colinb

So, not gravity or radio waves?

the same Arab countries that ejected their long-established Jewish populations en-masse in 1948? I wonder where they thought those people were going to go. In 1948.

It’s less than one per hundred teachers and that’s with the assumption that there’s never two complaints about a single teacher in a year. I guess we have different ideas of a lot, which is fair enough.

I have no direct experience of this being an engineer rather than a teacher. I have been subject to an HR complaint once in my career. At Cisco. I’m not sorry. I can easily believe that it’s a stressful and unpleasant experience, especially for those people, the great majority, who are exonerated.

I was curious about the numbers. Apologies for the year mismatch. I can only report what I found. This year there are about 466000 teachers working in primary and secondary education in the UK. In 2024 there were 1684 complaints to the TRA about teachers. (No idea how many were to because of physical contact) of 1055 were dismissed. So around 600 upheld complaints. Or 0.3% of teachers. That doesn’t seem too bad to me.

The greater scandal is that the average time to clear each case was around 103 weeks.

I know. I’m willing to bet the first thing they’d do after seizing the guns would be to stop unfriendly media from first hand reporting of events in the White House.

Then, when they know they’re proof against an armed citizenry, they’ll start running government policy as a way to line their own pockets. Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if a sufficiently emboldened crook, safe in the knowledge, that you personally cannot stop them by armed force, started to flout the laws left and right.

Put it another way. I never fail to be amazed by the fantasies that govern significant chunks of American thought. People who’ve lived there, and also in other places are able to figure out pretty quickly where they’re actually safer, and more respected by their government, and able to live a decent wholesome life.

I’ll note in passing that there are other countries with similar levels of gun ownership but less suicide and violence. Perhaps the first is because they have slightly more left leaning social policies. I’m all but convinced that the second is because they aren’t driven to a frenzy of terror by their local media. Maybe that cat has escaped its bag and isn’t ever going back. A shame. To live one’s life in fear of angry frightened people with guns sounds awful to me.

Last thing. I’ve had guns pointed at me twice. Once by an infant British soldier in 1990s Belfast. And once by a robbing bastard in a very wealthy part of Los Angeles. Neither was fun, but at least the soldier was predictable in the then prevailing circumstances

Assuming your summary is true, does that have anything to do with the virtues or failing of feminism? After all socialism also (indirectly) gave us weekends, paid holidays, sick leave, social security, state pensions, and decent healthcare. (Shame about the authoritarian psychopathic leaders etc. but that’s clearly not linked to any specific political leaning).

I mean, if you’re against feminism, then I think you’re definitionally against the freedom of choices in life for fifty percent of humanity. It’s an unconditionally evil stance. The fact that most of the people who noisily complain about it are so clearly inadequate in their personality ( no one with actual confidence in their worth needs to spend their time crowing about it) doesn’t help.

Your italicised text is /exactly/ wrong. Hen eggs are fertilised inside the hen’s oviduct. I mean, eggs are somewhat porous after laying, but they’re not that porous.

(I don’t know about you. I’m just a programmer holding strong opinions about avian physiology. Maybe there’s an actual biologist on the plane who can correct me)

I think I strongly disagree with your first sentence. Strongly. I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English to know that the two are not an uncommon combination. Last year, I worked with someone whose first language was something from China - no idea which flavour - and they would often pass their written comms through an LLM. I could tell when they had done so by the onset of sudden grammatical correctness. But I don't think they were doing this with the intention of deceiving, merely of communicating clearly and correctly.

Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.

Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.

Not accessible in the EU cuz GDPR. “We thought about having a business that wasn’t exploitative and abusive of our users, and decided against it.”

Can you explain more please? I recognise some Claude-isms when reading text, and I recall image generators that added more fingers than are usual, but I don’t know what the 2-d graphics on the app home page signify in this respect.

ah, my apologies. I read more than you wrote. I think you and I are probably more in agreement than not. I read a book last year, "Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People" by Claire Dederer, on this topic. Good in parts. Left me hanging. She talks a lot about several probably bad people, Polanski, Woody Allen, Picasso etc. But she never seems to hit a conclusion. Maybe that's the answer; there is no easy, pat answer. You just have to push through each case, as you find it, according to your judgement at the time.

While writing this, I dug out a Reddit thread about the book, where one of the participants (YakSlothLemon FTW!) hits us with Wagner. Well, yes, game over. I'm not a fan of that sort of (to my ears) overcooked opera, but if you like it, play it. The dirtbag isn't getting any royalties because he's good and dead.

I too thought of Polanski (Roman, not Zac) while reading these threads. I’m not sure the comparison or perhaps, the parallel holds though. PO’b may have been a bad husband. Or he may have been married to a bad wife. Or maybe they were both a bit rough. I don’t know an any real evidence either way, and life has taught me that it’s hard to see inside the truth of other people’s relationships. I have trouble enough with my own, and I’m present in real-time!

Polanski R is not the same thing. He drugged and raped a child and was defended for decades by people who ought to know better because of his directorial genius. I don’t dispute that genius. I just can’t watch his movies again without feeling a little sick.

