marksweston

I'm not sure it's right to characterise Deep Blue or Stockfish as repositories of human chess theory. Fundamentally they were all based on a relatively simplistic function for calculating the value of a board position combined with the ability to evaluate more board positions further into the future than any human possibly could (plus a database of opening moves). That approach seems thoroughly non-human, and represents a victory of tactical accuracy over chess theory or strategy.

However I agree that the games between AlphaGo and Stockfish are really interesting. It strikes me that the AlphaGo version of chess looks a lot more human; it seems to place value on strategic ideas (activity, tempo, freedom of movement) that any human player would recognise.

I think, in practice, "justice" has always been a mediated form of vengeance. The state maintains its monopoly on violence by extracting enough vengeance from criminals that individuals (i.e. victims or their families) are willing to subcontract revenge to the state. In other words, the "justice" system has to provide enough vengeance to retain the consent of the victims, or those offended on their behalf. The benefits to society are large; total violence is much lower once it's able to break the cycles of private retaliation and avoid endless bloodfeuds. But it is an uncomfortably pragmatic equation.

I don't think there's any other consistent way to look at the issue though. Treating murder as the ultimate crime, as almost all justice systems do, makes sense in terms of the cost to the victim and the desire of societies as a whole to see murderers punished. But most murders are unplanned, and most murderers are no more likely to murder again than any other member of the population. Given the above, long sentences for (unpremeditated) murder just do not make sense; they probably have little value either as deterrence or prevention, and they certainly don't rehabilitate. But would a victim's associates stand idly by if their murderer was free after five years?

In as much as this analogy is useful: when you lie to the lender about your income, spending and ability to repay the loan, you have committed fraud.

But the EU is supposed to be an a collective of allies and partners, not a network of purely financial transactions. In that context surely the shame belongs to the partner that betrays the trust and confidence of its friends?

Not that I'd argue that Greece "deserved" everything that happened. But this line of argument seems to justify a complete refusal of responsibility on Greece's part.

Are they "incredibly damning"? It's impossible to tell from the minimal amount quoted in this almost content-free article.

Historically it seems that the highest paid developers in London have been contractors, who can charge £600 ($780) / day for fairly non-niche skills in web-development.

IR35 may change the incentives for employers enough that that kind of money is more likely to be paid in salary form. We're now seeing senior developer salaries being advertised as high as £90k - £100k ($130k). Again, for in demand but non-niche skills (Ruby, React, full-stack JS etc).

I'm sure London won't be seeing SF or NYC level salaries, but you can definitely live comfortably in London on a software engineer's salary.

pesky hackers

...working on behalf of the KGB, seeking military advantage for the totalitarian police state they served. Yes, let's be on their side instead.

This is strongly overstating the case:

The UK right to silence is pretty well summarised in the modern wording of the police caution: "You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

Staying silent is not obstruction of justice or contempt of court. No one is ever required to respond to questioning. But it might lose you credibility in court of you produce an alibi or other defence at trial that you didn't mention during questioning.

The only exception is passwords and encryption keys, which have to be supplied if a court order is obtained and aren't considered testimony.

it is utterly bizarre that you're treating the fact that the party that got the most votes won the most seats as evidence that the electoral system is biased towards them.

Have you considered adding elections when the Conservatives didn't win the most votes to your data set?

This is simply not true.

FFTP is biased in favour of the party with the largest share of the vote, or perhaps another way of putting is that the relationship between vote share and number of MPs is not linear.

And beyond this, the British electoral system has consistently favoured Labour for decades (as Boundary Commission changes fall behind demographic change and population movement)

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-...

I read the author as being fully self-aware and assuming we understand that that is the case.

Name a thing and you summon it into existence.

'Brogrammer' started as a witticism and has become a social phenomenon that people discuss as though it was based on rigorous observation and not just a joke.

It may seem “unfair” to toy with the idea of losing the assholes, particularly the unintentional assholes. Since they “don’t know better” it seems almost cruel to let them go simply because they’re making everyone around them miserable, and it somehow feels like a smaller request to have 50 people tolerate one asshole’s behavior than to demand one asshole figure out how to not alienate everyone with whom they interact. Frankly, I think you’d be doing an asshole a favor by losing them, nothing is a better teacher than failure.

