noodlesUK

I think when talking about university research output it's pretty clear that the objective of university research is to produce output that is much earlier in the stack of productisation than something that comes out of a corporate entity. The vast majority of university research probably won't impact people on a day-to-day basis the way that running a product-led company will, but that's not to say it isn't valuable.

Take mRNA vaccines for instance - the initial research began in university environments in the 80s, and it continued to be researched in universities (including in Europe) through the 00s until Moderna and BioNTech were started in the late 00s. All the exploratory work that led to the covid vaccine being possible was driven through universities up to the point where it became corporate. If that research hadn't been done, there would have been nothing to start a company about.

It's the same in computing - The modern wave of LLMs was set off by Attention is All you Need, sure, but the building blocks all came from academia. NNs have been an academic topic since the 80s and 90s.

I suspect that in 2050, there will be plenty of stuff being built on the foundations of work conducted in academia in the 00s and 10s.

I wouldn't expect to see that many groundbreaking innovations being useful in day-to-day life coming out of contemporary university research. You have to wait several decades to see the fruits of the labour.

I think one of the core observations in this article is that the ATI is essentially just a funding programme for existing university research organisations.

At least in places like Rutherford Appleton you have a distinct institutional identity and culture, in a place where it feels like stuff is going on (Harwell campus is a pretty cool place for both private and public research). There's an organisation that people work for with distinct aims and objectives. I don't really see how the ATI is much more than a funding brand under EPSRC.

If you set up a research institute, you can do good research in specific focus areas and take credit for it. If you just have a funding body, you're going to feel like a funding body, and very little is going to be attributable to your new institute.

I think the UK could do with setting up a few more proper national labs like the US has with LLNL, Oak Ridge and friends. That's not to say we don't have any, but if we're going to set up an institute, that's the model we should follow.

I don't think this is necessarily true in all countries. Here in the UK I see a lot of people using Xero & Sage, and micro businesses using Freeagent.

I think it’s not just the security of the platform itself either that’s measurably worse - it’s also way easier to end up with insane security configurations with the hellscape that is Entra. It all just feels like it’s held together with duct tape.

The deep integration with AD (now Entra) was the strongest selling point for Azure, but it’s also by far the biggest issue with the platform IMO.

There’s also just no consistency in the platform - the CLI for instance has totally different flags and names depending on which sub command you’re using. It’s like this everywhere in Azure.

Oh, I completely agree for IoT devices. When I was first reading the article I feared that the issue was something burned into the bluetooth radio binary blob, or something at the hardware level that would not have mattered whether you were running esphome or not. Upon a little deeper inspection, it doesn't sound like that's the case.

EDIT: My Spanish isn't very good, but reading the slides it doesn't sound like the vulnerability is likely to be remotely exploitable, it sounds like it's only an issue if the chip is in HCI mode and being used as a bluetooth adapter. If someone who speaks Spanish could confirm I would be very appreciative.

I totally get it - I haven't made many friends since covid.

> Nobody wants to get my loser failure filth on them, they are all afraid they will be associated with me and nobody wants that. It's why my wife left me.

This kind of language does not help. If you talk about yourself this way, even hyperbolically, you will feel this way about yourself.

> I don't know how to tell people that I have nobody else without sounding pathetic.

You don't need to - perhaps you have friends from university (if you went) or school. If you don't have any friends or colleagues that you have even a passing acquaintance with, you could try meetup (especially in the US, it's a good platform). Just go see some people. If you're worried about sounding pathetic, it might be easier to do a group activity, so you're less likely to get into a deep emotional conversation. If you can't find a group activity, find a local charity that's doing a litter pick or something similar. You could also sign up for a class of some kind at a local community college or arts centre. I hear pottery can be very therapeutic.

EDIT: I've read some of your other comments about how hard it is to build meaningful friendships. It is hard. It can shake your sense of belonging to the core when you discover that people you thought were going to be friends for life end up not being around anymore.

However, not all friendships need to have a deep meaningful connection. It can be nice to just see people on a semi-frequent basis to do an activity together. It's certainly a good start.

It sounds like the job is only one part of the crisis you're facing. I echo the other commenters in suggesting professional help - depending on the country you're in this could be free or provided by your health insurance.

The weekend is almost here - try to make a plan with a friend (even if you haven't seen them in years), or go do something you enjoy like going to the beach or a local park. It won't fix things, but it can be a brief respite from the grind.

In terms of the job, I would keep going but start phoning it in. "Quiet quitting" is a real thing, and it will give you the space to look for a new job. If it's super intolerable, see if you can reduce your expenses significantly and just GTFO. I don't know if you have alimony, if so that might be harder. Reach out to your friends (even distant ones) and professional network - that's where all the good jobs are.

