't say you're getting it back with points or whatever because we all know that the credit card company won't be going broke so that cut is coming from somewhere. And in the end that's always the consumer


Of course it's a US view. It's a US site and the OP even prefaced it as such. Does every reply need to do the same?

Retailers(in the US) typically eat the cost. Some industries(in the US), like gun shops, are up front about charging more for credit card payments. Most companies(in the US) just see it as cost of doing business.

Points have next to nothing to do with why you should always use credit cards(in the US). There are legal consumer protection reasons. The points are just an optional perk.


> Retailers(in the US) typically eat the cost

This is what I really have a problem with. It feels so incomprehensible to me that, assuming you're an adult, you can think this.

It's just a cost, if that cost didn't exist then either the price would be lower or the margin would be higher. In the end you're paying for it. You're the one exchanging money for a good/service.

This is proven by your other comment about how some sectors give you the option. I would rather have that option because those legal protections are useless for the majority of purchases. Good luck disputing that burrito you bought or those groceries. In such transactions you're basically just inviting a company to take a cut for 0 added benefit (aside from points).


> those legal protections are useless for the majority of purchases

I think you're misunderstanding the protections we're talking about.

When someone steals my credit card and spends $10k on it, I just dispute it. The charges don't show up on my bill until after the investigation happens, and chances are it will be found in my favor. I continue having my cash in my bank account. Life continues with no changes.

When someone steals my debit card and spends all my cash, I dispute it. They begin their investigation. This means I'm without all my cash for days, maybe weeks, while they do their investigation. Now I can't pay rent. Now I can't buy groceries. My life is pretty messed up at this point.

I've seen it happen to several people personally. It happens all the time.


> When someone steals my debit card and spends all my cash, I dispute it.

You gave them your PIN too? Yes, then you have something you explain.

Without it no one is spending anything beyond the tap to pay amount which would typically be low amount (double digits)


Not all debit transactions require PIN inputs here in the US. Many can also just go through the credit card networks. For example, all my debit cards in my wallet right now have a VISA logo on them and can run through as if charging a VISA card. I've had other accounts and banks in the past which went through the Mastercard network. However, I do not get any of the extra protections, the money comes straight out of my checking accounts.

On top of that, I can use the card online using the same kind of credit card numbers. This does not require a PIN.


So that's the worst of both worlds.

Still a cc company involved, so they'll take a cut without any of the advantages. Not even sure why that's a product


So now I hope you can better see why it doesn't really make sense to always use a debit card here in the US. There are still interchange fees, things can still be processed as swipe + signature or just the numbers printed on the card, and you risk your own money whenever its spent fraudulently.

While there are still some interchange fees involved, its less than the overall fee with actual credit cards. Its often more like 0.5% + $0.21, the max allowable fee under the Durbin Amendment.


You're confusing costs with pricing. Retailers set the price they show customers to what the market will bear and not a penny less, regardless of their costs. Sometimes they make money. Sometimes they even lose money on an item for strategic reasons. It's only competition that forces prices down though.

So, someone could open up a cash-only chain store and have lower costs that could allow them to price things a couple percent lower, but the absence of that business suggests that they know nobody wants to go to the trouble of paying cash anymore for a savings of a few bucks a month.

I expect that if credit card fees went to 0 tomorrow, no prices would change (though I'd lose thousands in value I get from points each year). Many retailers like grocery operate on thin margins already, so they'd be especially eager to keep the block of cheese at $2.69 instead of dropping it by a few cents.

And even if you could prove that eventually some retailer would give pass on that savings to customers, I still would rather use a card than deal with cash. And stores know that they sell more than they would if (1) everyone had to carry cash everywhere they go and also (2) if people couldn't spend on credit. That's what the retailers are spending 3% on.


> In such transactions you're basically just inviting a company to take a cut for 0 added benefit

Simply not true. Every transaction with a card carries some risk of those cards details being leaked or even an innocent error being made by a cashier or clerk fat-fingering things. Some more than others, and you could maybe argue the risk is minimal - but it's there. Especially in the US where card transactions are less secure on average regardless of debit or credit.

Credit carries significantly more consumer protection in the US. Debit in theory has all sorts of legal protection, but as the other commenter states - in practice it's really spotty.

