* Posts by Loyal Commenter

5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010

Tesla has a lot of work to do on its Optimus robot

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What's the point of a humanoid robot?

The human body is the shape it is because of evolution; bipedalism has evolved the way it has because it evolved from quadrupedalism, there are inherent stability problems (which is why human infants can't walk at birth, whilst other animals, such as baby deer, can). In fact, due to the way the pelvis has evolved to both support bipedalism and encompass the birth canal, human infants can't do very much at all, as they have to do a lot of development post-partum.

Designing robots to look like humans might be necessary if you want to build a convincing sex-bot, but other than that, why not design the form to fit the function, and not worry about pleasing perverts.

If you wanted to design a robot which can walk efficiently (rather than one on wheels or tracks), why not give it four legs, which at least removes the need to design expensive and complex balancing systems to move the centre of mass about to avoid falling over when walking.

I mean, you wouldn't design a computer vision system to mimic the evolutionary mistakes of the human eye, such as putting the blood vessels on the inside, resulting in a blind spot, or using materials for a flexible lens that stiffen over time, resulting in the gradual drift of minimum focal length.

Having said that, maybe that does explain Tesla's computer vision and navigation systems.

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Would you have issued blanket DNRs to autistic young people in care homes?

Would you shove a watermelon up your bum? Because that question is exactly as much a nonsequitur as yours.

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Would you trust doctors to decide which fetuses must (as opposed to may) be aborted?

1) Nobody is suggesting that when they talk about reproductive rights

2) Slippery slope fallacy

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

To be fair, he has said a lot of stupid things, and that is not really the most stupid one. The comment he was replying to was the really stupid one, because abortion right up to the point of birth, for any reason, is also clearly wrong.

There are reasons why civilised countries set abortion limits, which are strict time limits, except for cases where there are extenuating circumstances, such as severe foetal abnormalities.

There are also reasons why the decisions about such things are made by sensible discussion by experts, and not on internet message boards, and, in civilised countries, not by priests and proselytisers.

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Technically, doctors don't take the Hippocratic oath, because modern medicine doesn't rely on a foundation of ideas from ancient Greece. The field of modern medical ethics is much more rigorous.

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Medical ethics is a thing.

Fundamentalist religious ethics is not.

Guns-n-bibles right-wing American MAGA ethics is just an oxymoron.

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

No, their children won't be inbred monsters: It takes generations of inbreeding before that happens.

If they happen to be carriers of rare recessive traits, or both carry a single copy of a defective gene, it can happen in one generation. The parents can appear to be fit and healthy, because the functioning copy of the gene continues as normal. If they both carry the same defective gene, then there is a 25% chance of the offspring carrying two copies of that gene, and a 50% chance of them carrying one copy. Those are pretty high odds, and any individual is likely to carry a number of such genetic defects, meaning that children born with "oddities" of one sort or another are close to a sure-thing.

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And I say YOU are wrong. Now what?

Now you're wrong twice.

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You. Are. Wrong.

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Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

It's a very, very difficult line to draw.

It is indeed, and certainly not one I'd choose to have any politician (or lawyer) draw, and certainly not religious fundamentalist ones. Let's leave medical science to the medics and scientists, please.

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Go on then, post that same opinion non-anonymously, so we can see which coward you are? Or does your "right to anonymity" when expressing your repellent point of view trump the rights of women? In your mind, I suspect I already know the answer.

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

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We have a Room 3b doorplate on our spare room, courtesy of the Discworld Emporium.

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Re: Notes? How old school!

"You fail to take in the information and process it because 80% of your time is spent frantically copying notes down"

Back in the olden days, when students were students and lecturers were old men in scratchy suits...

I used to take rough notes to cover the main points of a lecture, and then go and write them up later. That way, you have an aide-mémoire after the lecture, and the act of recalling and writing neatly helps cement the details, and also gives you a legible record later when you come to revise for exams. I had text books at uni which I don't think I ever actually opened, because paying attention in lectures and tutorials was kind of the point of attending university, rather than just reading the books.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

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Re: Think how bad science could get with government meddling.