So…..

Once you have successfully labelled someone, you should actively fight any tendency towards empathy with them. Don’t bother worrying about whether their behaviour was intentional. Just kick them out. It’s for their own good.

At this point, I’m labelling the author an asshole.

It’s weird to me how persistent this story is.

From the reported control traces, there was no prolonged period of dual input. There were 3 or so brief moments of dual control input (1 - 2 seconds), during which a warning was sounded. The pilots never spoke out loud about it, but we can infer that they heard the dual input warning and were aware when it happened because the sequence of events was the same each time; inputs from both joysticks received -> aural dual input warning -> input from one joystick stops.

Something about the idea of two pilots inadvertently fighting each other for control of the aircraft has definitely caught peoples’ imagination. But it didn’t happen.

It’s hard not to see this as purely a response to an article title. It bears no relation to the actual article content, which was thoughtful and interesting and really deserved a more on-topic critique.

I agree, but was responding to a post that was heavily criticising Lion Air for not paying for the option and implicitly laying the blame for the crash at their door. Either the option was safety critical, in which case Boeing had no business making it optional, or it wasn’t, in which case blaming Lion Air is unreasonable.

Given that thanks to Boeing, the Lion Air crew didn’t even know the MCAS subsystem existed, and that MCAS would continue to rely on the single faulty sensor however many extra redundancies were installed, the decision not to buy seems kind of irrelevant.

Who ships safety-critical features as an optional extra?

Fascinating stuff, really interesting characters. I for one never knew the Germans were pursuing fission for the production of "engines". Do yourselves a favor and read the entire transcript.

I'm fairly sure that by "engines" they meant reactors.

My understanding is that aerodynamic modelling and simulator runs have shown that a committed decision to push nose-down, regain airspeed and recover from the stall, could have been successfully initiated all the way down to 5000 feet. The Captain had another 2mins 15secs (approximately) before reaching that level, and another 30 secs before impact after that.

There was time, if only someone had said the word ‘stall’ out loud.

To me, this moment is one of the failure points in the incident and is entirely the captain’s fault.

Captain: What the hell are you doing?

Benin: We've lost control of the plane!

Robert: We've totally lost control of the plane. We don't understand at all... We've tried everything

Now, instead of a team working jointly on a problem, we have two juniors feeling that they have to justify and defend themselves to their captain. It’s a really poor psychological position to be in with a time-critical problem to be solved.

It’s a human response, obviously, but I’m betting it’s the opposite of what his training would have recommended.

IMO, in that moment, the Captain either needed to get his crew problem-solving, or take control himself. unfortunately he did neither.

This narrative is incorrect. The aircraft gave audio and visual warnings when there were multiple control inputs. And we can infer that the crew on AF447 noticed them because the 2 (IIRC) instances of dual input lasted less than a couple of seconds.

To the American government, yes of course they are.

The American government isn't supposed to be some even-handed dispenser of global justice; its job is to protect American citizens and their interests.

Are they?

My 20 month old (i.e. out of warranty and with no Applecare policy) iphone 6+ started showing the symptoms a week and a half ago. The "Genius" at the Apple Store immediately recognised the symptoms and processed a free replacement (refurbished) phone without any prompting or negotiation on my part.

So while it's true that they are staying very quiet about it in public, it does seem that knowledge of the problem and a free replacement policy has been communicated within the company.

Clients don't want to read Cucumber specs

Far too broad a generalization I think. I currently work with a non-technical CEO whose first encounter with Cucumber was when we were trying to re-specify a feature that we'd got wrong at the previous attempt. It was a revelation to him, and his initial burst of enthusiasm resulted in his going away and writing - unknown to us - Cucumber Features for about half of the functionality of the app. He's calmed down since then and leaves the actual writing to us, but Cucumber remains our go-to tool for resolving complicated requirements.

Obviously trying to force Cucumber on an unwilling/uninterested client is going be difficult and damaging to the relationship. Maybe if their first experience was a positive one in which using Cucumber helped resolve a communications problem rather than a technical ritual that they were forced to repeat for every user story, then attitudes might change?