Even in your scenario of a burrito or grocery purchase credit is going to be much better. So long as you don't make a habit of chargebacks they are typically pretty automatic for most card issuers so long as you present a compelling case. If you're a "valued customer" you tend to get a few freebies before they start to really demand evidence of fraud for such things.


> If you're a "valued customer" you tend to get a few freebies before they start to really demand evidence of fraud for such things.

Just saying, your 'few freebies' is where you rip off a merchant. That's pretty much theft at that point


By “freebies” I meant a chargeback with few questions asked. As in they trust my side of the story and immediately refund the money. I’ve done it maybe three times in my life for exceptional circumstances where vendors either made a billing mistake they refused to correct, or engaged in outright fraud.

Other folks might have just as legitimate reasons to make a chargeback, but due to a low internal “customer value score” they will need to jump through a bunch of hoops a more “valuable” customer would not for the exact same situation.

I tend to agree chargebacks are taken advantage of far more than they should be - but my point is that the chargeback experience is going to vary drastically by demographic.

I was originally interested in Bitcoin 15 years ago because of the fraudulent chargeback problem. It’s interesting how times have slowly changed and chargebacks are starting to shift towards a benefit for the privileged due to the sheer amount of abuse from so many people. Basically we decided to tie them to a hidden credit score.


That's a fair argument, and if all companies decided to pass the costs directly on to the user at checkout time, the conversation/advice would probably be a lot different.

For whatever reason most do not, so it's advantageous to use the one with better legal protections. It's not only about purchase protection/disputes, but liability and timelines when/if someone steals your card info and makes a bunch of fraudulent charges. The more places you use a card, the higher the chance that info will get skimmed or stolen.

Luckily, while behind, most places in the US have moved to tap to pay which helps a lot with POS skimming. But it only takes one bad employee to photo or copy your card info, or one poorly configured webstore, to leak your information and use it for online purchases. My most recent credit card doesn't even have numbers or an expiration printed on it, for that reason.


But most debit cards cannot be used with just the numbers. So I can give you my debit card and you can't do anything with it.

You typically need a PIN for any decent purchase. Sure you can tap to pay but that wouldn't be a lot of money fast as it asks for a PIN above a certain amount. That problem of copying the card data is only because it's a credit card and that's all you need to make a purchase.

As to skimming, in Europe there was some active skimming going on in the early 2000s which is why I can't even recall seeing a terminal here that still issues the magnetic strip.


> But most debit cards cannot be used with just the numbers.

Every debit card I have in my wallet right now can be used anywhere a VISA is accepted using the same kind of number as a VISA card. I can go to any website that accepts VISA as payment, type in that same 16-digit number as any other kind of credit card, expiration, and CVV and essentially empty it out in a few minutes.

This has been true across many different banks. I have had ATM-only style cards issued in the past but I haven't encountered one of those in over 20 years.


Maybe the terminals don't use the strip, but the cards still have them, so they can still be skimmed, and at least used online, as well as in other parts of the world that do have the magnetic readers.

I think it's possible to write the number to the strip of your cloned card with the bits set to say this is NOT a chip card, so that a terminal won't say "Use chip" -- but clearly the issuer could have the opportunity to notice it odd that the transaction is using the stripe and hopefully subject it to harsher fraud heuristics.


Really, this is a non-existing problem in most places outside the US. Are you still using magnetic stripes?????

It's a non existent problem in the US, too. The internet likes to blow things out of proportion, but not only are pretty much all payments made with tap to pay for many years now, even when it was magnetic strip, the incidence rate was miniscule.

> It's a non existent problem in the US

Dead wrong. Its still a big problem in the US.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-resea...

> In 2023, 21 percent of U.S. consumers experienced financial fraud: 17 percent of all consumers (or 18 percent of consumers who own credit cards) experienced credit card fraud, and 8 percent of all consumers experienced non-credit card fraud (with some consumers experiencing both types of fraud).

Sure, we've now moved to do tap to pay and chipped cards for a lot of transactions. However, this is useless for online orders which just requires knowledge of the magic numbers which all are helpfully printed on the face of the card you hand to people, tell over the phone, or type into websites.

We need to move towards actually secure online payment systems.


Wireless POS card terminals are incredibly cheap, why people need to hand their cards to someone?

Waiter presents me the machine, I insert my card or wave it over the NFC reader of the machine, if I insert the card, machine always ask for pin, if I use NFC, it will ask sometimes based on some obscure criteria.