So, business reporter says it's good, science reporter points out the problems.

The conclusion to draw there might not be that the BBC have "changed their tune," as if they are one homogeneous mass with a single opinion, but that different parts of the BBC report on different things in different ways, and individual journalists have opinions.

Also, that science journalists might know about science, and business journalists might know about business, and quite often businesses are run on wishful thinking and false assumptions, whilst science always has to obey the laws of thermodynamics.

The second article you linked there is reporting on the study that I was referring to, that found that the overall cost of using renewables to generate electricity, use that to split water to produce hydrogen, and then store, transport and burn that hydrogen to produce that energy back as heat is less cost-effective than just using that electricity (minus transmission losses) to drive a heat pump. Anyone versed in thermodynamics could have told you that, because energy is lost to the environment at every step, and splitting water is pretty inefficient.

That's before you even get into the nastiness of hydrogen as a fuel, which those whose thinking on the subject is apparently only cursory, such as Rees-Mogg clearly haven't bothered with.

As an aside, the problem with heat pumps, of course, is that they are expensive, and because of the lower temperature differences involved compared to traditional central-heating circuits, require all your radiators to be replaced with ones that use a wider-bore pipe. In theory, just replacing a boiler with a hydrogen-fuelled one might be cheaper, but that ignores all the problem associated with the delivery and containment of that hydrogen. In terms of using it as a fuel for cooking, would you be comfortable using a gas hob where the flame is invisible? At least with natural gas, you can see the flame, so tell if it is lit. Also, as you note, the partial pressure required from hydrogen to cause an explosion is a much wider range than with natural gas, so in safety terms, it's a no-no.

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Re: Think how bad science could get with government meddling.

I'll just add, he obviously doesn't know much about the physical or chemical properties of hydrogen either. Something that can diffuse through things other gases can't, due to weird quantum tunnelling effects, and which is odourless and burns with an invisible flame isn't really something I'd be comfortable piping into my home, for safety reasons if nothing else.

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Re: @Loyal Commenter

I thought it ment [sic] pulling your own weight and not screwing everyone else by being out for themselves and expecting to take for nothing.

Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what Thatcher's government wanted you to think, and the right-wing press certainly promote that idea.

In reality, living off stolen benefits is a full-time job, and it always cost more to prevent it than was gained from doing so (the amount lost to benefit fraud has always been vanishingly miniscule when compared to the budget for benefits as a whole). The only real result was to punish the poor and disadvantaged by making them jump through hoops.

I'm lucky that I have a decent job and don't need to claim benefits. I have had times in my life where I have been equally unlucky, and the benefits system at the time (which was under a Labour government) was demeaning and humiliating. it certainly didn't help me, and there's no way I could have been well-off by cheating it.

Meanwhile, those screwing everyone else and not pulling their weight are those whose income comes from capital, and not from work.

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Are you referring to Mussollini as left-wing? Interesting. Most people who define fascism as pretty right-wing, and Meloni's party is pretty well accepted to be hard, if not far-right.

As for Adern, I think you are mistaking wanting to put some controls on people presenting their opinions as facts as some sort of attack on opinions. I don't think it's particularly controversial to want to have things that are presented as facts to actually be truthful, but perhaps that is a problem for those who make a living spreading lies, who knows?

Opinions are, of course, like arseholes, everyone has one, and they all stink.

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The problem with well-defined views is that they can be very wrong. Do I have to point to 1930s Europe to demonstrate some very well-defined views, and how disastrous that can be?

Again, basing policy on evidence, rather than views, would be nice.

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Well, yes and no.

Yes, everyone has an ideology. However, politicians should use that to inform policy, not drive it. Policies should be evidence-led; that is, you should look at whether that policy, or something like it, works, or has the desired effect, and look at the reasons why. If you do that, it, in turn, should inform your ideology; you should be able to question your own preconceptions and re-shape them based on the evidence.

