inejge

Any party can win if it gets the majority of candidates across all parliamentary constituencies. However, a Prime Minister must be elected as an MP somewhere. If Reform got a majority without Farage being elected, they would be in a strange situation where the leader of the party couldn't become the PM. It's amusing to think about, in a schadenfreudish way, but the chances of that are slim. He would certainly stand in a general election for the same seat, other major parties would contest it, and it seems that Clacton-on-Sea supports him over the others. This by-election is special because the major parties are boycotting it for being a self-serving stunt that it is.

Couldn't help noticing:

In other words, it’s not just a tool problem, any more than it’s a human resources problem or a leadership problem. Instead it is a systemic problem [...]

Shades of an LLMism, a bit padded, a quarter of a century ago. These days someone could easily give it a stink-eye. I'm sure that training has ingested this along with countless similar examples.

are there people that use the caps lock key?

I for one do. Old habit when typing in longish C constants (ECONNRESET) or shell environment variables. I'm used to typing capitals by holding the Shift with the pinky of the other hand than the one entering the letter, so with long strings of capitals sometimes I'd have to switch for every other letter, which gets old fast. With Caps Lock, I press it, type in the letters, press it again.

Completion mostly works these days if you have it, but you don't always.

Domino theory as applied to business, plus one should never underestimate the lengths to which a company will go to wring the last ounce of profit from a market.

This is what they don't tell you about continuous/transition/progressive bifocals: optically they don't work.

I'll defer to your judgement re optical properties, but I want to offer a counter-anecdote about practicality.

I've had myopia and have been wearing negative diopter glasses for over half my life. I've never needed vision correction for reading. This is not an unusual combination, and if you want a celebrity example, watch some old Apple keynote videos with the late Steve Jobs, who would repeatedly lift his glasses to read something on the phone in his hand. This "works", but can be inconvenient in some situations.

A while ago, I started thinking about progressive bifocals. Cursory web searches told me that my particular combo was impractical. My optician didn't see a problem, so I decided to trust him and got a pair made. The TLDR is that they work for me much better than the old ones. There was a period of adaptation. Going downstairs and looking at the floor/ground were a bit disorienting for a while, but i don't notice it any more. Switching between the monitor and the phone or paper in front of me works, which is why I wanted the bifocals in the first place. I only use the old glasses for watching TV, probably meaning that my TV-watching posture sucks, but fortunately I don't watch a lot of TV. I still take off the glasses for sustained book reading.

But the 15c 'Collector's Edition' had some issues, and I wonder about the build quality and reliability of this new one, too.

Build quality deteriorated (from impressive heights) more than 25 years ago, when HP's calculator manufacturing moved to China. Not on account of China itself, but it was definitely a cost-cutting measure, and higher-end calculators were becoming an endangered species even then. For example, keycaps used to be double-shot injection molded, so the legends could never wear out; no more, now they're silkscreened like with everyone else. The new key mechanism could never reach the robustness and reliability of the old one, which is a problem if you're used to every keypress felt in your fingertips being correctly registered.

(Not everything was premium quality. On my late 15C, the faceplate logo wore out and the soft sleeve crumbled to dust after a couple of years. But the machine itself continued to work flawlessly until an unfortunate accident with a space heater.)

Additionally, the new Voyagers (1x series) are not running on the original, custom HP "Nut" CPUs, but on ARM microcontrollers, presumably via firmware emulation. It's impressive that the whole things works so transparently, but as I dimly recall, there were problems with that emulation in the first 15C Collector Edition runs, supposedly fixed now.

So, if you buy a new Voyager these days, you're getting a convincing replica of the originals from the '80s, nothing more. Caveat emptor.

Yes. Bell Labs are a shadow of their former glory, when Bell could lavishly fund it, having a quasi-socialist telecommunications monopoly. Private companies don't like to fund research outside of their own domain -- that has been offloaded to federal funding, but (as seen here) it's getting a lot more strings attached.

I almost never write code directly (it's always Claude)

Who, then, understands the code? If the answer is "no one really", entropy will overwhelm your codebase sooner or later. Otherwise, you need to read the code, and for that the knowledge of language is still relevant.

Ah fun fact, why do we use the word “right” and “left” but also use the word “right” as correct/lawful and use left as thing that is well, left? A linguist theory says that people always been predominantly right handed, so the way you use tools is the “right” (correct) hand, and the one you don’t, well it’s the hand that is “left”.

It's a bit more varied, even in the Indo-European family. What does tend to happen is that the words for handedness get positive (right) or negative (left) associations in idioms, but additional meanings are not universal. In French, "droit" additionally means right (as human right), but not "correct" (yes it does have a bunch of adjacent meanings). In German, "recht" gets to mean "law" or "justice", shared by some Slavic languages ("pravo") -- but not all of them, which have the word "desno", without any association with rights/justice/correctness. The Latin "dexter" gave us "dexterity" and "dexterous", but also nothing alluding to justice. Et cetera.

As an aside, "left" originating from "left over" sounds like folk ethymology to me. Dictionaries point to "weak" as the original meaning.

I went to Finland, and there were ships going from Finland to Estonia, carrying people just to buy cheaper alcohol there. They went back to Helsinki with shopping bags full of vodka. Makes you wonder how does it look Tallin in drinking statistics.

They just need to exclude the shops in a 150 m radius from Terminal D in the Tallinn harbor to get accurate statistics, the Finns rarely go beyond that ;)

You just have to use a secure device.

