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vermooten

244 karma · joined December 29, 2013

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vermooten··on Woman stranded in Spain after UK's eVisa system mistakes her for twin sister
Edge case that needs fixing. Move on.
vermooten··on How to read more books
I've read 31 novels since January, far more than I'd read in the last 30 years.

Easy: I read 50 pages every night when I go to bed, instead of screens.

I started with short novels, 150 pages or fewer (chatgpt gave me a reading list).

It quickly became a habit, and it's lovely.

vermooten··on Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi
HS2 Phase 1 as a whole required 8,276 public-body consents, but those were not 8,000 permits for the bat structure.
vermooten··on I program on the subway
Sounds like a 1-way ticket to burnout.
vermooten··on A lumberjack created more than 200 sculptures in Wisconsin's Northwoods
Nature isn't good enough, so he had to vandalise it.
vermooten··on The Newark airport crisis
It would have been easier and cheaper to raise the salaries of the Long Island employees.
vermooten··on Can you lose your native tongue? (2024)
“Parents were discouraged from teaching their children languages other than English, even if they expressed themselves best in that other language.“ Yes my Spanish-speaking father and English-speaking mother decided, when I was growing up in USA in the 60s, not to speak Spanish to me, in case it fucked my learning and development up. Shame, it would have been cool.
vermooten··on Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people's hearing problems?
Yes! I love my Airpods Max more than any other headphone ever but I wear them all the time and mt tinnitus is crazy. Should stop wearing them, at least reduce.
vermooten··on Subway calls 'emergency' meeting with franchisees as sales plummet
If they'd use bread instead of 'bread' I'd eat there all the time.
vermooten··on My curated list of indie blogs
How about 'My list of indie blogs' instead?
vermooten··on What if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?
I've always thought of dreaming as analogous to a flight simulator, as the article suggests.
vermooten··on The story of titanium
Come back, zinc! Come back!
vermooten··on Habits of great software engineers
Management-speak or not, it's correct. Software development is much more social than it was when I started. Pairing and mobbing get better results faster.
vermooten··on How was the size of Earth first measured? (2015)
Thank you! I've wondered that, can't wait to see what he answer is.
vermooten··on I don’t want to sign up for your newsletter (2018)
Hard-to-read grey fine type also acts against user goals. Is it still 2010?
vermooten··on How to Stop Ruminating
not much use when your ruminating self knows the tricks you're playing on it
vermooten··on I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney
I remember the 90s when manual typesetting and page layout was replaced with Quark Xpress, and when analogue phot retouching was replaced with Photoshop. Lots of highly skilled people suddenly out of work - the ones who didn't retrain to use the new tech. Wasn't overnight but felt like a revolution. Then of course magazine publishing lost out to the internet.

I would love to spend my days making stained glass windows, or as a dry stone-wall builder in the Yorkshire Dales. TS, there's no way to make a living in either.

vermooten··on Ask HN: Tools to learn music theory?
Tenuto app is my favourite for this. I'm also a new adult learner.
vermooten··on Britain’s economic record since 2007 ranks near the bottom among peer countries
St Jeremy led an institutionally anti-semitic Labour Party, clearly documented by the EHRC. Reading that will answer your question.
vermooten··on My daughter's school took over my personal Microsoft account
Whenever my MS account did stupid stiff like this, I'd just create a new one. I ended up with 4 before moving my life outside of the MS ecosystem.
vermooten··on Explore Wikipedia's New Look
Magnify to 150% and it's readable again.
vermooten··on 27 years ago, Hoover offered free international flights with any £100 purchase
Not quite true, but I can see why you'd think that. I worked for a reputable SP company in Oxfordshire, legal were all over everything we did. The Hoover debacle did wonders for our business, all of a sudden clients wanted protection from the scammers.

But ok I then went to one in London and some directors were sent to prison for fraud. So OP yes you have a point. It was a dodgy world.

vermooten··on Less is more agile
Waterfall / no process -> Scrum -> Kanban -> XP

Problem I found with this journey is that Scrum concepts pollute Kanban and beyond. We now just do what works, as little process as works for us - and we implicitly review the process with each commit.

vermooten··on Could long Covid be linked to herpes viruses? Early data offer a hint
Do you have any data to back this opinion up?
vermooten··on Workers quitting over return-to-office policies
I'm still genuinely uncertain why companies are so desperate to get staff into the office.

'Business people' like HR, sales, marketing LOVE being together in person; Engineers somewhat less so. Given that companies tend to be run by 'business people' then yeah I think I just answered my own question.

vermooten··on To learn more quickly, brain cells break their DNA (2021)
Daily Mail headline: "Thinking gives you cancer!"
vermooten··on Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
Don’t forget how much streaming services struggle with classical music meta data.
vermooten··on Map of Surnames in Europe
zzzzzzz
vermooten··on Conway's Law
A great read.
vermooten··on The Problem of Marital Loneliness
When I saw that HBO were doing a remake I wondered: who do they think they are that they can do better than Bergman?
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