You might still be left with some fundamental principles that are unshakeable, such as thinking that government should be there to server the entire electorate, even the ones that didn't vote for you. People are always going to have fundamental beliefs, and they are always going to differ to those of others. However, making policy that affects a whole nation through sweeping changes, based on hunches, or on a book you read, is almost never a good idea.

I'd be just as unhappy with some extreme-left ideology, to be fair, and I think Starmer now has the next election clinched because he is sat in the centre-ground. This upsets many on the left, because he doesn't take things far enough, but the thing about politics is that it is a bit like steering an ocean-liner. You have to turn, and it takes a long time. If you try to do a right-angle, it will break in half. Truss is seeing the result of her extreme lurch to the right (from an already pretty right wing position) reflected in the polls. They currently have Labour and Conservatives where each other was at the last election, and the trajectory is showing that the gap is only going to widen. The poll-of-polls is an interesting metric to watch, as it's probably a bit more accurate than any individual poll, although I don't think all the data points are necessarily adjusted for selection bias.

I'd be satisfied to see this country become less extremely right-wing, because, quite frankly, the extremes at both ends are barking mad.

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Re: IMF

You vote for a party not a leader, the party hasnt [sic] changed.

You might vote for a party, I vote for a candidate.

I'd like to have the opportunity to vote for a party instead / as well, but the chances of getting anything like real PR will probably have to wait until Labour's second term in around 5 years time, because although the party overwhelmingly supports it, the leader doesn't see it as a priority.

We used to have that when we voted for our MEPs.

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Re: @Loyal Commenter

My response was directly to the comment above it, referring to your glib comment about wealth inequality, and illustrating it with a worked example.

It should be manifestly obvious that Britain's richest man doesn't work that many times harder than someone who works hard and earns a poverty wage. It should also be obvious to anyone who spends more than a few seconds thinking about it that those who make the most from cheating the system are those who are now rich, not those who are poor (for example, the repellent Crispin Odey, and others who made a fortune shorting the pound after the dodgy referendum vote). It is a fault of the right that they like to reason that society should help no-one who is in need, because a few might exploit this. It is human nature that we will always have those who have no morals and will cheat, but to use this as an excuse for increasing wealth inequality is abhorrent.

I pay enough in taxes to have an opinion on where I would like to see them spent. I'd rather they went to the poor (and in turn back into the economy) than to the rich (and then offshore).

If you can't follow the argument, that inability lies with you.

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Re: @Loyal Commenter

If you think Sir Jim Ratcliffe works several thousand times harder than an A&E Nurse, I've got a whole load of bridges you might like to buy.

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Re: re: Why did you feel the need to do so?

It's the right-whingers who get most offended by being called a snowflake though. It seems being on that side of the political spectrum involves giving up any sense of irony.

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That bit where Thatcher says, "There is no such thing as society." in the penultimate paragraph. It is a non sequitur; just because she is deliberately conflating the thing she has described as society, with society. This was then used to promote the corrosive idea of the cult of the individual, which is basically the embodiment of the concept that everyone should be out for themselves, and screw everyone else. This has directly led to the idea that unregulated free-market capitalism somehow benefits everyone, which is clearly untrue (you only have to look at the wealth inequality, and financial stability in countries which adopt this sort of policy).

Thatcher's speech was an excuse to remove the safety nets that society provides. That's fine if you're rich, but most people are not. People get sick, get old, have unexpected life events, suffer bereavements, accidents, and so on, and the purpose of the state should be to support all its citizens. The idea that you can't have this because the poor are scroungers is a neat diversion to the fact that the ones scrounging the most are at the top of the tree, not the bottom. You know, the ones who manage to accumulate more wealth than they could ever spend whilst working no harder (and often much less hard) than others...

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Re: Think how bad science could get with government meddling.

Nice to see I'm gathering downvotes for pointing out the disconnect between right-wing ideology and the fundamental principles that underpin the physical reality of the universe...

Or was it for the name calling, because I can assure you I've heard him called much worse? In which case, I might suggest that those who like to call others snowflakes shouldn't be so sensitive...