Secure as defined by a duo of monopolists. It's a contractual concept and doesn't have a firm relation to security-related characteristics. I'd trust GrapheneOS to be as secure as anything Google is capable of releasing, but that doesn't help them if Google refuses to vouch for a device running their OS. Which is also why your check/credit card analogy falls flat.

Considering the amount of money at stake, Software is a deeply, deeply unserious and careless industry, and a great many practitioners are also deeply unserious and careless people.

What else do you expect, given the economic incentives on one side, and the immaturity of the discipline on the other? Writing robust software requires time, money and competence, in a purely empirical approach, since we have no fundamental theory of software. The pressure is for quantity and features in minimum time. The approaches are incompatible, and economics win every time.

The plus I haven't encountered before, but "996" is a Google away. In short, working 9 AM to 9 PM, six days per week.

You must belong to the club of folks who use hashmaps to store 100 objects.

Apparently I belong to the same club -- when I'm writing AWK scripts. (Arrays are hashmaps in a trenchcoat there.) Using hashmaps is not necessarily an indictment you apparently think it is, if the access pattern fits the problem and other constraints are not in play.

It's amazing how much we've brainwashed folks to focus on algorithms and lose sight of how to actually properly optimize code. Being aware of how your code interacts with cache is incredibly important.

By the time you start worrying about cache locality you have left general algorithmic concerns far behind. Yes, it's important to recognize the problem, but for most programs, most of the time, that kind of problem simply doesn't appear.

It also doesn't pay to be dogmatic about rules, which is probably the core of your complaint, although unstated. You need to know them, and then you need to know when to break them.

https://archive.ph/yvUA3

Why can't the cyclists slow down when they see that there's a human obstacle in front of them?

They usually do. (The considerate and/or non-confrontational ones. There are always idiots, and people have the tendency to remember negative outliers and project their behavior on the group as a whole, which is unfortunate.) However, slowing down isn't the whole story. Riding a non-motorized bicycle is much easier if the rider can keep moving, however slowly, so it would be considerate in turn for the pedestrian to step aside and let the cyclist pass, if possible. A distracted pedestrian can be warned by a bell.

Separately, delivery riders as a category have an incentive to ride as quickly as possible, which is a recipe for conflict. Removing that incentive means removing or completely reimagining the service. I don't think that anybody has a solution or mitigation at present.

That is spectacularly useless

Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.

A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.

Hehe "Balkonkraftwerk", available from Lidl for €250 (see TFA). This makes me unreasonably happy for some reason.

Just having something like "Have a bonded 3rd party security team review the source code and running router software" would solve around 95% of the stupid things they do.

It would certainly help, but no economically feasible amount of auditing and best practices could lead to having a warranty on that software. My thesis is that our current understanding of software is fundamentally weaker than that of practical applications of electricity, so it makes no sense to present analogies between the two.

Not on account of its control software, which is what I was talking about.

So, we don't need an electrical code to enforce correct wiring.

For an analogy to work, its underlying elements should have a relation to the target. Your analogy is not in the same universe. For electrical work, there is a baseline of materials and practices which is known to produce acceptable results if adhered to. For software, there isn't. (Don't tell me about the Space Shuttle. Consumer software doesn't cost tens of millions and isn't written with dedicated teams over the decades.)

With network protocols, you make one layer (Ethernet), you add another layer (IP), then another (TCP), then another (HTTP). Each one fits inside the last, but is independent, and you can deal with them separately or together.

It looks neat when you illustrate it with stacked boxes or concentric circles, but real-world problems quickly show the ugly seams. For example, how do you handle encryption? There are arguments (and solutions!) for every layer, each with its own tradeoffs. But it can't be neatly slotted into the layered structure once and for all. Then you have things like session persistence, network mobility, you name it.

Data formats have other sets of tradeoffs pulling them in different directions, but I don't think that layered design would come near to solving any of them.

Qt costs serious money if you go commercial. That might not be important for a hobby project, but lowers the enthusiasm for using the stack since the big players won't use it unless other considerations compel them.

[The same timezone in Poland and Spain] sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization.

Well, if you look up the histories of the time zones in the respective countries ("Time in Poland" and "Time in Spain" on Wikipedia, I have no reason to doubt their accuracy) you'll see that both settled on CET, with or without daylight savings, long before the EU was even an idea.

I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive.

Which is nuance that will get overlooked or waved away by upper management who see the cost of hiring developers, know that developers "write code", and can compare the developer salary with a Claude/Codex/whatever subscription. If the correction comes, it will be late and at the expense of rank and file, as usual. (And don't be naive: if an LLM subscription can let you employ fewer developers, that subscription plus offshore developers will enable even more cost saving. The name of the game is cost saving, and has been for a long time.)

we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire

Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.

It's in the library you're using, and you're not using all of it. I've had that exact situation: a dependency was vulnerable in a very specific set of circumstances which never occurred in my usage, but it got flagged by Dependabot and I received a couple of unnecessary issues.

Definitely. [1] (Use reader mode if the page misbehaves.)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260220083443/https://www.theat...

Yes, you configured an LDAP server using it's own protocol. It was not good.

It's still possible to configure OpenLDAP via the slapd.conf file. The old roadmap called for ditching configuration file support in 2.5 IIRC, but it proved hugely unpopular so the file works to this day. The new configuration style is mainly useful for live updating of access rules and indexing.

I would expect WD-40 to work fairly well because it cleans the chain and gets the filth out of the links

That it does, but it doesn't leave much lubricant behind, which you need for a properly functioning chain. As you know, you want something that will get between the pins and rollers and stay there, minus the grime that would turn it into grinding paste. Which is probably why some people swear by wax, but that sounds like a giant hassle.