jemmyw

Every job is the means to an end really. But if people are taking jobs at your employer and then feel unmotivated and are trying to get a new job elsewhere as soon as they can, doesn't that point to your employment situation being part of the problem? If it's so easy to get a job elsewhere for more favourable work and/or salary then are you just underpaying the market?

If you're in that 20% that actually has an interest in the work then you'll probably be fine.

I use one. I play guitar at my desk then type and I think that transfers a lot of dirt around. It does leave a mark on the screen. It's easy enough to clean off, but I do like how it drives some people bonkers.

From what I recall, doing handwritten CS exams in 2004, you aren't writing long essays. Long form was the course work. The exam was short form answers and it did not stress my writing hand. The one with most writing was the natural language exam (an extinct subject I should think) and I felt more time worry over having to flip back and forth between pages to cross reference than time spent writing.

That's not quite true. The original signals would let a train into the cross over block when no station lines were available because they didn't have that pass through. Depending on the layout it would either get stuck or end up heading in the wrong direction. Pre-signals could solve it but they weren't in the original.

For most signalling you want the path signals. They come in 2 flavours: both kinds only do the path in one direction, one kind is non-blocking to trains running the opposite way, the other kind is blocking, one way only.

This combo lets you set up an upline and downline with a terminal station: you have one way only signals on the line, and non-blocking signals on the station entrances pointing into the station, and a crossing between. Trains will get to the end of the upline, and wait to get a path to the end of the station. Then they'll turn around and wait to get a path to the downline.

> since charges were introduced

That's one way to look at it I suppose. The other is that these institutions had a tax break for a long time, not having to charge VAT like every other business. So I think quite a few people see it as a little unfair that the schools for rich kids get a tax break: and it is wealthier families that use private schools for the most part. It's not like these schools didn't know this rule change was coming.

I don't live in the UK these days, but one of the problems with the place is how complex the tax system is. All these little carve outs, sudden % cliffs, rebates and what have you. My first job was writing payroll software in the UK. You think that's the norm, then you move somewhere else and realize how much easier it is in many other countries. Then you get calls from people like "don't charge VAT on vegetables like in the UK": people don't understand the cost imposed administrating an ever more complex tax system.

The US has a volunteer army, if you don't want to do army things why be there in the first place?

I assumed they meant more than that because nodejs does the same since v22.18 and prior would do it with a flag. But they mentioned type stripping, which is really all transpiling of ts does for most code.

> Deno can run true TypeScript directly and not just strip types

What exactly do you mean by that? Because no js engine carries the ts types into the runtime as far as I know. Deno and nodejs both use v8 as the runtime. v8's internal types are not connected at all to the ts types regardless of the wrapper. The only difference might be when/if static type checking is performed.

Basically you have a tax by another name.

That's not necessarily a problem in and of itself, there's plenty of areas in life where we have essentially a tax by another name or system. The problem I see, looking from the outside from a country with a "universal" health system, is that the American way of doing it is extremely complex, which pushes up the price of everything. It's not that there are profits involved, it's that there are so many incentives, and then patches to prevent them, generating more in other places.

I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.

I didn't like cursor when it first came about but now I use it for my personal projects. The plan is good value for accessing different sota models occasionally for planning. Composer is actually really good, and fast.

I'm not sure if it's because my personal projects are small enough I know them inside out and my work project is huge, but I prefer terminal code agents for day work over ide integration.

Wine ruins the taste of coffee regardless of colour

I did read a story about a mother and teen influencer who was moving to the UK because of the ban. I wonder how they're feeling.

I think Germany has tax rules that make exits harder, whereas it's very easy in the UK to sell. If you have a more free market next to protective ones it makes sense that your IP is going to flow in that direction.

People who want to have kids have kids. There have been worse economic conditions, and far worse living conditions for folks in the not very distant past and they still had large families.

There has been a slow burn change to social pressure and autonomy. It seems like women don't want to have a large family, or some a family at all, if the choice is there. The rationale about why they put it off are unlikely to be worth much.

I think every economic remedy will fail. But it'll probably pick up again because I imagine social pressure will turn. All this noise people are making about it right now is the start. Personally I see that as a negative, we should be celebrating a downward population trend. We had so many years of warning about the effects of an ever larger population and now get hand wringing the moment that looks wrong.

I've tried rtx and lean-ctx and these tools seem to end up confusing the agent more than helping. Any saving is irrelevant if the agent decides to work around the tool and makes even more calls than it would otherwise.

I don't know about cost saving, but if it's keeping the context size down I've had a lot better results using subagents to keep a higher order conversation clean for longer.