For really expensive transactions, eventually, I may get a notification on my bank app in the phone, asking me if I am really, really doing this, I authenticate with biometrics and click ok.

it is not that hard.


> Wireless POS card terminals are incredibly cheap, why people need to hand their cards to someone?

Lots of restaurants and bars have been slow to adopt new systems. While many have moved towards waiters having portable machines and can process the payments table-side, probably half the restaurants and bars I go to expect the waiter/bartender to handle the card.

Few banks/merchants actually require a PIN for transactions most of the time. I couldn't even tell you what the PIN is on most of my credit cards, its never come up on a lot of them even with $1,000+ purchases.


We are moving towards it... if every site accepted both Apple Pay and Google Pay we'd be there. If we got there, you could make the case that we ought to all be able to file all the numbers off of our cards and never need to give them to anyone. But the problem is that even with 99% adoption, those secrets still have to be printed on the cards and used some percentage of the time to support the laggards -- and it only takes one hack or phish to defraud you.

> if every site accepted both Apple Pay and Google Pay we'd be there.

So add another layer of duopoly and middlemen to the way I pay for things. No thanks!

What happens when Google permabans me because I failed to pay a $0.50 cloud bill a few months ago and I got forever locked out of my iCloud account? Guess I can't buy anything online again ever.

Don't get me wrong I've used these for payment processing before, but I'd really prefer some kind of more standardized way of doing payments directly instead of adding yet another middleman. I already have a secure token device with me (the credit card), I should just be able to pay directly with it through the website.


I use Apple Pay a lot, but because I am already carrying a phone and in my country my driver license can be government app in my phone, thus, I don't even carry a wallet most of the time.

But I would hate not to have the option of using my bank card by itself. When I travel, I always carry my wallet and a couple of card, because your phone can die, be stolen, you can be out of charge, etc...


Most 18-22 year olds are living alone for the first time and have just set up their first bank account and are spending all their time focused on studies and trying to get an internship, so they aren't focused on the difference between credit card and debit card, plus they don't spend a lot out anyways

That's way less common in Europe. Most places are chip and pin or NFC and that limits skimming quite a lot.

Thankfully the US is very slowly catching up. We actually have NFC at most payment terminals already.

Even better, our small town (pop. 100) gas station upgraded their pumps a while back, and they have NFC! Finally my normal fill-up location is skimmer-resistant. Or is it skimmer-proof?


> Or is it skimmer-proof?

Put a reader with a shield on the pad and a new pad on top and a small terminal in somewhere out of sight. You won't know the difference. Requires infrastructure though so it is a bit more complicated and a lot more noticeable. Likely used the non-pin entry limit which is always reset after you payed a large amount and had to enter your pin. Not like the strip readers of olden days.

Anecdote: We had a "chip charge" system where you put money in your card via a ATM like device and those sometimes had strange "extensions" in front of it which read your chip while you charged it and immediately took the money. People often don't know what too look for when it comes to skimming devices and with tech it may look like a strange but genuine device.


Wouldn't that only be able to steal money one time though? Whereas a traditional skimmer captures the card number, and can charge the card indefinitely until the card is reported stolen and replaced.

You can still skim the magstripe with a skimmer over a chip reader, even if the original reader doesn't read the stripe. Then you can use that number online, probably to buy gaming currencies, giftcards to flip, etc.

Ah but you see, chip cards were a French invention so obviously the US is going to turn their head from it and pretend it doesn't exist for more than 20 yrs

How so? My card was skimmed and I had only tapped it in maybe a half dozen locations. Never swiped it or inserted it anywhere or used it online.

You go to any restaurants where you handed the card to the waiter?

Maybe you waved it in front of a hidden camera?

Yes, in the US, if you are disciplined to not spend beyond your means, credit cards are much safer to use than debit. Sadly, the last I checked, financial discipline is not taught in our public schools.

In the rest of the world (not the US), "credit card" == "debit card without zero overdraft limit".


It's worth noting that upstream gdb (and clang) are somewhat limited in GPU debugging support because they only use (and emit) standardized DWARF debug information. The DWARF standard will need updates before gdb and clang can reach parity with the AMD forks, rocgdb and amdclang, in terms of debugging support. It's nothing fundamental, but the AMD forks use experimental DWARF features and the upstream projects do not.

