PJDK

Speaking as someone who has led teams in small startup .net companies.

At your level I'd not really be thinking too much about specific C# skills, I'd just expect you to have them. Books wise I'd be looking for texts with a wider application. Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, Code Complete. Jeff Atwood maintains a good list https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-develo.... A lot of those books are quite old now so I'd expect you to have some opinions on what part is timeless wisdom and what part is out of date. You should also be looking to the books that are outside your direct area of responsibility, about design, user testing, management. Even if that's not your bread and butter, knowledge of those areas will be increasingly valuable to you.

I'd also expect you to have experience with and opinions on the use of AI in coding and in products.

With 7 years experience I would be looking to you to be guiding people on the team and and taking on projects and decisions.

Finally on much more practical note, we found at our size (15 person company with a dev team of 5) that we would basically never get job applications from adverts so half the time we wouldn't even put one up. You'd be wise to talk to some recruiters. It's also very much in their interest to get you hired so they can give you much more specific advice.

Can I push you to give it a try - places with honesty boxes feel like places with honesty boxes if that makes sense.

Obviously you might get your car egged once - but you can get eggs anywhere.

If it's any help, my (admittedly very nice) corner of Bristol has a couple of honesty boxes for eggs and things about the place and I've never seen any trouble from it.

Does it keep teasing a war with China - seems like China keeps teasing an attack on Taiwan and the US is deliberately ambiguous on how it would respond to such an attack.

I think all this talk of who would win often ignores that factor to. There is no realistic total war scenario between China and the US - China doesn't have any desire or capacity to role tanks into Washington and the US doesn't have any desire to role tanks into Beijing.

The war, if it comes will be China trying to take control of Taiwan and the US intervening on the side of Taiwan. Victory for China looks like Taiwan under PRC rule, victory for the US looks like Taiwanese independence.

With that in mind "all" the US needs to be able to do is make the cost of the invasion/maintaining the supply lines too high. If I was China the drones I might worry about the most would be underwater!

It makes sense when you remember that the vast majority of football is played by purely amateur players - the rules need to handle a village school as well as the world cup final.

On the battery front that really is just a function of your use. I've got a smart phone I use purely for work, which in reality means sending a handful of messages in a day. That battery lasts 5 days or so.

Also my first phone, a "bomb proof" Nokia died when it fell out of my pocket into a shallow pond. Most modern phones would survive that no problem!

I don't know for sure (not in that world) but wouldn't this make sense from a compartmentalisation perspective?

You have a person that knows X and a person that knows Y, but knowing both X and Y is vastly more valuable. To keep things secure you ban the X group from knowing about Y things regardless of how they found out.

It's going to produce absurdities sometimes, but the basic principle makes sense.

Potentially - it's not like a strictly defined term. With mainstream political parties you'd more often think about specific policy areas than the whole business.

Populism is definitely a part of democracy, but it is a criticism from "responsible" politicians for "irresponsible" ones.

Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.

But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.

One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.

The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.

Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.

So, we often look back on the old days with rose tinted glasses. But let me recount my IT classes from the 90s.

We'd sometimes go to the library to write something up in MS Word. We always liked this because it would be a good 5-10 mins to boot up some kind of basic Unix menu. You'd then select windows 3.1 and wait another 10-15 minutes for that to load. Then you could fire up word and wait another 5 minutes. Then you could do 5 minutes work before the class was over!

Coming from a UK background something I've been long curious about is is there a constitutional reason for when the opposition presidential candidate is selected.

It seems like the current way of doing things leaves the opposition rudderless through most of a presidential term, followed by a bitter fight where their own side rip each other apart followed by only a few months to try and establish oneself as leader in waiting.

Could the democrats do their primaries now? It feels like that would 1. Distract from Trump so he doesn't get run of the news 2. Mean that all the "candidate X is a bad democrat" stories could be long forgotten by the next election. 3. Give a pedestal to the actual presidential candidate as the go to person for the media to get reactions from 4. If they turn out to be genuinely terrible there's a lot of time to find out and potentially replace them.

It's not actually really come up fortunately, but we have an agreement that we have £X allowance a month for our own spending. We don't then need to justify what can come out of that allowance, and if we need to cut back on that spending it will be a general cut back not "spend less on beer" specifically.

Obviously join expenses like meals out would still need to be cut back too, but we're at least doing those together in the first place.

We do something very similar. All pay goes into a joint account and all the bills and joint expenses come out of that one.

We pay ourselves each an allowance that covers our personal spending. That's basically everything I spend money on by myself, so lunch out, treats, games whatever.

I think its a really good way if avoiding any worry about "wasteful" spending. What we each value is different. If we need to tighten our belts we just reduce the allowance, we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable.

Some people even take a day off sick when they are actually not feeling sick at all!

Worth noting that UK missiles (but not warheads) are taken from a joint pool with the US. They have completely shared maintenance, so any reliability concerns are shared. Similarly, the testing is also joint so this should be seen as two failures out of all trident tests rather than two UK failures.

Not that that is a fun headline of course.

Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.

That's definitely impressive tech, and I'm sure the experience inside a headset is pretty incredible. What I'm saying is that it is not a good match for live sport.

