jayceedenton

Sadly, visiting many parts of Ethiopia (including Dallol) is now not recommended unless essential, with large areas of the country having blanket 'Do not visit' advice due to violence and kidnapping. So think twice before booking, or recommending that others should go.

Ten years ago things were very different, with huge growth in tourism. The famine of the early 80s finally receding into history. In the 2020s, war and starvation have returned.

I thought the same thing. Of course it is downstream, but I think this is why the person mentioned it: because the journey is surprising.

They're saying that powerful tidal currents caused someone that entered the water at Dartford to end up in central London. A very unexpected result.

These 'top 10 tips' have put us in a strange place re reporting on suicide. The news becomes very cryptic with a lot that's unsaid.

It's before!

A couple I noticed (sorry, not at a computer right now):

> Only with decomposition will they begin to float.

> “There have been people that have jumped off Dartford Bridge and ended up in central London.

Completely unnecessary edits if you ask me.

So if you own a minority stake in anything, you can be told at any time that it has been reduced to a value of zero?

I guess this makes sense if they alternative was bankruptcy. If you can't inject money to help at a critical time, then I suppose it makes sense that the business you have a share of is basically worthless, and only the one that has more money is worth something.

Is this just routinely abused to disinherit a shareholder? Does this mean that being a shareholder is just about finding alliances you can use to screw others over, until you eventually get screwed yourself?

> There's a bit of a difference between a fire drill in an office building from the perspective of a regular office employee - and a firefighter

And which one of those do you think a tech support interview is closer to?

A fire drill where we don't pretend it's real but do take the drill seriously, is fine.

A fire drill where the Health & Safety guy insists that we pretend it's real - yes, most people find this cringe-inducing. For more on this, see Dwight Schrute.

This sounds like a good exercise, and kudos for thinking differently and at least trying to create a fairer and more useful process.

Two comments I'd make, that I hope you are already thinking about:

1. Role playing is a cringe-inducing experience for many (most?) adults. Please credit the interviewee with intelligence and don't try to actually role-play this. These are hypothetical scenarios, so discuss them as such.

2. As interviewers we are incredibly prone to seeing the things we know as obvious. When you devise an exercise, you can start to believe that everyone should easily see what you consider to be the 'right' way forward. In fact, seeing it may rely on your many years of experience in your company's culture, or your many years of experience with the interview exercise! So please, always remain skeptical of your assumptions about what is obvious, and avoid the trap of expecting candidates to see or follow the path that you think it's best. If any of your support scenarios are actually devious riddles that require one perfect question or leap, then whether candidates 'get it' or not will be random rather than indicative of better performance in-post.

Interesting that Google owns 'here', given the competing map business Here. Also that Amazon owns 'tunes'.

Many of these look like efforts to grab TLDs that would compete.

The domain business seems completely broken to me. Anything remotely useful has a squatter. I dream of a day when the entire system is obsolete.

How is that relevant?

The point of this entire exercise is to allow developers and consumers to leave the Apple app store if they like. A free choice. If people must stick with it because the alternative will lead to total financial ruin, then there is still no choice.

That can't be it. Their are hundreds of books on Amazon with far worse words in the title.

This is motte-and-bailey argumentation in my opinion.

The motte: SPAs are a good way to write highly complex applications in the browser, like Photoshop and Figma, to compete with desktop apps.

The bailey: SPAs are a good way to write most web applications.

If you attack the bailey, proponents retreat to the motte, which is hard to disagree with. With the motte successfully defended, proponents return to the bailey, beneficial for those enthusiastic about SPAs but much harder to defend.

The only way to tease this issue apart is to stick to specifics and avoid casting SPAs or MPAs as universally good or bad. Show me the use-case and we can decide which route is best.

If you work with people across multiple timezones, it's really useful to be able to open a screen with a set of clocks and glance at the time in every relevant timezone.

If I just have https://time.fyi/timezones bookmarked, it seems to remember the timezones that are important to me. Definitely convenient and far easier than doing multiple searches or using a phone's multiple clocks(?).

This site is useful enough and it's a nice execution.

I don't know anything about game engines, but always assumed that Godot was limited to simpler games. A lot of people seem to be pushing for Godot to replace Unity after the recent licensing shambles.

Is it really possible to build games line Cities Skylines, Subnautica, Rust, Outer Wilds, KSP, Ori... in Godot? Is this more of a long term ambition at this point, or is it possible for this kind of game to be built in Godot today?

Compost heaps don't include cooked food, so they aren't so attractive to flies, vermin, etc that can spread bacteria and disease.

Seems likely too that the collection of rags and bones (for their various uses) became more systematic, with rags and bones as side-products of industrialised processes, and therefore collecting a few rags and bones from individuals was no longer economically worthwhile. There are also other ways to make money now, that are more profitable to the individual than collecting bones worth a few pence per bag.

I suspect too that the rise of plastics mean that we have fewer day-to-day uses for bones, as handles for things, ornaments, etc. This leaves only the larger scale industrial uses, that get bone from other industrial food production processes.

