dave4420

MAD came extremely close to kicking off at least twice during the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis and that time a Soviet officer chose to ignore a malfunctioning early warning system). We can’t conclude from the fact that it didn’t kill us that it wasn’t a serious possibility.

Maybe in two or three decades we’ll discover that Russia was nearer to using nukes than we assume.

> leaders across the tech industry have admitted RTO mandates were partly intended to trim headcount

It seems like they’re getting the desired result, and not actually backfiring?

Just because we have a cognitive bias, it doesn’t mean that bias is leading us in the wrong direction on every topic. A stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. It just means we have to be more careful when assessing evidence.

Not really. Why now? Why not thirty years ago, or thirty years hence?

What if they switch the simulation off an hour after we notice?

What’s the difference between the free version and the pay version? Anyone know?

I’m pretty sure that law got extended to the rest of the UK a few years later.

(I agree with your overall point though.)

If people who want DST can just switch operating hours during summer instead of imposing DST on everyone else, then people who want year-round winter time can just switch operating hours during summer instead of imposing year-round winter time on everyone else.

It's a bogus argument either way.

Now I am in the blessed position of working from home again, I can choose when I get up. What I choose is this:

- for 26 weeks of the year (broadly from spring equinox to autumn equinox) I get up at 7am (which would be 6am in the absence of DST)

- for 6 weeks of the year (broadly centred on the winter solstice) I get up at 7:45am

- it takes 10 weeks for me to switch from getting up at 7am to getting up at 7:45am: I get up 2 minutes later every day for 5 weeks, and 1 minute later every day for another 5 weeks (and the clocks go back during this)

- it takes me 10 weeks to switch the other way: I get up 1 minute early every day for 5 weeks, then 2 minutes earlier every day for another 5 weeks

I do this to maximise the amount of daylight I get during the winter, without having to get up in the dark.

The point of me telling you all this is: the hard part is not getting up at a different time every day for 10 weeks. The hard part is synchronising with people who are essentially living in a different time zone.

This is why I don't do this when I work in an office, even just one day a week: I can change when I get up by a minute or two every day, but the trains won't change when they run by the same amount. That 9am meeting I need to be in the office for is still going to be at 9am, and the guy who controls when it starts won't agree to move it.

When I work in an office, I can't choose my timezone. Neither can you. Neither can anyone else.

(The dates I target aren't really the equinoxes/solstices. What I actually care about is the latest sunrise, which is a week and a half after the winter solstice, and shift everything accordingly.)

This will do nothing to prevent captcha solving sweatshops.

You will be dependent on AI to assess whether the human on camera is a real human, correct? Why won’t this become an arms race?

And yes, this would be enshittification.

The harm is not just half a second to delete an unwanted email.

There is also the cost of: seeing that I have an unread email, switching to my email app, and working out that it’s spam.

If this gets normalised, it will not be just one spam email. There will also be the time to classify and delete spam emails from everyone else who feels entitled to spam me.

There is also the cost of incorrectly deleting a non-spam email, because you’re on a hair trigger because of all the spam you get.

If I block every email that contains the word “unsubscribe”, then I will block most automated emails, whether I want to receive them or not. It is not viable as a way of stopping spam, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Close the lid slowly, while keeping your eyes in a place so you can still see the screen and the keyboard. The screen will turn off before the laptop is completely shut.

My understanding is that UK chocolate is different from Continental European chocolate in the amount of vegetable fat, so I wouldn’t take UK chocolate as being representative of Europe.

Well, when did you last go on the job market?

Big Tech made lots of redundancies after covid, and it’s taking a while for the glut of people on the market to find new jobs.

Also… this is a slow time of year anyway, isn’t it?

Yeah, but I wonder if maybe there’s a bug if you load the page bang on the hour. (It was bang on the hour when I first loaded it.)

The other two cities were out by an hour when London was out by an hour.

That’s confusing, having them all on the dial at the same angle makes look like they share the same time.

(I thought that toggle would show me a more boxy view, like a calendar.)

It gets the time wrong (says it’s 4pm in London but it’s 5pm). Edit: fixed now.

I’m not sure that it works with shading day and night like that — day length is different in different places. Maybe colour the city by day/night instead of the dial?

They care that it’s not got malware

That’s really what you took from it?

I thought it was clear that management was a large part of the problem.

There’s more overhead in calling a BIOS or OS routine than in calling one of your program’s subroutines, and your subroutine can take shortcuts, eg not updating display attributes if your program knows from context that the colours aren’t being updated.

8 bit computers generally weren’t interested in backwards compatibility, so this would not have sped up innovation

I find computers frequently do not do what I tell them to do:

“Hey Siri, set a timer for twenty minutes.”

“You can’t set a timer for a time of day. I’ve set an alarm for twenty hundred hours.”

Cats have been getting more popular than dogs over recent decades, have they not?

But dogs are considerably easier to train than cats.

I don’t think there is anything in your thesis.

It’s going to crash hard, isn’t it?

At some point you need to stop asking people on the internet and start asking a good copyright lawyer in your jurisdiction.

You have to follow the provenance.

If I own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, I can rip that, encode it to MP3/AAC/FLAC/whatever, copy it between my laptop/desktop/phone. That’s fine.

If you also own Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD, then… I cannot give you any of those files, because they have ultimately come from my CD, not from your CD. Even though the bits are identical. The provenance matters. You have the right to use the copies from your CD. You do not have the right to use the copies from my CD, even though the bits are the same.

No. Someone tried that 20-25 years ago (with CDs / music streaming, but the principle’s the same) and got sued into oblivion.

The principle being, you don’t have the right to watch the movie as such: you have the right to watch _your copy_ of the movie.

If someone gives you an unauthorised copy of something you have a legit copy of… it’s still unauthorised.

You go down to the bottom of the pay scale every time you change career. If that means you won’t be able to afford your current lifestyle, then unless you have a good reason for walking away from that career, that’s going to make you unhappy.

I would call that portability (data portability, phone number portability, email portability, social graph portability, whatever), and reserve “self hosting” to mean at least operating (in some sense) your own infrastructure.

Bravo!