andy-pearce.com
I code for fun & profit, more the latter now I’m a father. Interested in anything but intolerance (but I’m not big on sports). Kind or not, at least be civil. All views my own. I occasionally blog about coding: http://www.andy-pearce.com/
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BUT it’s just that bit slower for people to notice and respond. That can make a big difference to the time taken to remediate, and that can be the difference between, say, a settlement payment being sent before or after the end of trading for the day, incurring stiff financial penalties. (3/3)
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This is particularly acute before it’s a full outage. Whoever is triaging issue tickets coming in (often automated alarms) might suddenly say “hey, did anyone start doing something in production about 10 minutes ago?” and we can catch things early. Again, this isn’t impossible over Slack etc. (2/3)
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Absolutely, but it’s a difference in overhead. When we have outages out of hours, Incident Management create a chat room and video call all parties join. What adds friction is the need to notify and invite people. In the office, it rapidly becomes clear if something is afoot without effort. (1/3)
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Let them eat cake. And have it too.
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Few object to diversity of thought. But diversity in decency, civility and respect is what makes X intolerable for me. Respectful disagreement is fine, throwing around juvenile insults is not. It happens everywhere, of course, but it’s a matter of degree—X is swamped with it.
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It shouldn’t be a surprise that people tend to prefer the company of those who don’t incessantly denigrate and verbally abuse at them. This is supposed to be fun! The vast majority of the population are not political activists, they just want to talk to people that don’t disdain them. (2/2)
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I’m always rather bemused with talk of “what’s good for the movement” etc. because I just don’t think that’s how most people think. The people who left X are, IMO, primarily just sick of how awful it is as a platform—ads, spam, endless abuse, AI slop, etc. It’s just not a pleasant experience. (1/2)
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Once they built the multi-storey bicycle park, things were a lot better. Of course, I can imagine a lot of cities don’t have the budget to spare for that, but at least using the double-decker bicycle racks shown below under some sort of cover keeps things organised and compact, IMO. (2/2)
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It’s probably fine there (and way better than nothing!) but it give me flashbacks to what Cambridge railway station parking used to be like. Lots of spaces in principle, but it was chaos—hardly ever any usable space and choked with bikes that had been locked up, and then just abandoned. (1/2)
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Now it’s much more like the US system in that regard—driving licenses are cards with your picture. You need to renew every 10 years with an updated picture. A couple of years ago, they passed a law saying you needed photo ID to vote, in a naked attempt at suppression of low income voters. (2/2)
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When I passed my test in the mid-90s, the driving license was just a sheet of paper—it didn’t have your photo on it, and there was no obligation to have it with you when driving (there still isn’t). This was kind of nice, as it meant fewer places could gratuitously demand photo ID. (1/2)
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Probably be fine… Until an insurance company gets involved!
US Driving regulation has always been rather more permissive than the UK (though I accept it varies by state!). You can’t drive a car on public roads until age 17, and the practical test is quite strict—the average pass rate is about 48%.
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If it’s helpful, here is the government FAQ on it. It’s meant to capture pedal assist bicycles, but exclude electric mopeds and motorbikes, which have always had different restrictions than bicycles.
www.gov.uk/electric-bik...
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His words say he’s “absolutely buzzin’”, but his dead eyes say, “please end my suffering, my soul is burning in exquisite agony”.
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Also, in London the limit on cars is 20mph in quite a few places, which isn’t much about the 15.5mph limiter on e-bikes. The limits are enforced by automated speed cameras in many places, which look up your number plate and just send you a fine (and penalty points) in the post.
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The UK approach is to regulate at point of sale—any bike capable of going over 25kph (15.5mph) without power assist cutting out is classed as a motorbike, and you need a license and plates. I assume it’s much easier to enforce against sellers than riders.
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The argument is that cars have license plates, so the offending driver can easily be identified and charged. The theory is that this acts as a deterrent. Although it’s easy to pick some holes in this argument, I also think there’s some validity—take plates off cars and people would drive WAY worse.
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It’s embarrassing to share a species with them for oh-so-many reasons, but their pathetic attempt at a feud is just another brick on that nightmare Jenga tower. I keep expecting a tweet like, “yeah? Yeah?! Well you… You… Well, your MUM is a DOUBLE poo-head, so THERE!!”
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I’ll forgive someone maybe 20 seconds of screen time, you never know if they might get an emergency message. But that’s long enough to decide between putting the phone away and leaving the auditorium. Any longer is inexcusable.
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Good god, that’s terrifying! Genuinely feels like the intro montage to a Terminator movie.
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The pandemic taught me to be ahead of the curve.
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Delon Musk.
