IneffablePigeon

Exactly. It also makes sure you don’t pattern match the product as “inferior quality”. You assume “average quality”, and in fact (at least in the UK) many Aldi versions of products now have a reputation for being surprisingly high quality - but not all of them, so the segregation here between product lines allows some to get that reputation without being dragged down by the actually average ones.

They help all this by stocking the real branded versions of some products, and the fact their own brand products look roughly equivalent on the next shelf reinforces all of this.

Aldi have successfully manufactured a feeling that when you buy something cheaply it’s a _bargain_, rather than that you have compromised on the product you actually wanted to buy.

They also very hard when legally challenged for trademark disputes on their clone products with similar packaging, it’s certainly an important part of their strategy as far as they’re concerned.

Did it focus on it? Most efficiency measures are cash positive after a few years. My LED bulbs paid for themselves 3 times over at least by now. That’s before you even get to the positive externalities.

I think I agree to some extent. I like parts of all 3 definitions presented here, and I feel the new definition loses some of the clarity by omitting the fact that we’re interested in a particular system at a time.

But I really like this blog post’s main thesis that the people are part of the system and a key part of your observability stack. You can have an objectively perfectly observable system that outputs all of its answers to your questions in Greek, and I won’t be able to make head nor tail of it and neither will pretty much any of my team. Just as nines don’t matter if the users aren’t happy, observability doesn’t matter if the team can’t understand and act on the answers.

I have spent the last year building out observability tooling and I expect to spend another year on it. I would say 70% of my problems to solve are social rather than technical.

Don’t read blogs if you don’t want opinions, is my advice.

Painkillers are sold in packs of max 16 tablets in the UK (almost always 500mg for paracetamol, 200mg for ibuprofen). In addition they must be sold in blister packs not bottles, and all shops will only allow you to buy two packets per transaction (mix and match, you can’t have 2x paracetamol and 2x ibuprofen). I believe there are some exceptions for prescriptions.

Obviously you can still overdose by going to multiple stores and popping them all out of the blister packs but it puts enough of a barrier in that you have to be more determined (and more knowledgeable about what amount will actually kill you). Apparently it works.

> most people don’t have mortgages

Most people do either have mortgages or pay rent which pays their landlord’s buy to let mortgage on the house they live in. Mortgage rates and rents have both spiked very sharply. Along with energy bills that’s a huge chunk of most people’s expenses.

Yes because there are no hurdles or downsides to moving halfway across the world.

Except in France the bread is pretty cheap even from an independent bakery because there’s one every 50 metres so the competition keeps the prices down.

This is pretty much the same attitude which leads to kids being wrapped in cotton wool, ferried everywhere in giant SUVs and never let outside to play. I find it a bit sad.

I mean it was actually this forced change that made Apple finally upgrade from the USB2 speeds they were stuck on until now for this connector.

Ironically Apple are also demonstrating on their laptops exactly how you might keep the current connector but add an additional innovative charging connector (MagSafe). They did the same with the pogo pins on the iPads.

I don’t think that’s necessary in any case, USBC itself was essentially designed by committee before a single device was shipped and I’m sure the next standard will be too because that’s what it takes to coordinate the whole market. Innovation still happens. The world doesn’t fall down.

Good news for Rider I guess

This is _exactly_ why it is important.

Most of what you write will be skimmed or not read at all. The only way to increase your odds is to make your writing engaging (to improve chances of it being read) and clear and concise (to improve chances of comprehension).

Another oft overlooked skill is to know when to repeat your message in multiple places, and how to do so without it being irritating or noisy or irrelevant (see also: when not to write anything at all). Again, this increases the chance your message gets across.

I bought an m series device to replace my windows desktop mostly for efficiency reasons. It saves me hundreds a year in electricity costs at the moment (quite literally, I calculated it beforehand and checked real usage afterwards). It also means my office is now silent and cool. It’s a big QoL improvement for me.

Individual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size.

Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management.

Software is a team sport.

Union types are a gap, although records and switch expressions will get you much closer than was previously possible.

Object literals are a thing, they’re called anonymous types. You just new them up. And functions can be passed around as first class objects, with some minor type boilerplate in a few places.

There are a few places where you have to adjust to different naming conventions and types are obviously stricter but my experience is that for the most part modern c# has all the things I like about TS/JS.

Alternatively, the slight variation where even shipping good clean robust code was easier in the old days because the product was much smaller and didn't have years of accrued product and technical decisions to work around or unpick, all of which were good at the time but don't work a few years later.

The "maturity makes things slower" thing can apply even if the quality of code was always good.

The “it’s really hard” argument isn’t a very good argument in my opinion?

If we hold reproductions of a single repository to a certain standard, the same standard should probably apply to mass reproductions. For a single repository, it’s your responsibility to make sure it’s used according to the license.

Are there slightly gray edge cases? Of course, but they’re not -that- grey. If I reproduced part of a book from a source that claimed incorrectly it was released under a permissive license, I would still be liable for that misuse. Especially if I was later made aware of the mistake and didn’t correct it.

