gaius

Unfortunately UX people seem to hate boring and/or simple stuff...

Many years ago I was working on a project for a major UK high street bank, and on the team was a designer who genuinely believed "users like a challenge". No users do not like a challenge. Users like spending the absolute minimum time possible doing their online banking, then they like getting on with their lives.

I believe he later went on to win loads of awards... as judged by other designers. Anyway a large part of why the web sucks and runs like molasses is guys like that.

Rover.com seems to be pretty shady https://www.gofundme.com/rovercom-sitter-killed-my-dog

https://www.gofundme.com/my-rover-sitter-killed-my-dog

http://www.roversdirtysecret.com/tag/killed/

poor countries are poor

India has nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and a space programme.

but people tend to remember when that's been done to them, and aren't exactly keen to have it happen again.

Companies stick with Oracle and IBM for multi-decade stretches, maybe the move to cloud will be what it takes to dislodge them, but then again, in a world where Azure, AWS and GCP exist some people still choose Oracle and IBM, so there's no explaining it.

If I were a CIO I would announce that this year's bonuses will be funded from savings on Oracle licenses, then sit back and let nature take its course.

CMake is very powerful but unlike most things there’s no underlying principle or theory that when you grasp it, everything just clicks, and you also can transfer the knowledge to other languages. It’s just a matter of memorising lots of tricks and special cases.

Every day I bitterly regret that they decided not to use Tcl for CMake in the end.

can't pay insane rates for education of either university level or trades.

Well, yes and no. It’s true that university is expensive (but you don’t need to repay loans until you are earning over a certain threshold). However it’s also true that if you take an apprenticeship a) you will be paid during training and b) a skilled tradesman or tradeswoman can easily out-earn most graduates, and this is well known.

Apparently yes https://www.drugfoundation.org.nz/matters-of-substance/novem...

It doesn't take 5 years to teach yourself Machine Learning.

The low-hanging fruit in ML is absurdly low these days, the tools are very good and there is loads of sample code available. If you were already good with Python or R, and already had some nice clean data, you could be doing something useful with Keras in a day, no joke.

"piss off" is accurately interpreted as "go away and leave me alone". Whereas "fucking come on then" is often a precursor to violence.

But sure, intonation is a thing. "I beg your pardon" can be said in a threatening way.

A workflow I'd like to see: you write your code and ensure that it is functionally correct, all the tests pass. Then you go home and overnight, some ML/DL/NN whatever tool works on your code to find the best way to compile it (fastest binary that passes all tests). Repeat this every day for the duration of the project. At the end your artifacts are the source code, the shippable binary, and a model perfectly trained to produce the latter from the former. It's a shame that Itanic was too soon to take advantage of ML going mainstream.

Intel has its own compiler, surely they could ask their compiler gurus to help with ISA design.

Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have meant e.g. bigger L1 caches because you would have the die space to play with, or more execution units, or whatever.

It didn't work out and Intel did make some stupid decisions along the way (also underestimating the importance of backwards compatibility with existing code - not only binaries, but you also needed to be able to compile existing source well) but it was worth a punt, and maybe will be again someday - maybe a DL-based compiler could produce good VLIW code? Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C?

People who think UBI will include people voluntarily going out to work at jobs that aren't fun... this study is a wrench in the works! I bet the younger generation will play fornite, league of legends, or scroll insta/snapchat all day

Yes and no. The B in UBI is basic, you won't starve or freeze but if you want nice things such as a new gaming PC, you would still need to earn to pay for that. Maybe in that world you would do just enough work to earn it, then not bother working again until you needed to upgrade - and that's OK.

And one of those countries is Switzerland, which has a world-class army, better in fact than many of its European neighbors without conscription

Citation needed. The Swiss have done a pretty good job of defending the Vatican of course, but when was their military last tested for real?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Switzerlan...

(the answer is WW1)

Both of these (the public's worship of the military, and the military's disdain for the public) have experienced a clear upward trend over the last 20 years

But "the public" isn't one thing. The right-wing half of the public respect the military, and the left-wing half despise it while revelling in the freedom it provides, which also includes the freedom to despise it. I mean back in Soviet Russia if you spat on the uniform of a soldier of the Red Army, I imagine you would have been in alot of trouble. Or in China with the PLA.

the suggestion to reduce the number of people promoted by 2 percent—which meant that some qualified people

Wasn’t it from 10% to 8%? That 2% is misleading there, it makes it look far less significant than it was.

Google’s human-resources department presents potential ways to cut the company’s $20 billion compensation budget

I guarantee there are cost savings to be had in the HR department, but I bet there was no slide on that

Gen X were 20-something’s in the ‘90’s, that group is just hitting the ageism barrier themselves.

The problem is the massive influx of newcomers to the industry who have no experience and crow very loudly that experience doesn’t matter, or that their 6-week bootcamp is as good as a degree+decades of experience. Well the joke will be on them too one day, they are just too inexperienced to realise it.

Private companies don't have any obligation to continue showing anything. They don't have any such 'moral' obligations at all.

Consider that We The People developed a legal framework for companies to exist as the existence of companies as a thing was deemed to be a net good. But what if it isn’t any more, if companies are purely focused on profits at the expense of the legal and social environment in which they exist? Then the law can be amended.

HR: no sorry, it’s policy

Worker: but you set the policy, it can be whatever you want it to

HR: ...

Saying “policy” must be a cover for a real reason that the company wants kept secret

This means that Google has the login details for your bank. You are almost definitely in violation of the bank’s ToS by divulging them

If you want your info to stay private, do not send it to untrustworthy parties via untrustworthy means

Well there’s the rub isn’t it. I don’t think most people would consciously decide to rat out their friends secrets for $20 - or indeed for any price. But somehow, it’s happening.

Sure, but maintenance of the confidence of a friend shouldn’t need a law.

You dodged a bullet, that guy was just telling you what you wanted to hear, lacking in moral fibre

The BBC are reporting they signed up as a 14-year-old and there is no parental consent sought

I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall at some of their meetings when someone says “So we are going to do data collection on minors without parental consent now” and all the developers just say “great I’ll code that up straight away”. Like is there no dissent at all? Is there no one at all who says “guys this is not OK”?

And now everybody is freaking about a fairly reasonable trade

OK let’s imagine that you have a close friend or family member with some confidential issue - maybe an illness, maybe debt, maybe they are in the closet. Occasionally they message you, on old -fashioned SMS or email mentioning something about it.

How many dollars is a reasonable trade to tell a data collection agency everything you know so they can add it to their file on your friend/relative?

Not if it involves minors without parental consent it isn’t.

Because it’s not transitive. If I send you a personal message, I didn’t consent to you giving that to Facebook who will use my phone number to add it to the shadow profile they keep on me. Facebook might as well pay in pieces of silver.

A Goretex jacket is a godsend but I’ve never rated Goretex trainers. In conditions that need Goretex water will inevitably enter over the top anyway, and now you have buckets on your feet!

It’s also that demand outstrips supply for the famous events such as the London Marathon.