The article mentions that Rag & Bone men moved to items that were still valuable e.g. scrap metal. They weren't chased out of neighborhoods.

This article seems to be trying to get in way too much, but I appreciate the initial sentiment.

The sad truth is, a smart team can do well with any architecture. A weak team will fail with any architecture. And maybe it's not really too sad.

I've seen organisations that really kick ass using microservices, and I've seen some microservices horrorshows too. The difference is having teams that are talented enough to get the benefits of any given technique and mitigate the drawbacks well. Those teams will execute any architecture to its maximum benefit.

Honestly, Java has a lot going for it. Amazing library ecosystem. Simple to learn, like Go but with essential quality-of-life improvements. Community without PLT sadists. Fast as all hell when written with care. Vast variety of jobs. Super-polished dev tooling.

I know there problems too (verbose, OOP and enterprise over-design, some horrible legacy systems) but Java is as strong as ever I think.

I'm interested, have you worked in Java before on a bad project and have scars, or have you built up a negative impression from afar?

You never considered the possibility he was just being honest?

The Plasticine?

I haven't bought vinyl in at least 15 years, but I'm pleased to see any physical media still maintaining a place in our lives. For me, it's not the nostalgia factor, or the atmosphere created by physical media, it's purely about the availability of music.

I have a huge collection of hip-hop vinyl and CDs. A significant proportion of my favourites are not available on Spotify. We're not talking about niche artists either - releases by plenty of well-known artists from the 90s and 2000s have some kind of rights issue that has kept them off streaming platforms. Just recently one of the best, and seminal 00s hip-hop albums has been lost from Spotify. Either all this fantastic music is gone and lost forever (because not on Spotify = does not exist), or we keep the CDs, vinyl, and ripped MP3 collections.

People think that Spotify is basically all of music. They see the music streaming services as having solved the 'unified catalogue' problem where the video streaming services are still balkanised. This is far from the truth though, so much is missing from Spotify. What I really miss is not the vinyl, it's the completeness of Napster in 2000.

The way this technique combines knowledge of mechanical and human optics is really fascinating.

Of course the calibration could also be done by recording an image to film and developing it, but it would be very slow and inconvenient. This technique is literally using the film-like qualities of the retina, which has just enough permanence to record the required pattern. Genius.

We have no idea why Max Howell was rejected. Only the interviewing team knows that. Maybe there were a variety of other problems. Maybe he came off as a complete asshole during interviews. Often not knowing something is fine during an interview, sometimes the point of the interview is to see if you can ask good questions and collaborate with the interviewers, take advice, without becoming defensive or combative.

Even if feedback was given after his interview, it's often the case that the real reasons are too sensitive or controversial to feed back.

You can't trust a candidate when they complain about why they were rejected. They really don't know.

Social media has taught us that some human group dynamics work at small scale but not at large scale. At large scale they have a much more sinister effect on society. One of these seems to be shame. Social media creates purity spirals, driven by fear of public shame. These spirals lead us to highly unethical places where not only are individual lives destroyed, but the progress of humanity is held back by kneejerk thinking, dogma and puritanism.

It's great that more and more people are starting to question whether social media is having an overall positive or negative affect on their own mental health. I'd like us to recognise, discuss, and combat, some of the wider problems that social media have brought, and how they're degrading to society as a whole.

> Hard Truth #6: Honesty can only hurt you

I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.

Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.

Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.

This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.

I will always remember this incident as the time when the UK general public were exposed, en masse, to Spring error messages.

The confusion caused by ordering a member of the general public not to request a bean from a bean factory in a destroy method implementation still makes me laugh, even now.

I'd love to see what images from the training set look most similar to a given generated face.

It's hard to decide whether these are impressive without knowing whether each face is just a real face with some minor adjustments.

Yes, I think my personal Overton window is around 3 years behind. It hasn't caught up with what we're now happy to call 'Far right'.

As far as I can tell, anything remotely right wing is now 'Far right' amongst a growing band of idiotic and insufferable liberal moralisers, so the moniker has effectively lost all meaning.

It's a lost cause us discussing this. I think if you describe how the UK has been governed in the last 10 years as 'far right', you're an idealogue and completely irrational. You're convinced I'm blissfully ignorant with an unintentionally warped political compass, or I'm a crypto right-winger. Oh well.

Far right? Come on now.

I'd say the #1 job you have as a parent is to make sure your child feels loved. This will create a sense of self worth, which is the best protection against bad decisions.

Some parents get so wrapped up in the steering part that they come down on their kids like a ton of bricks whenever they make a bad decision. These are often the times when your kid needs some understanding. You'd be amazed how much it means.

The business records a high number of sales (or high value sales) and hence dirty money can be used as clean incoming money.

The high staff numbers indicate either a) staff can accumulate and no-one is really bothered because the normal economics don't apply, or b) more staff implies a bigger business (to anyone looking at the books), which means more money can be laundered without raising suspicion. Efficiency just depends on how much cash you can imply this coffee shop makes, so more staff is a good thing.