If something is prohibitively difficult maybe we should sometimes consider that more work is required to enable the circumstances for it to be a good idea, rather than starting from the position that we should do it and moulding what we consider reasonable around that starting assumption.

I stayed at a rural Airbnb that had it in place of a wired connection. It was pretty good for download (100mbps fairly consistently) but the latency jitter and upload speeds made it almost unusable for video calls and it did cut out for a minute or so once or twice over the course of a few days.

It's definitely a nice option but it's hard to rely on. I certainly wouldn't want to work remotely using it as my main connection for any length of time.

I found the source article much more illuminating: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...

I don't find the headline graph that convincing. Firstly, it's only based on items in this museum's collection, which is quite a biased set as it says in the article.

Secondly - if you actually look at the colour chart closely, you can see that although there is a trend of more grayscale objects in the collection, within the coloured section there's also a trend away from almost everything being some shade of yellow, orange or brown towards a much broader range of hues. Blues, greens and purples seem much better represented.

It looks to me like ~70% of the colours were basically "brown" in the 1800s, and now ~40% are white/gray/black. Seems more a reflection of modern objects being made more out of metal and plastic and less out of wood than anything else. Again, this is putting aside the clear bias in the samples here.

I'm sure there are trends going on (and the car colour one seems legit to me) but I think this overblows it a little. Fashion ebbs and flows.

EMI gives both tax advantages and means you owe no tax when being offered the option. 50k as a lump sum would be taxed as income (so, fairly heavily). 50k in shares might attract a similar tax bill to be paid directly by the employee far in advance of any chance of recouping the value of the shares.

EMI itself is not a scam. Whether a company follows through on giving you the options in a reasonable timescale is another thing, and whether the shares are eventually worth anything is another again. As with all things startup option/share related, consider it a lottery ticket with an unknown chance of paying out.

One could argue it makes even cheaper options like walking and cycling into more palatable alternatives. In any case, the vast majority of people in London use public transport to get around.

I'm not sure how it works for tradespeople who need to carry equipment. I'd hope there are schemes to subsidize more efficient vehicles for those sorts of cases, although I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't any.

I mean, I do see where you're coming from, and I have in the past second guessed some medical advice and asked if they'd considered a particular diagnosis I had a hunch on.

On the other hand, they're a professional and they've usually spent the majority of their life training to be good at what they're advising you about. I don't demand to be involved in the design of planes I fly on or bridges I cross, because frankly I'd do a worse job than even a pretty bad qualified engineer.

Indeed, but (arguably) exact volumes are not exact quantities for non-liquids

I think 75-85% of the bikes I see around here (UK) still have rim brakes not discs. They're cheaper.

I have no idea, but at a guess, I suppose the number of people in the country _with easy access to the sports_ is the more important number than the raw population. There's 300 million people in the US but how many of them have access to snowsports?

It might also just be a reflection of the distribution of medals available - Norway has dominated in the cross country skiing based events, but Germany dominates in the sliding events. Between biathlon,cross country skiing and nordic combined there are 26 disciplines, but luge + skeleton + bobsleigh have only 10 between them.

Not sure how you make this more obvious, perhaps I'm just slow today, but I failed because I didn't twig that when I got a letter in the right place it would make the right hand number go _down_ as well as incrementing the left number. I.e. I thought the right number was the total correct letters rather than just the count of letters that were correct _and_ in the wrong place.

ITER was planned in part through early results from JET in the 90s - but they more recently replaced the inner wall of JET to match what ITER will use, which was a good choice according to models but this gives empirical confirmation that it's possible to sustain the plasma using the new wall material.

All new fusion plants are a risk, that's why they're experimental. I suspect they were reasonably confident they could make ITER work and that's why they started building, but this will give them confirmation that the material choice was a good one and will also show them in advance some of the operational obstacles and possible solutions.

In other words, they knew "where they were going to go" but this gives them more confidence they were correct in deciding the direction, and will speed up their learning curve setting up the machine once built. Even if it is built and something fundamentally doesn't work about the concept, that will still be useful scientific knowledge, even if it is disappointing.

I mean, both? I think the vast majority of people I knew (UK, in my 20s) knew that the main reason we were locked down was to minimize the risk of the NHS being so overrun it couldn't perform basic healthcare.

Of course personally we all just wanted to not be locked down any more but I don't actually think that many of us were staying in for our own sakes - we knew the long term risk to our own health if we were to catch it was fairly low. Very biased sample, of course.

Amazon basically does this, I think? As a consumer, I hate it, because I end up with a huge box and loads of useless paper whenever something isn't the right aspect ratio for one of the standard boxes.

Obviously for distribution of stock you could probably be smarter about it and waste less space/cardboard since you've probably got lots of each size of item.

I'm no expert but my understanding is that unfortunately there is some correlation between transmissibility and severity of disease, because one of the ways it can become more transmissible is to reproduce in your cells faster so that you shed more virus particles. This also means it takes over quicker and your immune system has less time to respond before it does lots of damage.

Whether that outweighs the randomness you describe I don't know. Maybe nobody knows for this virus?