All of this to say, judging Polanski for being a monster is not the same as judging PO’b for being a jerk. I reread the Aubrey-Maturin novels every four or five years and they enrich my life on every occasion. And I don’t feel even slightly bad about it.

(Disappointingly, I did lose an argument over a big family dinner several years ago when it turned it that tracklement is a neologism. Imagine my embarrassment!)

I have to say I’m really enjoying the Eternal September of Software comments here. They make me wonder about the vintage of the authors. Was Windows 7 the first stable OS they used? Some crustifarian Debian? I don’t actually recall if the Multicians I knew thought New Jersey software was rubbish. I know I still miss the solidity and useful abstractions of VAXcluster. Kubernetes would be funny by comparison if it weren’t so tragic.

It was always better in the past. The capitalists always ruined it in the past. Only I am the true bearer of the artisanal software flame. /s

Not in any way being negative about what you’ve done, but… Mac only. Is this just because of inbuilt knowledge about file system shape or some more important Apple exclusive tool/environmental quirk?

Can you provide some context for this? I’m aware of SBF’s EA links, and how empty those sentiments appear to have been, but I’m just some guy, and it isn’t clear to me that the whole idea is dishonest, even if I don’t think it’s terribly realistic.

Ooof. €109.70 in paperback

I sort of agree, and sort of not. The decision to cheat on exhaust fumes was taken by senior executives. How many of them are being laid off?

I presume there’s a voting mechanism? Are you complaining because democracy hasn’t yielded your favourite outcome?

FWIW I might align with you in not finding all that much that I wanted to read in recent winners. That said this years nominations for Hugos have given me

A Drop of Corruption

and

Shroud

I enjoyed the former (and the earlier book in the dance series) and I’m 30% though the latter.

Betteridge’s law strikes again. (I came close to finishing that sentence with a question mark. Oh the irony)

More seriously, I looked at the article you linked. It talks about lots if complex climate stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t think it mentions bombs as a cause. Or the war. Please show your receipts.

There has got to be a pun in here somewhere about room temperature IQs.

Is there a car manufacturer that hasn’t taken advantage of such schemes? Should I pay more for my next car so that Volkswagen executives can get paid despite not facing serious consequences for choosing to poison millions of people?

I think it’s true that declining to hand over a password in a criminal investigation is itself a criminal act in the UK. That said, I don’t know how often this actually occurs.

As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.

I have the bamboo desk with the curved front.

I like:

- the way the wood looks and feels. - it has been fairly tough. I managed to stain it with an overnight pen leak, but it's mostly easy to clean, and stands up to minor impacts from computers and cups. Also, no water marks so far.

I dislike:

- the curved front, which looked cute in the pictures but makes it a PITA to fit a keyboard tray. That was a mistake. I wish I'd gone for the straight edged desk.

The truly excellent weavers will be fine?

Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.

I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.

[I have lived in the UK. I do not live in the UK. I am not British]

well, I guess you can always try moving there. It's my suspicion that more people move from China to the UK than the other way around. Why is that? Maybe they haven't heard the news about it being a terrible place.

I get it though. As other posters have said, various British police forces seem to get ahead of themselves and then have to climb back off their hill when confronted with skeptical press [remind me, do you get much skeptical press in China?] and although I do not greatly care for the marchers who carry pictures of ultralights (because yeah! Kill civilians!!) I don't think the people who are nearby and telling us that bombing civilians is wrong (hint: bombing civilians is wrong) should be penalized for doing so. The courts and the electorate will have their say, and (slowly) grind any disagreeing gov't into a policy change. As it should be.

That said, while I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement, I can't because, well, because it's stupid. It's a stupid thing to say. You should reflect more before you type.

Yes I did/do. He’s a top guy. I think he did some pretty spiffy work on multiprotocol routers in the 90s.

I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember:

  I wrote something to do cluster analysis of the previous day’s search queries. It turned out that the most frequent search was something like “naked picture of $soapOperaShowActor”. Actual search query data might shake your ideas of the goodness of people. 

 Much of AJ’s content was based on editorial staff (often young journalistic folk) researching what they thought might be the highest quality answer. One day I passed the desk of a colleague who was watching porn. What now? It turns out that they wanted to be able to answer the question “best porn of $kink” for a large variety of kinks. Which meant that they also had to have a policy of how to direct queries for CP. To something less harmful obvs.

 As a corollary of the above, the editors needed a way to search for candidate results. What did they use for this? Google of course!

Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.

Anyway I got laid off in the great wave of 2001, was out of work for a while, did some truly awful work on supermarket planogram s/w and eventually got a gig doing IP routing. Ever since then I’ve been patronising grad hires by telling them how useful it is to have a bad job in your past. It makes it much easier to cope with occasional bad days at an otherwise good place. “Sure, my code crashes on a double exception when the reverse bcopy chokes on an unwired chunk of address space in the ARP lookup interrupt path, but at least I’m not trying to optimise the positioning of cornflakes to take advantage is this month’s promo pricing”. Good god, there was a time when I had a subscription to The Grocer magazine. Watch out kids. This could happen to you! (I also got to spend a day following a guy around the London Underground as he refilled chocolate vending machines. But I won’t talk more about that unless you buy me a beer).