cs02rm0

StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions.

I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone.

Yet I certainly couldn't ask a question without suffering the same. That terrible experience wasn't reserved for newbies. I learned to stop contributing pretty quickly, well before AI.

I think they lost something too.

I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.

The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.

The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.

I feel like hiring is all a bit broken. Roles get flooded with applications, it's chance whether your CV gets through, then there's hiring rounds that seem designed to make you quit the process before they have to filter you out.

Is it working for anyone, on any level?

https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/

Having the name of a former Indian state doesn't seem to be cricket.

At least I can step away from the laptop now I've got RSI.

They're still around, even if Musk is excluded. Torvalds springs to mind pretty quickly. I think society is increasingly adverse to people having personality flaws, than it is in favour of people having strengths such as technical knowledge or ability.

Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.

It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.

I'm absolutely fine with a social media ban for under 16s.

And completely against it actually meaning strong identification of over 16s.

It still surprises me sometimes that LLMs are just available for _anyone_ to use. Isn't it odd that it turned out this way?

I assume it's some of their best training data.

MacOS overly rounded corners.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't use a Macbook because of some marginal gain in the hardware.

Isn't this terror-ists winning? When people give in to terror?

When we had the IRA active in the UK everyone would be proud to carry on as normal after any incident, to show that life would go on as normal despite their efforts. This doesn't seem normal.

And I only want one. I don't want to set it for every single app, with different nuances.

I'd imagine a similar ballpark to any other day-to-day government spending. It might affect perception around the absolute number on the balance sheet, but it won't significantly affect the proportion of spending.

It was widely covered at the time of the Spending Review last year, based on government figures.

Day-to-day is the routine, required cost of running the state, without long term infrastructure spending.

The NHS consumes about half of all day to day public service spending. It is singular in its ability to suck spending out of UK government.

The UAE is in Arabia. It's not in Saudi Arabia.

> We do airshows because they are cool.

No. They are for recruitment and showing other nations what is on hand in case they want to mess with them.

That's what he said.

I hate consent banners more than tracking cookies.

Might vary depending on where you are and where you're applying to. I'm from the UK, spent a year and 500+ applications applying to remote or Gulf roles. Turned up nothing.

One thing that struck me was, when you look through the board and the committees, it's full of scientists, finance people, doctors, academics. There's maybe a couple of technologists - ML, IT delivery.

If they've got anyone with a background in cyber security I can't see it.

https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/about-us/people-and-governance/

And then the CEO comes out with:

We have never seen any evidence of any UK Biobank participant being re-identified by others.

This data contains sex, at least month and year of birth. I can't see any sensible security-oriented technical person coming out with a line like that.

The web is global, UK law certainly isn't.

A couple of years ago I planned a road trip I've yet to take, from where I live in Worcestershire, passing through Malaga where they have a glass pyramid in front of a Roman theatre that shows the basins that were used for making garum.

Worcestershire sauce is a descendent of garum.

Although Ofcom doesn't think geo blocking is sufficient to absolve them of that liability. Crazy as that is.

Crikey. My dad (and just about every other westerner) used to brew sid down the road in Dhahran, I never heard of fires from it.

I'm not the target market for a subscription for this, but I found it quite buggy - I had multiple browser windows open and couldn't navigate to more than one. I couldn't navigate to other spaces either (clicking on them did nothing) and scrolling through the apps menu was laggy.

The screenshots on the website look nice though.

At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. That’d probably be every couple of months, if that. Respectful. Low noise.

Low noise for some fonts is zero emails. In the nicest way possible, users aren't excited about your big release, they're just not.

They seem to converge to the mean

I think that was the point being made; if you're looking at it from the perspective of being really good at something, its tendency towards an averaged result is substandard.

And which temperatures - air, ground, sea? Or qualitative measures such as when lambs are born, crops are harvested, leaves fall, etc?

There's a lot that we associate with seasons. But the quote somewhere above about six seasons with locking before winter and unlocking after does feel like a better fit to me.

As a Brit, this feels like a much better fit.

And then Canva, Prezi, etc. I can't understand the idea that there's no alternative to PowerPoint on Linux either.