I tried the demo, but I decided to not say anything. It desperately tried to make me talk. The entire experience was bizarre and unsettling - another commenter described it as a northern Californian startup CEO’s level of strange fake enthusiasm. As a Brit, I found the level of synthetic bubbliness in the voice extremely off-putting. I’d hate to live in a world where that was the way everyone behaved in real life.

The entire thing felt like it was a hyper advanced engagement hack. Not there to achieve anything (even my enjoyment), just something to keep my attention locked on my device.

AI products in the future should have a clear objective for me as a user - what can they help me do? Some simulacrum of a person that is just there to talk to me at length is probably going to be a net negative on society. As a tech demo, this makes me afraid for the future.

To any who are interested, many other countries provide high quality weather data products (paid and free), and so does ECMWF at the European (not just EU) level. ECMWF’s data is available directly from them or via various member countries national agencies. My knowledge is Eurocentric but I suspect that China, Japan and others also have useful datasets.

I don’t work in the field, but I have visited ECMWF and they’re the real deal.

https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data

https://www.met.no/en/free-meteorological-data/Data-and-prod...

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data

This seems especially relevant given the massive outage that Barclays, another major UK bank just suffered. Barclays was down for around two days with customers unable to spend money at all.

I suppose had they implemented a similar system, they would have degraded into a minimum viable banking system rather than the total outage that impacted so many brits.

I think this illustrates an issue in common law systems in general. Contrary to what we’re taught in school about how actions are generally legal by default, and only illegal if a law has been passed to prohibit them, in reality, actions exist in a superposition of legal and illegal until someone challenges that position and a court finds out (subject to any appeals). You can only evaluate in practice whether something is legal based on copying others in similar situations. The further you get from the known outcomes the fuzzier this all becomes.

This tends to be something people encounter a lot around tax, complex business structures, and various international dealings where you’re more likely to end up in an edge case that hasn’t been well explored.

I think for the development story, we had vagrant in the 2010s which IMO provided a much better experience for developers to set up reproducible dev environments.

Docker excels at bundling up all the dependencies of a piece of software for deployment.

Devcontainers definitely work these days, but I miss vagrant.

I think this article completely misses the point. “Just be better” is only useful advice to the extent that you hear “don’t ship things that you know to suck”, which, let’s face it, many of us probably have at one time or another.

In order to really prevent bugs, you need actual engineering.

This means understanding the constraints on a system, where bugs are likely to occur (perhaps not even in code your company writes - your OS can have bugs too!).

Shipping stuff that you subjectively feel is high quality is a good start, and it’s enough for a lot of industries, but it doesn’t mean “bug free”.

> The ecosystem of Java is so huge. Most people who use Java barely have any idea what the rest of the software industry is doing.

I think herein lies the problem. The Java enterprise software (usually spring) world and the everything else under the sun world are very separate. Java devs usually have minimal visibility of other ecosystems and their patterns, and are very reliant on extremely mature (and heavy) tooling that other languages don't tend to use. Other devs hate how bloated the Java ecosystem feels, and that they can't use any of their usual tools. Neither tends to understand that their approach isn't the only way.

I’m concerned that this article is AI SEO slop. It doesn’t say much about its central thesis, but just “delves” into the background of wifi for several hundred words.

OWE, which it mentions at the end is genuinely useful, reducing the drawbacks open networks had in the past.

Yes, they’ve said that, but gate agents at airports are the people who get to make decisions about boarding and expired documents will definitely freak them out. The issue isn’t really at border control, where there’s direct access to the databases anyway, it’s at the various stages of delegated border enforcement (boarding a plane, right to rent etc) where this will suck.

You might be able to bully them into accepting them because it’s in Timatic but there will be British residents who are blocked at least temporarily because of this.

Yes, and so do NZ and Australia. I actually think the biggest influencer is probably EITAS, which is the same thing for the Schengen area (yet to come into force).

It’s a part of a wider trend going forward. I will say the UK/EU systems are fairly unique in that they aren’t excluding each other. Canadians don’t need ESTAs nor do Americans need Canadian ETAs

If you have records of your own and pointers to other organizations contemporaneous records, you may have an opportunity to appeal if your DB record is lost.

The home office rather notoriously destroyed/never kept its own records of arrivals of commonwealth citizens, which was one of the steps leading to the Windrush scandal.

Many older records only exist in paper form, and often the receipts are good enough. This is especially true when you’re dealing with 3rd party governments. A foreign government is going to put a lot more stock (rightly or wrongly) on a birth certificate that is printed on fancy paper covered in security features than it is to a printout of an email.

With the current system, the passport chip can be validated offline if you have the CAs cached. If your computer is completely dead, you can look at the documents under a UV light and verify authenticity the old fashioned way. You could definitely design something that was verifiable offline using phones, but you’d be harder pressed to have it verifiable without any tech whatsoever.