When you watch sports they have multiple cameras all over the place. Fixed cameras with long lenses, cameras that zip over the pitch, cameras on blimps, slow mo cameras and so on.

These cameras are so much better for enjoying sport that they put giant screens in the stadium so you can see what happened after a goal is scored.

That experience is never going to work in a VR system (beyond VR as a way to have a big screen available) because if you kept shifting the position and focus you'll make everyone very motion sick.

My argument is that the experience of seeing sport from a specific seat is inferior to watching it multi camera with huge zoom lenses. The thing that draws you to the stadium is the sense of being in a crowds.

The technology to do this has been around for a while to has anyone tries. I'd certainly be curious to give it a go. I imagine there are some technical problems too, like if your team scores and you jump in the air and your view point stays still.

This did get me thinking if any sport might be better viewed in VR, and maybe games like pool, snooker, chess. Where you see the whole thing from one vantage point, and the scale is such that the 3d of it all would be meaningful.

I've heard the sport idea thrown around a few times, but I'm not sure I buy it.

If you go to a sports event you are mostly buying the experience of being there, the energy of the crowd, the cheering all that stuff. The actual experience of seeing what's happening is not really better is it? That's why the stadiums have screens in them.

Replicating that experience at home is more like getting people around to watch a game together.

Would anyone be condemning people who paid for youtube premium and also blocked tracking with ublock?

I think it's worth gaming out a world without nuclear weapons in the context of the Ukraine war.

It seems pretty undeniable that both Russia and NATO would be more willing to countenance a direct confrontation.

Not only that, surely by this point both sides would be dusting off plans to start construction once again. That immediately opens up the likelihood of preemptive strikes to prevent your opponent actually achieving a new nuclear weapon.

I've seen this notion a few times, but I think it bares some scrutiny.

What places used to exist that no longer do where you can exist without the expectation of buying something?

Thinking about it, libraries are unusual in that they have no cost at all to enter. Top of my head only religious buildings seem to be similar in that regards.

There's quite a lot of options as far as no expectations to buy anything, but you need to pay some kind of fee - sport's centres, clubs that sort of thing. (One might argue they often contain a shop/cafe, but I'd argue you don't go there to use those, and they are very optional)

The Royal parks in London generally close at night. Interestingly some of the parks ar "commons" as in common land and so can't be closed!

That might work as a first strike capability - although sailing a cargo ship from North Korea to Tokyo without garnering any interest from intelligence agencies might be more difficult than you give it credit for.

But the main thing you want nuke for is as a deterrent. Get in a fight with us and we press the button. It's hard to imagine the sneaky boat trick working when North Korea is under blockade by the entire US and Japanese navies. And even if they run the blockade they're going to have trouble getting close to Tokyo.

Speaking as someone now married to a woman he met on tinder.

I took the view that if I matched with someone and they replied to a message there was a pretty high chance they were interested in a date, so I would generally just ask on the second or third message. Something like

Hi, <basic small talk question based on something in the profile>.

Hopefully receive a reply with some kind of conversational hook.

<reply to the hook, ask a follow up question>. Would you like to meet for a drink sometime this week, would central Gotham work for you? My number is 123556679

Pretty much everyone is on the site to go on real dates, so best to think of the messages as for organising them.

Your mileage may vary, but I'd say this led to a date 80% of the time (assuming the match and reply had already happened)

I'm not sure this is accurate - tests on students are twice a week according to this https://dfemedia.blog.gov.uk/2021/03/09/covid-testing-in-sch...

In the UK flour and yeast disappeared from the shelves for quite a while during the first lockdown baking boom.

The issue wasn't a shortage, but a shortage of flour in small bags.

Interestingly I saw some supermarkets fill up bags they usually use for bakery items to just sell the flour which seemed like a smart solution!

Also in March/April last year hand soap and toilet roll was hard to come by.

Portugal is a terrifying example of this. They got through 2020 extremely successfully, but have suddenly been hit extremely hard. They've now had as many deaths in 2021 as they did in all of 2020.

The EU is fighting with Astrazenica. The UK has mostly kept out of it - only just commenting once the EU decided to change export rules and around the Northern Ireland agreement.

Would "best reasonable efforts" generally include breaking of stronger worded contacts signed earlier? The UK contract was more along the lines of "you can partner with Oxford to get their IP and we'll help set up production lines on the condition we get first refusal of vaccines from those lines"

I'm saying that the correct response for the teacher is to try and overpower the researchers and escape.

If the learner is strapped to a chair and being totally ignored then why should the "teacher" assume they themselves have the power to end this experiment?

My major problem with Milgram is about the "learner". As far as the participants of the experiment are told the learner is, like them a volunteer. That means the learner has just as much autonomy to end the experiment as the teacher.

So why isn't the learner calling an end to the experiment - why should this be on the teacher to call it quits? Either the learner is making a fuss, but that's just how they react to a bit of pain (think about how people can squeal getting into a cold bath voluntarily) but they are happy to continue. Alternatively they are being actively coerced into continuing - in which case the correct response for the teacher is what exactly?

Maybe try and jump the supervisor and make a bolt for the door? You are clearly trapped by some kind of sadistic serial killer and you are unlikely to make it out alive.