frobozz

One thing would be not violating the Open Source Definition by forbidding use by under 13s.

> I would really, really love to have been in that sales pitch meeting.

Me too. I could do with getting a bit of extra cash handed to me in a brown envelope.

Yes! Several months of doing most of the higher grade work to prove yourself worthy of promotion.

Then you actually get the promotion (normally with the smallest possible payrise). They still won't let you let go of all your old duties while piling new ones on you. And they keep hounding you to aim for the next promotion, which is increasingly unavailable.

This looks like a long-winded version of those boomer memes about how they used to return glass bottles to the shop and buy groceries on the high street, mocking the supposedly eco-aware younger generation who buy single-use plastics and drive to an out-of-town supermarket.

By the time GenX grew up, the boomers in charge had stopped selling drinks in refundable glass bottles and had shut down all the high street grocers etc.

It was GenX and Xennials who did this to the web and then started blaming younger folk for not having their own hand-coded Geocities page on a webring.

Same for me, but I do think it is a good introduction.

It could just be my bias, but everyone I have met who did some Prolog after Java and C said they found Prolog difficult.

None of my fellow Prolog-first cohort seemed to have any problems with other languages.

Can you explain your counterexample? Perhaps with with some rates? I don't understand it.

I can't see how it is would be financially beneficial to accelerate the payment of the smaller/cheaper loans over the biggest/costliest one.

I'll concede that paying back your friend sooner than they expect might have a goodwill benefit, but not a monetary one. Even then, I'm not sure how much, over just giving it to them when they asked.

Yes, but you'd pay the highest interest one off even faster if you direct all your spare cash to it, then you can pay off the smaller/lower loans really, really quickly by directing the money for that monthly payment to them.

Snowballing has no money or speed benefit. The only reason to do it is the psychological "Yay! I've paid it off" boost.

Yes, the cut canals are one way at a time, with passing in the Great Bitter Lake.

For some of the canal north of the lake, there are two channels and ships go both ways, one in each channel: https://zoom.earth/#view=30.510825,32.344757,16z/layers=esri

In most sports, when a goal is scored, the game stops for some kind of reset.

Surely a game with more goals is therefore more boring, because it has more time with everyone dawdling back to the centre line and the referee holding the ball/puck/whatever.

The trouble is, even people who would challenge things don't want to be forced to do so unnecessarily.

I'm happy to speak up if something isn't right, but if that happens too often, I'll speak up using my feet.

If an ad or interview gives me a vibe that most of my job is going to involve telling people they are wrong, I'll choose a different job.

Also, if it can spot an incapacitated person amongst all the other swimmers, then it must be able to recognise when people are not incapacitated, otherwise it would just be going around randomly grabbing swimmers.

Yes, and that's the other thing.

To reliably distinguish between drowning and breath-holding, you need to wait (or have more context)

This device (which has to come out through a secret underwater hatch and propel itself amongst people) cannot be faster than a lifeguard who has spotted the questionable situation and put themselves close to it before making a decision.

For decades, all sorts of devices with very simple processors have been able to detect when the force against an actuator exceeds a certain amount and reverses or disengages it.

> Does it really try to strap the person to a hospital bed, underwater...?

It looks like it folds two barriers against the sides of casualty to pinch them in place. I imagine that if you are not completely incapacitated, you can dodge or wriggle out of it. I would also guess that, given that it's supposed to be clever enough to spot an incapacitated casualty to rescue, it might be clever enough to stop trying to rescue you if you attempt to swim away.

> Won't that drown the person if the robot is too slow or malfunctions?

WRT rescuing unconscious casualties from dangerous situations, you start with the assumption that they will die if you do nothing, and could already be dead. With that in mind, who cares if this robot drowns someone halfway to the surface who would otherwise have drowned at the bottom?

> So the reasoning is: job training for lifeguards is not feasible (why?), so we should develop super expensive robots that local pools can't afford.

I agree with you on this point. I think there is something in having a system that can help spot swimmers in danger, but then leave the job of rescuing to actual lifeguards.

The problem of not having enough lifeguards is not that they cannot perform rescues, but that they cannot continuously observe the entire area and spot people in need of help. Apart from spinal injuries, a single lifeguard is perfectly capable of performing a rescue in most pools or swimming ponds (in much larger or more complex areas, like water parks or the sea, it might be harder to get to a distant casualty from any given station).

Another thing is that lifeguards prevent the situation that this robot is designed to rescue people from. You spot a swimmer in trouble, and toss them a float or a line. You spot a dangerous situation arising, and you take action to prevent it. You don't wait for them to sink to the bottom and pass out.

That book was bunk.

By the time Edison made a light bulb, incandescent light had been initially demonstrated by Davy 70 years beforehand, and shown to practical by Lindsay 35 years after that.

Jobard, de la Rue, and de Moleyns had made experimental light bulbs 40 years beforehand, Lodygin had held a patent for 5 years.

Most crucially, Swan's lightbulbs had been lighting Mosley Street for six months. Carbon arc lights (also shown by Davy early in the 1800s) having been in commercial use for some time before that.