It's a little out of date now, but Lance Six had a presentation about the state of AMD GPU debugging in upstream gdb at FOSDEM 2024. https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/events/attachments/fosdem-20...


The extensions were voted into the upcoming DWARF 6 standard, e.g.https://dwarfstd.org/issues/211206.1.html


amd gdb is an actual debugger but it only works with applications that emit dwarf and use the amdkfd KMD aka it doesn't work with graphics .. all of the rest are not a actual debuggers .. UMR does support wave stepping but it doesn't try to be a shader debugger rather a tool for drivers developers and the AMD tools doesn't have any debugging capabilities.


Qualcomm doesn't bother to upstream most of their SoCs. They maintain a fork of a specific Linux kernel version for a while and when they stop updating it or new version of Android requires newer kernel then updates for all devices based on that SoC end.

They have little experience producing code that is high enough quality it would be accepted into Linux kernel. They have even less experience maintaining it for an extended period of time.


The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.

Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.


One thing I hadn't groked about Sodium Ion was the enormous Voltage range leads to a bit of an issue when it comes to current. You have a 4x voltage from top to bottom of the battery and this also means your current is 4x as well for the same power output. This becomes a bit of an issue and it is part of the efficiency equation, not just externally to the battery where wires have to be much larger than LFP or LI but internally due to internal resistance.


Ehhh not really a problem unless you idolize 12/48 V style systems that aren't adequate for these modern chemistries (i.e., non-lead-acid based) that scale down effectively to single digit amp hours per cell. You can keep the current around a comfortable 20A at any pack size, just by increasing the voltage. Say 5Ah cells. At 1.5kV (the highest easily practical with mainstream transistors and sticking to the "simple" circuit designs), that's 7.5kWh per such battery string.

That's a small home solar setup's entire battery.


Sodium gravimetric density is same. Volumetric is worse. Shipping containers generally cost by volume, but given how dense batteries are I suspect this won't matter.


I'd agree if you could stick them in the containers discharged, but you can't. This means that even safer chemistry like sodium battery is still hazardous cargo.


With de minimis for US-bound packages suspended I suspect way more packages are inspected than used to be.


> With de minimis for US-bound packages suspended I suspect way more packages are inspected than used to be

But a smaller fraction.

If you’re paranoid, route it via the UAE. All my European and Indian shippers are doing that for tariff-free pricing. (Personal stuff. I’ll pay a customs duty if I get it, of course.)


You can import from UAE without paying any duties or fees?


At least for wine, furniture, cheese, olive oil, art, kitchen equipment and medicine, at least from Italy and Germany and India and Taiwan, in the last six months, allegedly.


I mean that entire region has bought the president, even got themselves a military base being built on American land now too.

So why not.


> got themselves a military base being built on American land now too

As a European I'm as critical of the US government as can be and their president has definitely been bought, but there are already several countries that have some training facilities and military personnel in the US.

Calling it a foreign military base is really unnecessarily hyperbolic. And given the amount of military bases that the US have on foreign land, the outrage also seems a bit misplaced.


I suspect he was repeating a soundbite and doesn’t know the actual (entirely reasonable) situation.


For those downvoting: we sell fighter jets to many countries, including the UAE. They send pilots here to train on flying these jets. Those pilots need a place to stay.

For their own security protocols, among other reasons, many partner nations prefer to have a small area set up, think of it like a consulate, where their people stay within their own jurisdiction, rather than a hotel. The UAE is setting up such a place for its pilots.

That is all.

This isn’t a force-projection military base on US soil.


Higher enforcement demands probably lead to more stuff slipping through.


Similar three stages are also at every job you have:

- you underperform while onboarding and rapidly learning to cover whatever skill gaps you discover

- you slowly go from doing OK to being overqualified, but it doesn't get reflected in compensation or title enough and your employer has little incentive to help you reach the next stage, because you are currently overperforming compared to your pay

- you are so much past your paygrade you quit and go to a company that will pay you what you will be worth after onboarding and learning to cover skill gaps

With everything that companies provided to earn long term employee loyalty being sacrificed to stock price employee growth through multiple roles in the same company has become more of an exception.


The time spend on hardening software is always zero or very close to that unless the company makes that hardening a selling point of the product they make.

In the world of VC powered growth race to bigger and bigger chunk of market seems to be the only thing that matters. You don't optimize your software, you throw money at the problem and get more VMs from your cloud provider. You don't work on fault tolerance, you add a retry on FE. You don't carefully plan and implement security, you create a bug bounty.