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Re: Give them a chance

Not to be crass or anything, but if I was 96, having to deal with Johnson and Truss in one day would probably finish me off as well.

Those conspiracy-minded amongst us are currently wondering whether she just faked her own death in order to avoid having to award Johnson's resignation honours, and she's just keeping her head low until he properly fucks off, before popping up and pronouncing "fooled you all"

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Re: No problem

... even though decimalisation would have been not long after nanny changed his last nappy

I'm not sure, I get the sense that he may well have been wearing nappies (and being breast-fed) well after decimalisation in 1971. Who knows, he could even be wearing one now. It would be foolhardy to make assumptions.

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Re: Think how bad science could get with government meddling.

Coming soon: ditzy Lizzy will revoke those pesky laws of physics/thermodynamics to solve the energy crisis.

You may joke, but the haunted pencil Re-smog has already tried to make out that converting electricity to hydrogen, transporting it, and using it for heating is better than just using that electricity for heating (via heat pumps) in the first place, apparently completely oblivious to the laws of thermodynamics.

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Because if STEM was valuable it would pay better than finance, if it doesn't pay as well as finance then it obviously isn't important and should be cut

Close, but not quite on the money. If STEM was valuable to those who want to make quick profits at the expense of everyone else, they would be pouring money into it. They have worked out that it is more effective to pour that money into lobbying to have their own taxes reduced, getting lucrative contracts given to them that they can outsource as cheaply as possible to the lowest bidder, and so on.

Science is hard, and its value is in it being a societal good. Those currently in charge care only about societal goods as much as they can see some profit in selling them off.

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To be fair, they had a choice between two similarly appalling candidates.

It's a bit like having your racist grandma decide for you whether your dinner should be a bowl of human intestines, or some red-hot gravel.

Neither is a suitable choice, and the ones doing the choosing are deeply unqualified to be making the choice. The ones who have to suffer the consequences of the choice had no say.

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Well, if she has any abilities, they're certainly well hidden

UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet

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Re: Zero sum, as usual

I do actually know some Chinese people, both those living in China, and those who are now living in this country under a new identity to avoid being murdered by Snake Heads.

The Chinese people are pretty obviously not the same thing as the Chinese state, in the same way that I'm not the British government. Just as our government does some pretty bad things to some of its people, the Chinese state is demonstrably worse to some of its. The sheer existence of many large "re-education camps" that you would get arrested for filming near is testament to this.

The issue of who is responsible for Chinese nationalism is probably the same issue as we have of nationalism anywhere. It's generally whipped up for political purposes. It's certainly not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, it is evident in many places: here, the US, Russia, Italy, Brazil, pretty much everywhere. It often comes hand-in-hand with authoritarianism, and often (but not always) with the extreme-right. Really, it's a pretty good alarm bell for something being horribly wrong in that country.

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Re: certainly if you happen to be religious [in China] …

Yes, and given how eager they are to stamp out the religious practices of Uighur Muslims, what makes you think that being a Christian (of either main flavour) would mean you might fare any better. It's pretty obvious that the issue they have is with Abrahamic faiths in general, because they're not "Chinese enough". Buddhists and Taoists are probably safe (for now) because those faiths are pretty intrinsically linked to traditional Chinese culture, and President Xi likes that. Have the audacity to be anything else, and there's a strong incentive to "Chinesify" yourself to fit in...

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Re: Zero sum, as usual

Close, but in China, you'd probably have been hauled off for re-education *before* you'd made those comments publicly, because they would have picked up on your opinions that you make known in private first.

China's intrusion into private life really is remarkable, and remarkably scary. Their "Social Credit" system is just the more obvious public face of it all. If you happen to be anything other than Mandarin-speaking Han Chinese, and certainly if you happen to be religious in any way (other than state-sponsored Buddhist), you're already in real trouble.

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Re: Why Russia

Creating international pariahs in this way is deeply counterproductive, because in doing so, you are also throwing away any levers you have to influence them and bring them back to the table.