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Yeah, C++ can seem like black magic until you’re familiar with most of its twelve billion features. That’s why people learn simplifications like “don’t call virtual methods in destructors”, and are then taken by surprise to find you actually can—you just have to be very familiar to do it safely.
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Might I suggest switching to netcat? For services that just expect a text protocol over plain TCP, it skips all the telnet handshaking which can confuse things.
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Be nice to the most experienced people. Not the people who think they know stuff, the people who are actually parachuted in to outages and struggling projects. Try to sit near them and listen in when they’re explaining stuff to others. The lack of this is one concern I have with full remote work.
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Don’t even get me started on critical processes that still use rcp and rexec…
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I still have a fondness for Telnet, and its chatty will/won’t/do/don’t style of negotiation. At university people used telnet to read their email, and we also had hubs that flood-forwarded everything, and students could have their own PCs in their rooms on the same subnet. What could go wrong? 🤔
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I can state from personal experience you would be terrified how much of the finance industry still uses FTP. This is why initiatives like DORA are so important.
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You need to review and understand that code in depth with ZERO trust initially that it’s even faintly useful. If you do that, and AI still saves you time, then go ahead. But I suspect any time saving will be obliterated and, more concerningly, people will skimp on the review step in practice. (2/2)
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As a moderate AI sceptic, I share these concerns. I’ve discussed this a little with people in my team who are advocating for adopting AI tools. What I’ve always said is that I’m not outright opposed, but people need to treat AI code the same as random AND UNVOTED snippets from Stack Overflow. (1/2)
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Which derived class is this a pointer to? Which constructor was used? Is the method overloaded? Is it even virtual? If not, which base class provides it? Which of its overloads will be chosen? Is it templated? Is there a specialisation for this type? Is this operator overloaded? Etc.
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I started my career in C. If you saw a function called, you knew you just had to find the one function with the same name linked into the same executable, and you could follow the execution. C++, conversely (and some might say perversely), delights in giving you ways to obfuscate this simple task.
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I’ve been a developer for 25 years and worked with C++ on and off for most of it, and I still find it a headache getting to grips with a new codebase. It’s aggressively context-dependent so it often feels that to understand one small piece of code, you need to understand the whole damn application.
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Ah, I remember the days when you never left home in the car without your astrolabe and your dowsing rods. I suppose kids today don’t learn about the old ley line navigation techniques?
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Tip: if she says she likes Perl, then before calling it all off, make sure she’s not talking about jewellery.
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Headline writers use this one weird old tip to get you to read the story…
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Actual e-bikes are great! In the UK this means top speed of 15.5 mph (25 kph), 250W max power, and pedals. The bikes generally causing a nuisance are legally electric motorbikes, which must be licensed and taxed. Stricter enforcement of the illegal varieties would help alleviate public concerns IMO.
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“What the hell awful take is this? What an idiot! How could they- Oh wait, that’s my post they’re quoting…”
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These muddy waters only benefit the extremists on all sides. Those who want to criticise Israel in good faith need to also be rigorous in condemning antisemitism attacks elsewhere in the world or those muddy waters will wash away any moral high ground they might have had. Just my view. (2/2)
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Yes, I agree. The best response is for everyone to try to be clear and unambiguous about whom they’re referring, and to neither use criticism of Israel to minimise the real problem of antisemitism, nor use antisemitism to minimise the war crimes conducted by the IDF at its government’s behest. (1/2)
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Who used those words? Lots of people who criticise Israel, that’s who. You made a general point “criticism of Israel is not antisemitism”, I responded in a general context. This thread was about antisemitism, until someone tried to make it about Israel, claiming antisemitism “wasn’t a problem”.
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Not necessarily, but as soon as you use a word like “Jews” instead of “government of Israel”, you’ve crossed the line into antisemitism. Secondly, the post implies “antisemitism isn’t a problem”, which is clearly false. The IDF’s war crimes being wrong doesn’t make hate crimes against Jews right.
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Seems very odd that copyright can be treated that way—quite unfairly one-sided, given how the payment is generally not up-front but the future value of royalties. I’d say artists should have a guaranteed right to have rights returned to them, perhaps if they chose to repay any advance they received.
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Interesting thread! As a layman, one thing puzzles me. I get that rights reversion clauses might be ignored as the contract is nullified—but isn’t the contract the only reason the publisher has those rights to begin with? So if nullified, surely there aren’t any rights left for creditors to take?
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Oh, that’s a shame! Surely they can reserve just a small slice of spectrum for local AM stations? The BBC and some commercial stations still broadcast on medium wave, I think, and AFAIK radio 4 still broadcasts on long wave.
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It amazed me when I could do this using a home electronics kit as a child. My parents never liked buying batteries, so I was always looking for the projects which didn’t require them. It was remarkable hearing that tiny signal, even from quite a short length of wire held up in the air as an antenna.