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I've submitted many reports through similar apps to my local council and find 25% of them are even acknowledged, 10% at most are "fixed" and the fixes are worthless.

A pothole I reported last October was "fixed" in December, and has already opened up again after the ineffective repair failed to take.

Re: on Friday November 22, 2024 @06:21AM (#42212903)
This is great!

It really reminds me of https://trailrouter.com/ which I've found amazing for finding new running routes.

It would be amazing to have similar functionality to suggest cycling routes of a certain distance that are mostly on bike trails i.e. suggest to me a 40km circular/out-and-back bike route from my house.

Re:The Remarkable Decline in Home Burglary Rates in Japan on Monday December 18, 2023 @05:40AM (#38681007)
Strong vibes of US Highway Fatalities vs. Tons of Lemons imported from Mexico

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mexican-lemons-res...

Re:Maersk to cut 10k jobs as shipping demand drops on Saturday November 04, 2023 @05:20AM (#38139348)
> Danish shipping giant Maersk has posted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of $30.9bn for the full year ended 31 December 2022, a 57% surge from $19.6bn in 2021.

> This is said to be the firm’s best-ever annual result.

https://www.ship-technology.com/news/maersk-logs-record-prof...

Really sad to see these companies make enormous record beating profits then months later do mass layoffs just to maintain better returns.

Companies wonder why employees are not loyal, change companies every 2 years, are disengaged, and not working hard enough.

It's because most companies treat employees are expendable and are ready to fire them with a moments notice if some shareholder wants to buy a bigger yacht this year.

The article suggests the solar capacity is aggregate of installs by individuals because the power is so unreliable from the grid
Azure has some really horrible design patterns from a security perspective

If a user creates a resource they have the ability to delete it later, regardless of their permissions. An IT Admin creates a Network/VM/Storage/Whatever and later changes role and has no access to Azure. They can STILL delete that object whenever they want.

MSFT Bug Bounty declared it working as expected and by design. Owner can delete anything they own, regardless of permissions and access.

Re:Minidisc FAQ: MDLP (“Long-Play”) Mode Topics on Friday April 28, 2023 @05:37AM (#35739244)
In the UK I had a minidisc drive in a PC I built, which I used for both data storage and for writing music to play on a minidisc player

The technology was so far ahead of its time, it felt like a real step forward

Re:The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature on Thursday April 27, 2023 @07:18AM (#35726362)
Why would you need to look at a screen? Surely the feedback from a volume knob is the volume changing?

If it doesn't change -> change it more

It it changes too much -> change it less

If you realise it needs to be moved slowly -> move it slowly

Re:The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature on Thursday April 27, 2023 @06:07AM (#35725796)
I can operate physical buttons without taking my eyes off the road.

I know where the volume knob is and I can easily grab it and turn it without looking away. If it's slow to respond I can go again and dial it back down, without looking away. Or I can just keep my hand on the dial and spin it back a bit.

With a digital screen I can't leave my hand on it without continually pressing the input, and if I want to put the volume down I have to look and see where that button is.

A physical control absolutely fixes this

Highly recommend the TV show Black Mirror, which has an episode called “Be Right Back” where a character talks to her dead husband using an AI trained model in an app type setup.

Very interesting discussion piece on the real world impact and repercussions of these types of systems

Also own some newer Miele washer/dryer and found the estimated time is almost perfectly accurate

I connected the Wi-fi for the app and I get a push notification to tell me the actual time remaining once its done the measurements

Miele already offer this on newer washing machine. They can connect to your inverter too and start a load when there is available local solar/battery/low spot prices.

It’s called “SmartStart”

It works very well in my experience. Load the machine in the morning, and it will start later in the day, then send my phone a notification when the load is done

In my personal experience, and through my network of friends/former colleagues, it's incredibly easy to find work as a contractor - in the UK at least.

I've never met a contractor who was short of contracts and options. There is pretty constant demand. Most of my contractor friends work 8-9 months of the year, take an extended break, then when they are ready for new work will land a new contract within 2-3 weeks at most. Totally normal to land a new contract within a few days.

There are some SIGNIFICANT downsides as an employee to using an employer of record. It's another example of companies reducing employee rights and outsourcing risk and responsibiility.

1 - No equity. The legal company structure prevents you getting equity in the company.

2 - Significantly reduced employment rights. During the current waves of layoffs people employed through these type of arrangements found they had significantly less rights than normal employees, primarily due to fewer people being employed this way did not meet the usual thresholds for redundancy planning and payouts.

A friend of mine employed through an employer of record was "made redundant" and was offered exactly zero notice, severance or payout. When he tried to negotiate they effectively told him to sue them, knowing it will take significant time and legal costs to bring forward a claim.

If you don't manage them directly that sounds like you don't have authority.

Without the authority to make changes you this will be very hard to do, given the scope of changes required. Soft skills and influence works up to a point but given your remarks about resistance to change this is a big challenge.

You need to ask for the proper remit and authority, or decline and move onto another project or job.

Re:Ask HN: Quiet quitting in FAANG doesn't work now? on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:54AM (#32849465)
As someone who has worked for two FAANGs so far, I can tell you that leetcode is a running joke that has almost zero correlation to actual skills.