I completely agree. There are a variety of reasons why a person might be digitally excluded.

Governments need to make sure that people can access the services that they’re entitled to through a wide variety of channels, including physically visiting an office if necessary.

Though I will say, at a practical level, you will find that it’s increasingly difficult for people with criminal records to travel internationally (due to entry requirements).

Yeah and they’re now rolling that out to everyone, not just EU citizens. This sucks the most for visa nationals because their passport isn’t good enough to get into the country. They need the server to be alive and their documents linked to even make it to the border, let alone to cross it.

Travel to the UK is going to be really chaotic from 1st Jan when all BRPs expire, and 8th Jan when US citizens and other non-EU nationals require ETAs.

I do agree that conceptually the government shouldn’t force you to buy things from private companies to exercise your rights.

However, you already have to buy a passport (often for a lot of money) in most countries, so pragmatically, I don’t know that it’s a hugely different thing to ask. However, there’s a big difference for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

Immigration tends to stretch human rights though. It costs >10k gbp in visa fees for a British citizen to return to the UK with a non-UK spouse from arrival to settlement. You also need to be earning a fair bit of money, and not have the British partner as a stay at home spouse. I would say that frustrates article 8 ECHR, but the government disagrees.

There are countless examples of similar issues re international travel and immigration. Smartphone ownership is simply one of many.

There are significant downsides to the digitalization of travel documents. The biggest one I can think of is ownership - the UK is moving to an entirely digital visa system and bringing in an ESTA style system called ETA for visa free countries. Unfortunately this means that residency cards for noncitizens are being phased out. This means that when the Home Office messes up and accidentally deletes your immigration status, or you are at an airport with no internet access, you have no evidence whatsoever of what status you hold. It also means you will no longer be in possession of any records that might be useful years in the future when the current database containing immigration records will likely have been replaced. It’s much easier to keep a piece of paper around for 30+ years than it is to make sure a digital record doesn’t rot in that time.

I feel strongly that any future digital travel credentials that are offered by governments should be able to operate entirely offline, and provide records that can be retained by the data subject. That means that revocation is harder, but IMO that’s a tradeoff that is worth making to avoid another Windrush scandal.

This has already become a pain when dealing with countries that don’t stamp passports, because when you need to apply for something that asks for your travel history over the past 10 years, you might not have any records anymore.

Yes, this is exactly what I was referring to.

I hear the argument that we need "harsher punishment" pretty much every time any kind of social problem gets discussed in media.

I don't think that the US lacks harsh punishment at all - compared to peer countries, prison conditions are terrible, the incarcerated population is massive, etc.

What I do agree with is that enforcement feels ineffective. Every time a criminal commits an offence, they are spinning a roulette wheel and hoping it doesn't land on "go to prison". Making sentences longer and conditions worse doesn't change the odds that a particular criminal will end up punished, it just means the downside is worse (and increases prison populations). Even when a criminal is caught, they're often bailed and able to abscond. The question should be how to increase the effectiveness of enforcement whilst preserving rights and protections against wrongful punishment.

The other side of the equation is looking at the carrot, not just the stick. If life sucks and people turn to criminality because they feel like they don't live in a society that gives a damn, you have to improve society so people have something to live for.

I think a lot of this weirdly needs to be "vibes based policy" as it were. People need to believe that justice will be done in order to feel secure, and to feel that if they were to commit a crime that they wouldn't get away with it. Objective reality doesn't control behaviour, peoples' beliefs do.

Yeah, this paywall is both hard and niche. The normal tricks don't work, and I'm not going to pay ~100USD per year for a single random substack...

You mentioned fencing: the electronic scoring system in fencing is pretty primitive, and has not at all replaced the need for a referee. It determines whether a hit has landed, and that’s about it. Unfortunately the sport still has a big problem with how subjective the refereeing is (particularly in sabre, which is my weapon), and that’s driving corruption at the highest levels [1].

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/world/europe/fencing-olym...

> Harvard eligibility is weird: we can hire hybrid near Cambridge, MA, or remote only if you live in the states of CA, CT, GA, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, RI, VA, VT and WA.

I’m so curious about this - why these states in particular?

I agree in general, however when you actually interact with these places you soon realise that the markets are completely skewed by corrupt practices of various kinds (not just cash bribery). I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Kenya or anywhere else in East Africa but it’s obvious how things work after just a short time there.

What’s described in the article is a situation where the government has introduced export licensing and endorsed a coop system that effectively cements organizations in their current positions in the market.

It’s not just governments that do this, commercial interests do too by acting as gatekeepers.

I am by no means “putting capitalism in my gunsights” here - however it’s clear that one of the issues is corrupt and poor regulation. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be regulation, but that it should aim at stimulating a fair market where honest traders are able to transact freely and dishonesty is punished.