thorin

Someone must use these services because they are everywhere in the UK and I find them so annoying for many reasons, not just the ones you mention above.

Lots of people cycling all in black on ebikes on pavements making it dangerous for people to walk around safely and causing chaos for drivers and other cyclists. Also generally supporting big business over small stores. Everyone moans about having individuals charged with these minor traffic offences but in my view just targeting companies like JustEat directly and having massive fines based on employee behaviour would be far more effective.

What I found was that there was a lot of repetition in the questions that were asked and so once the knowledge base was built up, less new stuff was being added.

There was a lot of blocking and downvoting of questions which was both a good and bad thing.

If you had an expertise on a certain topic, the questions were often very simple and repetitious (e.g. I knew a decent amount at relational databases), but also you'd get people asking for whole system designs which got a bit ridiculous.

It wasn't great for asking about little known products or libraries etc and I often found no one responded to questions on certain js libraries or BI tools. Which was quite annoying, maybe because it appealed more to certain types of developers.

I guess you served your time and most people don't want to be answering questions every day for ever! There was a guy called Tom Kyte from Oracle who ran a question site for over 20 years - it must have taken a lot of his time, but if you're out there Tom it was very much appreciated!

In the UK you can find names and a contact address in companies house e.g.

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Not sure what the US or other equivalent is.

Agree with the other reply. Working for enterprises the actual initial writing the code part is probably 10% of the cost or less. Several times larger is the working out what the business requirements might be, which is mainly talking to people and writing stuff down. The support and maintenance part is also massive and if you assume a 5-10 year lifespan costs much more than the initial build.

I think what probably has improved is the ability of the business to prototype ideas for new systems and products quickly and throw them away if they don't work as expected.

The Saga of Eric the Viking - Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame)

Not really obscure, but I have a copy of a couple of Indian printed (pirate!) copies of books I bought in a bookshop in Kathmandu:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

My Dad has a lot of old late 1800s early 1900 books including a huge 2 volume dictionary, which is actually more of an encyclopaedia. It has topic sections like "How to defend yourself from savages" or "How to dig your own coal mine" etc.

Wordle occasionally

Connections daily

Lichess most days

This is the listing. You can click through pictures of it all. The rocket entrance is amazing.

https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...

I've seen one of those little robots before. My friend found what looked like a hand grenade while breaking up concrete/brick work in a house renovation. We called the police and fortunately we live right near to a Royal Engineers base with a bomb disposal team. They came out in their van and brought out the robot to have a look then picked it up and took it back with them in the van.

What I remember reading to my kids aged 5-10

The Hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring (more for me but they liked to snuggle up and fall asleep to it)

Harry Potter 1-5 (the hardback versions with lots of pictures)

Eric the Viking - Terry Jones - a personal fav of mine

Various compendiums of Greek and Norse Myths

Dr Seuss books

What do people do all day - Richard Scarry

My son started reading the Beastquest books very early by himself and was happy to read independently from there. After that at around 8 he started reading diary of a wimpy kid and the 13 storey treehouse type books.

Real ale has plenty of lower alcohol percentage options:

My faves are Harvest Pale 3.8% and Our House 3.4%

I also like mild which is often <=3%

0% Guinness is the only beer I would say that matches the taste of alcohol based beer. The others can be ok, but taste too malty, the flavour is off somehow. Also having 2 or more none alcohol beers seems to also make me feel "hungover" in a way, maybe due to additives.

How will they know if you're using AI or not?

I would say as a developer you absolutely need to be comfortable using the tools and understanding the possibilities but how much you use it should be up to you within any token / licensing limits.

I remember back in the 90s when people were starting to use IDEs and other developers would use vi or emacs for everything. There was always a suspicion that each camp wasn't doing it properly! Management didn't care as long as the work got done.

I'm interested in how addiction is so much more likely in some people than others. For over 20 years I loved to drink all sorts of different things. Once I had kids and hit 40+ it was so unpleasant in the morning so I decided to massively reduce. In the UK drinking is so pervasive. I limited my intake to <=2 drinks per night and never had an issue and would only break that maybe once a year. Recently I decided to reduce it even more. I will have a pint of ale in a pub if I go, but hardly anything else. It really didn't feel that hard.

Again at uni I found lots of people smoked cigs and mj and so I did it too a little bit, but decided after a year or 2 to stop and I've never really done it since. My dad was the same.

I've had the same realisation with certain foods recently and coffee, massively cutting down on sugar, salt and coffee.

Probably my only addiction at the moment is too much scrolling on my phone.

I totally accept this is a huge issue for many people, but no real idea why...

My primary motivation for work has always been to earn money for myself and my family. This enables me to do things that I want to do outside of work time. I have tried to align this with work that I find interesting or working with people I like, but this is not always the case.

If this is not an issue for you, then by all means find something else to do. Maybe look to move into a business domain you already provide IT/software for, or retrain to something else.

It's highly likely that many domains currently will be looking to maximise use of AI e.g. medical professionals, accountants, lawyers will not escape completely. Moving to something practical may be a better short term bet.

Would you rather fight one chicken sized robot or 100 robot sized chickens?

This is interesting? Do you have any other sources of caffeine in your diet? For instance I would have a regular can of coke maybe once a week and English breakfast tea at least once a day. Only coffee seems to really affect me though. I don't really need the affect but I do like the taste and now probably have 3 or 4 coffees a week rather than 2 a day and it seems to be helping.

Also Frank Beard

It was both, however where I lived, a few years before fathers would get up at 6am and go and work down a mine all day, or a shipyard or factory. They might get home at 6pm but after dinner they'd quickly go for a pint or go fishing or go to the football. Women often didn't work, or worked part-time so they could take the kids to school so saw a lot more of the kids and managed the household more.

Now women have the freedom to work, so both sexes can choose to avoid seeing their children if they want to. Bleak indeed.

They might talk about it, but gambling is a huge industry in the US and many different types of gambling are possible and have been for decades/centuries. It is far less restrictive than many other major countries on gambling I would say e.g. US, China, Australia etc.

Barclays use both the physical hardware code generator in the UK as well as a virtual version in the app. The Bank staff also use the same physical hardware in the branch so I guess it will stay around for a while.

I was at a graduate recruitment event in the UK for Unilever around 1998 when he speaker told us about the Magnum story. The premise was that someone might pay £1 for an ice cream to eat at home which seemed ridiculous at the time, given that people were probably expecting to pay 25-50p per choc ice/lolly, and that it might be something that would appeal more to adults than children. The Magnum was a big success and drove the way to flashier and more expensive ice creams!

Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.

My father worked in signals, first in the armed forces and then railway signals and telephone lines for his whole life. When I was young I was interested in Electronics, but not too great with them. I did study a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering but preferred the computer parts of the course and have since then been working in IT for nearly 30 years. I can understand how your fathers advice is important, but you also need to do something you can enjoy and succeed at.

I would say with your background don't worry too much about which technologies to learn. Things are changing fast so try and instead develop an engineering mindset, which will serve you well whatever you do.

He will guide you, but you also need to make your own path. Good luck in your journey.

Tell him you'll make sure to turn it off at exactly 5pm (or whenever you're supposed to finish). And that you'll turn it on at 9am and can't join any meetings till it's started.

I know they were pushing cloud very hard, and it was nice to see they were offering a lot of free tier to developers. What has been a surprise to me this year is working in the UK with certain enormous clients that they are still choosing Oracle products for new implementations which I was not expecting.

Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.

Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.

I seem to remember some pirate copies of art packages (maybe Photon paint) on the Amiga coming with a similar set of images that would be of interest to some teenagers...