Sure people practice a bit when they play the interview game, but being successful in FAANG is pretty much unrelated to solving leetcode problems.

Re:The Ethereum merge is done on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:46AM (#32849400)
Yep, a single digit amount of entities/wallets have majority control over the network.

"64% of staked ETH controlled by five entities"

https://cointelegraph.com/news/64-of-staked-eth-controlled-b...

Re:The Ethereum merge is done on Thursday September 15, 2022 @04:13AM (#32848781)
Let's be clear: Bitcoin is NOT reducing methane emissions or carbon emissions. Crypto mining cannot reduce anything. This is just a straw man.

The study you reference discussed burning waste methane to turn into electricity, rather than gas flaring.

That electricity could be used for anything. Water desalination, stored for grid balancing, powering agricultural needs or offsetting the electrical needs of the gas facilities.

Re:Thunderbolt, Displayport and Docks on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:53PM (#32717612)
Monitor USB ports also tend to have limited power output too.

If you want to use a webcam and a usb Jabra speakerphone for video calls you may exceed the power limits.

Took me way too long to diagnose the issue

slutsofinstagram.com

> Welcome to Slütsof In Stagrâm an online fantasy series about a Princess duck named Slütsof and her adventurous journey across the mystical lands of Stâgram. Join her as she leaves her castle, searches for her long lost brother Brösof The Magical Goat and challenges a tyrant King who has claimed all of Stagrâm for himself. Here is some concept art to ignite your imagination! --New submissions below!

(The author of the site originally registered the domain for other reasons. Instagram tried to take legal action so they pivoted and back solved the purpose of the domain and why it wasn't infringing on the Instagram trademark)

I think the chat function is probably even worse than the video calling.

It just feels brittle and flaky and awkward. Even small things like trying to insert an image often won't work because the format is unsupported so you have to screenshot the image first.

In 2022 there is no excuse to not support all the common image formats, it's not hard

I've had the same. When I was using Teams for many meetings I would restart the desktop app every few hours to try and prevent these kind of issues. Not unusual for me to restart it after every meeting.
I was working for a Venture Capital firm at the time, and it was during COVID when everything was remote so it was a VC platform for our VC to do VCing!
Microsoft Teams is one of the worst desktop apps I've used - on Windows and Mac.

You can see how it's built on layers and layers of badly designed compatibility layers and bad engineering decisions.

Massive CPU hog, unacceptable side effects (disconnecting Bluetooth devices), super laggy UI and overall poor UX are the headlines.

I decided to invest in an alternative VC platform for my business because it was that bad.

I used to work at Google Cloud, I left about 2 years ago so my advice might be slightly outdated so hopefully it helps someone.

I highly recommend anyone running production workloads to get in touch with sales and meet your account manager, and customer engineer.

You also need to swap to invoice billing and sign the offline payment terms. Credit card payments leave you in a MUCH higher risk category at higher risk of suspension.

You can ask them to put a flag on your accounts so that you won't get suspended in the event of billing issues. Iirc it gives you something like 180 days and blocks any of the automated systems.

The downside is you could get a crazy huge bill if you have an account compromised or some rogue IaC code. But you can manage that with quotas mostly. And with some good negotiation you can get a rogue bill written off. YMMV.

Shout out to Twitter @StateOfLinkedIn also
Re:Why your daily stand-ups don't work and how to fix them on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:16PM (#32387430)
Absolutely.

There were multiple daily standups, weekly standups, twice-monthly retros, monthly project updates, bimestrial project updates and quarterly workshops and offsites.

Which meant once a quarter you had at least 2 solid weeks of nothing but sync/update/standup/retro meetings to talk about the work you talked about planning to do, but failed to do because you spent all your time talking about planning to talk about planning to do it.

Re:Why your daily stand-ups don't work and how to fix them on Monday August 08, 2022 @06:35AM (#32384009)
I briefly worked for a large non-tech corporate in between two FAANG jobs.

What really surprised me at the corporate was how much they love to TALK about Agile. We had Agile Coaches, an Agile Centre of Excellence, dedicated Scrum Masters (literally their entire job), Agile Squads to try and improve the Agile Process, mandatory Agile Training and we constantly talked about how things were Agile and if we could be more Agile.

They even experimented for a quarter by adding a mandatory agenda item to every single meeting to review how Agile we were and what can be done to be more Agile.

We got absolutely nothing done. Progress was glacial, decisions took months, it was painful to do anything.

In contrast, at both FAANG tech companies I'm not sure I've ever heard someone say the word Agile directly. It just happens by default, no ceremony and rigour required. Shit gets done, at pace, and people are excited and motivated to do it.

One of the most frustrating problems I've encountered is arbitrary limits on the number of paired/remembered Bluetooth devices.

My Denon amplifier has an arbitrary limit of 8 paired devices. When you pair a 9th the oldest is forgotten. Storage is cheap, why have the limit!

I agree, I swapped from 2x27" 2K monitors to 1x34 ultrawide and the biggest change for me was the ability to focus on one thing.

Being able to just make one window full screen really helps me concentrate. Having a second screen constantly doing stuff just broke my focus.

When I need multiple Windows I can just tile with a window manager.

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