fredley

This is surely the ultimate reminder that you, yes you - wise, knowledgeable and aware person - can get phished.

Bravo Troy for the exemplar response to the situation.

This time my Wheel of Fortune will hit, I know it!

Right now every UK company—regardless of what they actually do—is preparing to claim they're doing it with AI in order to qualify for Government grants. Or they should be!

Don't blame them, this is how products are marketed and sold now, e.g. AI washing machines, AI microwaves, AI features in cars, AI home lighting. Of course, most of these things don't have anything a software engineer or computer scientist might reasonably call AI in - they're just using sensor data and (conventional) algorithms, the same way they have for decades, but AI is the buzzword now.

This is absolutely insane. If they want to know where potholes are, throw up a basic site with a map for reporting, people are very motivated by issues on the roads. Or just ask Google to share Waze data - many potholes on major roads are tagged there. "Feeding AI through cameras" makes so little sense it's laughable, in the most depressing way.

As you've pointed out, I might let it slide if issues were actually being addressed, but they aren't. There are potholes that have been sitting in major city roads where I live for years, and nearly all the street markings around the whole city have completely eroded - junctions are becoming scarier as nobody knows what lane to be in. But I'm sure throwing money at AI can solve these problems.

I think if they did, they’d sell less of it. Consumers would associate the cheaper price with a poorer quality product (most are probably not directly aware of the amount of duty they’re paying or even that they are). The whole goal of non alcoholic beer is to make it feel as much as a real beer as possible. A big price disparity would create more of a difference.

Anecdotally, my local (UK) brewery’s most profitable beer is their alcohol free one. Partly this is because it’s priced the same as their alcoholic beers, but they pay no duty!

Lava flows?

It is outlawed, in the EU.

See also: The search for Autumn

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/02/autumn200702

I do this too. Making games for the Playdate has been the most enjoyable programming I've done in years.

RISC OS was the first graphical OS I ever used - my father ran Sibelius (the very first version I think) on an Acorn computer for engraving music. The three-button mouse approach is totally unique, I'm glad they explain it in this article!

I am a certified (British) Vegemite fiend, I go out of my way to stock up from the supermarkets that carry it (it's tragic to see a whole metre of shelving, top to bottom, taken up with differently packaged marmite and its derivatives like marmite peanut butter, but not a single tray of vegemite).

However, as a child I went through a phase of eating Bovril on toast. Looking forward with not a little apprehension to "Adventures in making Bovril".

An elite-like for Playdate.

Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.

The way you make an addictive anything:

* Random, variable rewards, with the possibility for really great rewards.

* In as many different ways as you can feasibly include.

* Optimise for 'near-misses', which have been shown to increase the addictive properties.

I'm a WFH worker. My company is fully remote. They are really great at managing departures and make sure everyone's aware and has a chance to say goodbye.

However I can't shake this feeling that the mindset that got us from treating servers like pets to treating them like cattle is creeping into workforce planning, and the WFH movement is making it that much easier.

Why plan capacity when you can scale resources up and down on-demand on a whim? With the emotional and morale implications of letting people go hugely reduced it becomes easier to think like that.

It's interesting that despite being a BBC article, the customers supposedly ditching them are nearly all US retailers, with only one very minor UK retailer mentioned. From my experience (in the UK) they tend to work well if staffed appropriately, and are easy and quick to deal with the vast majority of the time.

Not as big as King's Chapel over the road though!

Photopea is an embarrassment to GIMP. I had a very similar experience trying to use GIMP once. Using Photopea was seamless and easy and it hasn't lacked any feature I've wanted yet.

That's how I was rolling until I got a new (to me!) car to replace a very old banger. It has phone connectivity and it's great, but it basically requires voice control, which works quite well. This meant I had to re enable the Google app.

I want the feature, I just want to be in control of when and how that feature is used, not have it pushed hard in my face repeatedly.

On language, in Britain there was (and still is to an extent) a whole host of words that would mark you as 'non-U' (aspirant middle class) rather than 'U' (upper class).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

It is still evident today if you know or interact with any truly upper-class people. There are still variations in the names for some things which persist even now.

At times it can feel like being trapped in a nation of self-saboteurs.

A House Through Time, series 3, is one of the best portraits of Bristol I think I've ever seen. Astonishing television.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000jjn8/a-house-throu...

Bristolian here (nice to see others here too!)

Painting houses like this is quite common in Wales, near the sea particularly. See places like Tenby. Bristol being very close to Wales means it does have more cultural crossover than the rest of the UK, I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

I now wear a cheap (~£20) vintage mechanical watch. It tells the time. It does need charging every day or two, but charging only takes a few seconds and doesn't require an adapter or power socket.

In any other field of engineering, the engineers are all trained and qualified. In software 'engineering', not so much.

Have you read Sahil Lavingia's blog?

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

No micro transactions, offline single player. A luxury in 2023.