It sucks and I hate it.


Then you'll get hacked or have an outage, and unless you're a monopoly it will cost you. But will the people who made poor decisions be held accountable?

You can do a decent hardening job without too much effort, if follow some basic guidelines. You just have to be conscientious enough.


I was once told to stop wasting time submitting PRs adding null checks on data submitted via a public API. You know, the kind of checks that prevented said API from crashing if a part of payload was missing. I was told to stop again with my concerns dismissed when I pointed similar things out during code review. I left that company not long after, but it's still around with over a quarter of a billion in funding.

I would love to say that this was an exception during almost 20 years of my professional career, but it wasn't. It was certainly the worst, but also much closer to average experience than it should have been.


c2h5oh: that does sound sucky. Perhaps it mostly describes web development though? Other software fields take this stuff more seriously.


Unless you equate web development and SaaS then no. It's the same in education, finance and SaaS targeting Fortune 500 companies.

Source: most of the companies I worked or consulted for in the past 20 years.


Depends upon the software.

I find valgrind easy on Linux and ktrace(1) on OpenBSD easy to use. I do not spend much time, plus I find testing my items on Linux, OpenBSD and NetBSD tends to find most issues without a lot of work and time.


This is not a "companies don't spend enough time with static and dynamic analysis of their software" problem, it's "less than a third of companies I worked or consulted for in the past 20 years mandated having input validation of any kind" problem.


To complicate things more HT performance varies wildly between CPU architectures and workloads. e.g. AMD implementation, especially in later Zen cores, is closer to a performance of a full thread than you'd see in Intel CPUs. Provided you are not memory bandwidth starved.


> To complicate things more HT performance varies wildly between CPU architectures and workloads.

IBM's Power cpu's have also traditionally done a great job with SMT compared to Intel's implementation.


Whats the difference between Intels and AMDs approach?


Basically it comes down to how much shared vs dedicated resources each core has.


That's why you sample just enough instead of storing everything


That sounds great until you have a massive issue that costs the company real money and leadership asks why you weren't logging everything in full fidelity?

We run with Debug logging on in prod for that reason too. We also ingest insane amounts of data but it does seem to be worth it for a sufficiently complex and important enough system to really have it all.


> That sounds great until you have a massive issue that costs the company real money and leadership asks why you weren't logging everything in full fidelity?

You should have an answer, right? Like, in your case, you run a lot of logging, and you know why. So if it's off, you say "because it would cost X/million dollars a year and we decided not to do it."

Course, if you're the one who set it up, you should have the receipts on when that decision was made. This can be tricky sometimes because a lot of software dev ICs are strangely insulated from direct budgets, but if you're presented with an option that would be helpful but would cost a ton of money, it's generally a good thing to at least quickly run by someone higher up to confirm the desired direction.


> and leadership asks why you weren't logging everything in full fidelity?

I haven't been asked this question ever. In a way, I wish I was. I wish leadership was engaged in the details of the capabilities of the systems they lead.

But I don't anyone asking me this question any time soon either.


Have you ever been asked “why didn’t we catch this sooner?”. I feel like it’s the same question worded differently


Its really two questions:

1. Why didn't we catch this sooner

2. Why did it take so long to mitigate

Without the debug logging #2 can be really tricky sometimes as well as you can be flying blind to some deep internal conditional branch firing off.


I’ve used feature flags to manage logging verbosity and sample rate. It’s really nice to be able to go from logging very little to incrementally pump up the volume when there’s an incident.


Sampling unconditionally at the start of the request is worth less than sampling at the end (so that your sample 1% of successful traces and be 100% of traces with issues).


We do. 0.5%


With SAAS swallowing big chunk of software business GPL is much less effective.

There isn't much difference between MIT and GPL unless you are selling a product that runs locally or on premisses and with the latter some companies try to work around GPL by renting servers with software on it - either as physical boxes or something provided on cloud provider marketplace.

Look at what you actually have installed on your computer - odds are that unless your job requires something like CAD, photo/video editing or other highly specialized software you have nothing made by large enterprise with exception of OS and Slack/Teams/Zoom.


> With SAAS swallowing big chunk of software business GPL is much less effective.

Which is why we have the AGPL.


But no LAGPL :(


Is that the one with fake breasts?


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