The real problem is that the UN set certain things in stone in 1945, including the five permanent members of the security council: the US, China, the UK, France, and the USSR (now replaced by Russia). That particular selection doesn't necessarily refelct today's world, and it's nigh-on impossible to remove or censure Russia despite their territorial war(s) of aggression*. A more sensible formulation, if made today, would probably include many others, such as Japan, Brazil, Germany, at least one African nation, maybe the EU as a bloc, and so on. Geopolitics has changed so much in that time, it now seems really foolhardy to have made any members "permanent" rather than being up for review every decade or two.

*I'm not even singling Russia out here, there have been a number of land grabs and wars of aggression from all the permanent members since 1945.

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

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Re: The older the OS...

I'm upvoting you just for the use of the letter thorn.

edit - I see I'm not the only one

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Re: Why mince words??

Not Bigfoot, but rather like that fox I saw wandering across the car park this morning.

I think you may have inadvertently hit the nail on the head there.

We are at pretty much the exact time of year when this year's litters of fox cubs are grown up and start fighting each other for territory. This means that there are *lots* of them wandering about, and if you asked a random sample of people who had been in a car park this morning, a good number of them are likely to have seen a fox there...

As noted by another commenter here, those who buy AMD are also more likely to be those who run Linux.

The technical term for this is "selection bias".

AI won't take coders' jobs. Humans still rule for now

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Re: AWEsome is as AWEsome does. UKGBNI MoD are Challenged to Deliver ...

You do realize that a quantum is, by definition, the smallest possible change, don't you?

...just to add that, in quantum mechanics, the quantum is the exact amount of energy required, or released when switching between two energy levels. The difference between this and classical mechanics, is that these amounts are exact, and the energies that quantum systems can have are exact and don't vary (and are calculated via the Schrödinger equation).

Yes, those amounts of energy are typically very small, but that's not what quantum means. Technically, the word means "a specific amount".

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Re: AWEsome is as AWEsome does. UKGBNI MoD are Challenged to Deliver ...

Again, incorrect.

There is no reason why a system cannot receive a quantum of energy that raises it by several energy levels at once. For example, the spectrum of a neutral hydrogen atom is dominated by the "hydrogen alpha line", where light is absorbed or emitted when an electron goes from the second energy level to the third, or back the other way. The spectrum also has many other lines: first to second, second to fourth, first to third, and so on. One quantum of energy, of the right amount, will raise that little hydrogen atom's energy level to any higher-level state, without going through the intervening levels: a quantum transition (or quantum leap).

It might have been a number of years ago when I studied the physical sciences at university, but this is pretty basic stuff...

Edit - The Wikipedia article on the Hydrogen spectrum even has a nice little diagram showing this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_spectral_series

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Re: AWEsome is as AWEsome does. UKGBNI MoD are Challenged to Deliver ...

1) It's amanfrommars, don't try to actually parse what is written here

2) You do realise that a"quantum leap" refers to a quantum transition, and isn't referring to the amount of energy in that quantum*, but the metaphor of movement from one energy level to another without going through the intervening "space", so describing some sort of development as a "quantum leap" implies going from the thing you had to the thing you now have with no intervening development, so is a metaphor for receiving something complete and fully formed.

*individual quanta don't even have to be small. The quantum of energy held by a cosmic ray particle, for example, can be large enough to give whatever it interacts with a really bad day. Quanta are also not technically indivisible, either, for example, a photon may contain a quantum of energy that is more than sufficient to raise the energy level of a system, with some left over. In its simplest form, this would result in the energy level of the system being raised by its quantum of energy, and another photon being emitted with its quantum of energy, which would be the amount left over from the original photon.

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Re: Move along, nothing to see

The thing to be worried about is when the "AI"s start to be good at architecting.

The tricky part in the overall product development cycle is the initial definition and modelling of the actual business problem and main use cases. There are, however, formal ways of doing this, and many business problems do boil down to a relatively small number of architectural skeletons. Once the overall shape is in place, the individual components are pretty much dictated for you, and much of coding is boilerplate when it comes down to it. There's no real reason any of this can't be automated.