The main invention that made light bulbs practically viable was the improved vacuum pumps of the 1870s, which none of these people lay claim to. This is what led to the rapid development of incandescent light in the 1880s.

Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.

As if you can drive faster than 15mph in London without smashing into the car in front.

This is one of those situations where the overlap between colloquial and technical usage can cause confusion when one leaks into the other.

In colloquial usage, asymptomatic encompasses presymptomatic. In technical usage, they are different.

If you develop symptoms, then when you were a carrier before then, you were presymptomatic, rather than asymptomatic.

Yes! I rarely see others mention this. It's always just "licence to call yourself an X." As though the job title itself is something important.

The other thing to note is that certain jobs can be easily offshored. If you can't get a local (data scientist/software engineer/ journalist) to do what you want, you can just pay a foreigner to do it. The same is not true of doctors and lawyers, due to the extra privileges you point out.

I don't mean physiognomy, though such things periodically arise and are roundly and rightly ridiculed.

I mean "Our computer says we have footage of you robbing a supermarket" (higher error rates)

Another way for issues to arise (your easily weaponised point, above) is if you need a separate system for recognising people from certain groups. If it's all the same system, it's harder to argue that you are acting in good faith when you only follow up on matches on marginalised groups.

If face detection defines them as not a person, then things that rely on there being a person in the field of vision will not work for them. (Like the racist soap dispenser that went viral a few years ago)

If face recognition makes the old racist "they all look the same to me" declaration, then peaceful protestors get arrested for looking like criminals.

Yes. Even then, a lot of the tech jobs remain in the US.

Look at the job listings for US tech company EMEA HQs. It's almost all sales and legal. Occasionally a pre-sales Engineer position comes up.

Meanwhile, they are hiring dozens of Devs at their US HQ.

An analogy I like is that they know you called a suicide hotline from a tall bridge in the middle of the night, but they don't know what you discussed.

What's the visualization? I'm always curious about how other clusterheads cope.

I "push my consciousness" into the pain-free side, essentially detaching the painful side of my head and picturing it not being a part of me, just a floating irritant nearby.

It works pretty well for the easy ones, and helps a little for the bad ones if I catch it while I can still concentrate.

> Investors did work for wages (or their ancestors did) and then instead of consuming they spent it on others in exchange for a pension.

That is pretty much the definition of the nobility.

Someone many generations ago did something perceived as meritorious by the monarch and was awarded a title and some land. To get to the position where they could have done something to earn them a peerage, their ancestors would have worked a job for payment, and so on.

The only difference is the timescale. The 16th Duke of Hamilton is 400 years from someone who had to work for a living. A highly privileged modern investor whose only job was a sinecure at Daddy's company might have parents or grandparents who worked an upper-middle class job.

> The modern day equivalent to nobility would be government employees

That is a ridiculous snark. Government employees work for a wage, just as commercial and third sector employees do. If they stop working, they end up destitute same as any other employee. You do realise that Ron Swanson is a fictional character, don't you?

I wrote my MSc in markdown with Pandoc. Loved it.

You are confusing positive and negative claims.

1) Vikings were definitely at point X.

2) Vikings did not get further than point X.

Yes, due to the likelihood of undiscovered evidence, you can assume that things happened for which we don't have concrete evidence. You just can't determine exactly what those things are, so there isn't really anything interesting you can say about it.

I don't think archaeologists ever make claims like "People X never reached Z" when Z is an easy 50KM journey from Y, where People X were known to have been, without pretty convincing evidence to the contrary (e.g. a mass grave containing the entire estimated population, showing they all died pretty much on arrival)

Your claim that archaeologists don't think that way is bogus. How do you think they decide where to look for new evidence? A lot of archaeology may be driven by building works needing to prove they aren't going to destroy a Roman villa, but plenty is still driven by academics thinking that a particular meadow has a good chance of containing artefacts.

Pretty much all security is relative.

However, it's not just about the better lock, but the apparent value of what can be stolen.

You can have the best lock in the park, but if you have a brand new top-of-the-market ebike and all the other bikes are rusty shitheaps with mismatched pedals and tape hanging off the handlebars, yours is still going to be a prime target.

The cost of filling one more seat in a massive lecture theatre is marginal. At university, I audited a number of courses with no impact on staff or students.

The cost of marking one more essay and giving comprehensive feedback is more significant, even if there is a comprehensive rubric to hand it off to an assistant.

The cost of running one more seminar/tutorial group for every 10 extra students is significant. A degree based on lectures alone, without giving all students the opportunity to ask questions, is less valuable.

The cost of courses that involve more consumables (chemistry, biology) or more face-to-face interaction (languages) is significant per student.

Economies of scale might work in the first term, where the the purpose is to get everyone up to a certain common (and quite low) level. Someone with only a first degree in the subject might be capable of teaching that. In later years, you can't all be taught by a world-class expert in the field.

The cost of physically expanding a university is significant. It can also be very difficult. I once had a term when I had a 15-20 minute walk between adjacent classes, because the nearest place the university could expand into was an old school about a mile away.

Then we need you to sign off on it again after we change it next week, and the week after that.