https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23638823/microsoft-ethics-society-team-responsible-ai-layoffs

It’s always one of the first things to get cut when companies try to save money.

Except that England’s national dish is chicken tikka masala.

You can use DNS based adblock, but this tends to break on public WiFi networks.

One other option is to use brave as a web browser. It’s a chrome derivative with a built in adblock. Most browser extensions don’t work on iOS so there’s not many options.

Teams defaults are pure scummery.

No, don’t alert me on a Sunday night with notifications that I might have missed over the last two days.

That would be fine, if people weren’t using LLMs to write code, or to do school work,

But they are. So it’s important to write these articles that say “if you keep using a chainsaw to drive nails, here are the limitations you need to be aware of.”

It’s a consequence of parliamentary sovereignty.

Parliament can always dissolve itself and call an election, and it’s an important mechanism for getting rid of the government.

The problem is that the prime minister also has a majority in parliament, and that means he can make parliament dissolve itself when he likes.

This was actually a problem for Johnson. Initially, he didn’t have enough of a majority and it wasn’t clear he could call an election without Corbyn’s support.

Good luck suing a cop. The courts have consistently ruled that they can basically do what they like and you can’t sue them for shit.

https://www.ncsl.org/civil-and-criminal-justice/qualified-immunity

The title of the actual paper includes “Occupational Cognitive Demand” which is a lot more on point.

Doesn’t need to be fun, doesn’t need to be interesting, just needs to be hard.

Accountancy has a fairly high cognitive demand, but calling it stimulating is a stretch.

They actually hired an Australian to copy it for them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Levido

Yeah, debugging tests is an important part of test driven development.

You also have to be careful. Some tests are for me to debug my code and aren’t part of the ‘contract’.

But on the other hand, it’s really nice. If I spend a couple of hours debugging actual code and come out of the process with internal tests, the next time it breaks, the new tests make it much easier to identify what broke. Previously, that would have been almost wasted effort, you fix it and just hope it never breaks again.

“Write an essay on the rise of ai and fact check it.”

“Write a verifiable proof of the four colour problem”

“If p=np write a python program demonstrating this, else give me a high-level explanation why it is not true.”

How fucked up would it be if your actual town square was owned by a private company?

You have just invented malls. Hugely damaging to society, but they come with convenient parking and air con.

I quite like the tag line X, the abandoned shopping mall of the internet.

I think it describes it well.

Honestly, most of what Cambridge analytica did was blackmail, illegal spending, and collusion between campaigns that were legally required to be separate.

Much of the data processing/ml was intended as a smoke screen to distract from the big stuff that was known to work and consequently legislated against. The problem is that they were so incompetent that the distraction technique was also illegal.

Maybe the machine learning also worked, but it’s really not clear.

There’s a particular joy to going all the way into the office so you can sit in remote meetings all day. Really makes you feel like your time is valued.

Same. I would take it now, so I could go back to being 20, but this time I would not fuck up all my joints because I know I’m not actually invulnerable.

That’s really not enough.

Review stops people from polluting your repo with bad code and lets you give feedback.

It doesn’t stop people from wasting time writing unfixably bad code that just needs to be thrown out.

Now of course what you can do is give people very small coding tasks and regularly review them before getting it into a shape where it can go in the main repo. But this is just micromanagement via git.

I don’t think you can buy the book. It was 20 volumes in 1989, and they’ve been working on an ongoing update since then. There’s no plans to physically print a third edition.

But yeah, it’s a serious scholarly resource, and they do put out free small dictionaries as well.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/

This will be great for Emacs.

Finally I can have dedicated control, meta, super, and hyper buttons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

Depends. It’s more fiddly than windows to get set up but there’s a lot more options for power management.

I’ve got a tiny 7 inch laptop and I genuinely can’t figure out how to stop the fan from constantly running under windows. On Linux, switchable underclocking and powertop make it last much longer.

This is assuming you’ve not got an Nvidia GPU in your laptop, I haven’t tried in years but toggling the GPU was always difficult.

Yeah, I think the reason threads is attaching itself to the fediverse is precisely because meta don’t see it as a threat.

It’s an easy way to appear open to the regulators without actually helping any competitors.