The real reason "AI" won't be able to do this is because the "I" in "AI" is a complete misnomer. There is no intelligence there at all, and just because the internals of how a ML model works are opaque doesn't mean that there will be an emergent intelligence either. Just because you don't (and arguably can't) understand something, that doesn't make it magic, in the same way that not being able to count the atoms in a block of cheese doesn't make the cheese intelligent.

There's no real understanding here, from the "AI" of what is being written. The human element comes in with verification. A human understands what the software has to do, I wouldn't let some ML algorithm decide whether the code n a PR is correct, what criteria to put on a unit test, or whether a completed module meets the user's requirements. I don't think we'd ever be able to automate UAT either, and let's face it, I doubt we'll ever be able to get users to write down their overall requirements clearly and unambiguously in a format that a machine can parse, let alone "understand". All the "AI" can do is help you fill in that code based upon patterns it "recognises", because a lot of code is self-similar. If anything, this is going to lead to duplication and failure to abstract common patterns in code that a good developer will spot and streamline.

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

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Should have changed it to Carly Simon's "You're so Vain"...

BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer

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Re: helpful

It depends entirely on the attitude of the person coming to you from help.

If they ask for help, in a polite and reasonable manner, they are likely to get it.

If they demand help, in a rude and unpleasant manner, and it's not work related, they'll get told "no", and possibly reported to their line manager, depending on exactly how much of an arse they are.

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

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Re: Too many staff?

It's because you are not their customer, you are the product. Their customers are the ones to whom they sell advertising space on their products' eyeballs.

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Re: Sunday Pinch-a-Loaf, Baldie Zuckertart et al.

You do know that's still constructive dismissal, and you can still take them to a tribunal, don't you? It's still constructive dismissal if you quit to take another job, without actually being dismissed.

Yes, CD tribunals have a high burden of proof. I personally know people who have won them against shitty employers, though, and the compensation does just about make it worth the absolute ball-ache of going through the process.

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Re: An old trick in the US

The irony has not been lost on me, from the man who is dead-set against modern remote working and doesn't even have a computer on his desk...

A better example of English exceptionalism you'll not find.

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Re: reminds me of this game

...£9, no, £13, no, £26...

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Re: employement tribubal.

...I should add, that this is 3% of a salary which is well below the UK average, despite being highly qualified and experienced. A salary, which, on its own wouldn't even pay rent and bills on a 1-bed flat in the city where we live.

Anyone claiming that public sector workers are well paid and get good benefits are living in an absolute fantasy land, or are looking through rose-tinted lenses at the salary and conditions of those at the top of the tree, whilst ignoring the other 99.9%

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FAIL

Re: employement tribubal.

You're lucky to work in the UK public sector, I suggest you look at your pension pot and shut the fuck up.

My wife works in the UK public sector. Her "pension pot" is a measly 3% matched private contribution pension, so might I politely suggest that ignoramuses with big mouths are the ones who should "shut the fuck up".

Edit:

The actual problem suffered in the UK public sector is caused by low pay. There are plenty of talented people about, but they often find that they can go and do a similar role elsewhere for twice the pay. Those whose roles are specialised, or vocational are shat on ever harder, because their skills are not easily transferrable to the private sector.

Public sector managers also tend to be the worst available, because they, too, could be earning twice as much in the private sector, if they were half-way competent. This is why I, as a developer, earn about £15k more in the private sector than my wife's boss, in the public sector. I shudder to think how much my manager, or his manger, or his manager, or her manager, or his manager are paid, in turn. As you get higher up the chain, I doubt the amount is commensurate with skill...

Malwarebytes blocks Google, YouTube as malware

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Re: Those YouTube comments can be pretty nasty

The adverts though; well I'd be inclined to treat all advertising as malware, in the sense that it's unwanted and steals your time. Given that google's principle business model is flogging advertising and finding ever more intrusive ways to force it into our eyeballs, I'd say fair game. The same goes for youtube which seems to have got to the point where a ten second video has 30 seconds of loud unskippable ads in front of it.