I find it quite interesting the people on the thread mentioning face blindness or being bad at names and how it's embarrassing. I'm bad at names, really bad, but I've given up embarrassment about it. For one thing I can remember the names of some people and I've come to realize that being great at learning names is meaningless, I remember the names of people I really like... sorry others, we can't all click.

Secondly, put yourself in the opposite situation, do you really care if someone forgot your name? Does it even reflect how well you know someone? I had a friend at scouts when I was a kid and we were inseparable for a year. Never remembered his name. Didn't matter.

It was a bit more nuanced than that. Each politician was trying to leave in their own image and failing to get anything through parliament, until Boris Johnson got a majority party.

What would have been better is if the politicians who started the whole thing to settle party politics didn't bugger off the moment things didn't go their way and instead did a follow up referendum with the options for leaving. I don't necessarily think the eventual deal would have been different, but it would have stopped a lot of the bickering. And maybe have exposed what leaving meant to a greater number of people.

I don't live in the UK any more, but I do enjoy reading the stories along the lines of "I voted for brexit and now my business has gone to shit" of which there are a surprisingly large number. The whole "we didn't want them telling us what to do but didn't think they'd apply rules to us like we weren't in the EU" crowd.

I ran pre AI articles through pangram last week and it gave similar kind of numbers so I think it's pretty bad at distinguishing.

> The wallet was supposed to be the constraint. It turns out, as we will see, that the wallet is the constraint after all.

I can't tell if you made a mistake and meant the wallet isn't the constraint. These short burst sentences are really hard to read. Write "As we'll see, the constraint is x.". There's no need to split that, a single sentence conveys the whole point.

The article is full of similar wording, and that's why it feels choppy to read.

> The rest of this essay is about why that is harder than the press understands. And about a second problem hiding underneath it

I'd describe this as chain of thought writing. It's fine in casual conversation, with the words just tumbling out of our mouths, but it doesn't work in writing or speeches. There are so many ways the two concepts expressed there could be worded, combined or separated. "The press has an unfortunate tendency to use hyperbole and simple descriptions, but even with those stripped away there are deeper misconceptions..."

It's interesting that folks have honed in on AI as the problem. I'm my view the issue is that you haven't decided on your writing style, and as a non native speaker, you're unable to write a simple phrase and get AI to embellish it. Writing simple phrases is surprisingly difficult. Try making everything concise, with no repitition, and then adding style and flowery language afterwards.

Edit: sorry I may have read another person's comment about being a non native speaker. Writing concisely is something we can all work on.

I call bullshit on these social interactions having any meaningful impact on work. I've been in very social offices of a large company where we all lunched together, spent a lot of time at the coffee machine, went out together during and after work. Lots of fun. I didn't once see, hear or participate in cross team discoveries as a result that improved work. And in smaller orgs that were also social, the social part is extremely inefficient at moving work information.

My current remote employer does as good a job at building trust between employees with 6 monthly on-sites. But they also do things that expose cross team productivity issue: rotate people in leadership roles between all the different company meetings, so the CEO might be in the planning meeting this week. Get different people in different roles to join customer calls. Not just anecdote at the coffee machine, actually see what's happening across the company.

Sergei Beseda chief of the FSB "fifth service" was arrested after the start of the war. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/06/20/no-infighting-here is a story I found around it. I guess we can't be definite, but that journalist in Russia was citing sources saying that the service had essentially embezzled money and made up the data about their resources on the ground in Ukraine, and misrepresented polling data they had that Russia would be welcomed by the general population.

The people who owned the house previous to us put plastic weed mat all over the place. Looked fine until it wasn't, and then it was a huge job to remove it. Still haven't got it all out 10 years on.

I'm not sure about their vinegar claim - I buy a horticultural vinegar and I haven't noticed any bad effects on the soil where I've used it. The main issue is just that you have to spray more often.

The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.

This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.

So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.

But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.

> is considered the time when the UK overtook France as the world's number one superpower.

But unlikely a result of said battle, rather the instability of politics in France.

Us British oft think of Waterloo as a great victory, although the circumstances, participants and objectives were pretty nuanced. Wellington himself rejected congratulations and thought battle to have very high cost.

thanks. now I had a chance to log in I can see it's not really what I was looking for. As this was about zendesk replacements I thought this would be more of a support tool than a kb tool. Nothing wrong with a kb tool of course, but for my more lightweight stuff I'd use something like docusaurus.

The best results I'm seeing with my own work is mixing agent with my reading of the code and advising. I find it super hard to imagine losing the human view right now. Agents produce good code but they too often don't see bigger structures. They duplicate code and logic and then can't find all the copies if it needs updating, they still need a person to say "make a helper" or whatever.

your password reset doesn't work. I forgot to save my generated password during signup. The forgot password links sent by email just take you back to the login screen.