IneffablePigeon

I mean, both? I think the vast majority of people I knew (UK, in my 20s) knew that the main reason we were locked down was to minimize the risk of the NHS being so overrun it couldn't perform basic healthcare.

Of course personally we all just wanted to not be locked down any more but I don't actually think that many of us were staying in for our own sakes - we knew the long term risk to our own health if we were to catch it was fairly low. Very biased sample, of course.

Amazon basically does this, I think? As a consumer, I hate it, because I end up with a huge box and loads of useless paper whenever something isn't the right aspect ratio for one of the standard boxes.

Obviously for distribution of stock you could probably be smarter about it and waste less space/cardboard since you've probably got lots of each size of item.

I'm no expert but my understanding is that unfortunately there is some correlation between transmissibility and severity of disease, because one of the ways it can become more transmissible is to reproduce in your cells faster so that you shed more virus particles. This also means it takes over quicker and your immune system has less time to respond before it does lots of damage.

Whether that outweighs the randomness you describe I don't know. Maybe nobody knows for this virus?

Perhaps not for free, but it's not unheard of for labor unions to negotiate temporary lower wages in order to try to save the viability of a business that they want to keep working for.

Perhaps it, or some larger subset of companies, should? Co-operative style employee ownership is one way of achieving something along those lines.

Equity is always worth _something_ if the company doesn't fail. At some point investors want to make some money back, whether that's through a sale of some sort or just through dividends.

I do agree those are quite different beasts and you want to have an idea of the relative likelihoods if you're making a decision based on them.

We used Tutum before it was acquired by Docker and turned into Docker Cloud. Whilst it probably would never have scaled to our complexity needs indefinitely as we grew, it was very clear that as soon as it was purchased the product stopped going in a positive direction.

The only changes that they really rolled out were replacing the older, perfectly functional UI with something superficially shinier but much, much harder to use.

Not only was it just hard to see what you wanted to see once they'd halved the information density and got rid of any visual hierarchy, you had absolutely crazy things like a slider for the number of instances of a service that would instantly apply with no confirmation and, even crazier, responded to the scroll wheel. We once doubled our number of production pods and didn't notice for a few hours, because someone scrolled up the page and their cursor went over the slider. Lucky they weren't scrolling the other way.

Anyway, I lost a lot of trust in Docker as an organisation that knows what people value about their products as a part of that.

That's the cynical take - not that it doesn't happen, but there's a lot of reasons why a manager might have better context for what is important to work on at any given moment that are genuinely useful. For example: business priorities (not just "tech debt" vs "tick feature boxes", but "which of these 8 aspects of this feature should we build first", etc.), more experience in what aspects of a problem are worth spending time on, being more connected to what others are doing around the business in different departments, having more time talking to customers to know what their real pain points are, etc. etc.

In fact, as a manager in my current team I probably spend more time nudging people to fix technical debt they've forgotten about because they're excited to work on the next feature than vice versa. In other teams I've spent more time cautioning away from writing functionality that isn't needed right now to avoid overengineering the solution.

How you communicate that guidance and extra context has to depend on the team, what works for one won't necessarily work for another. What you found to be terrible another developer might love - as a developer who now has some management responsibilities I had to learn that some people actually want a lot more management than I would have ever wanted - my "micromanagement" is their "I am supported and know what's going on".

Anyway I'm not saying there aren't bad managers out there (or that I'm a good one), but it's a lot more nuanced than you imply, and what you might hate in a manager others might actively seek out.

Every time this comes up a hundred people decide you "just" need to quantize, and that does help but is still vulnerable in multiple ways, including if you have low "valid location" density (think a grid cell that is 95% water) or if you're on a boundary and flip between two cells. It's easy to mitigate the normal case but takes more thought to mitigate the edge cases.

I buy carbon offsets to try to blunt my impact but I'd also pay a premium for more sustainable milk (and more importantly cheese) that was harder to distinguish.

Carbon offsetting is a poor substitute for just not having a big carbon footprint to begin with. It's a sticking plaster at best, and incredibly hard to verify the impact of as an individual consumer.

I'm not sure how you can say if they're broadly unpopular - certainly you mostly hear complaints but that could be because the only people bothered enough to write about it are the ones who don't like it.

I'm personally a happy user and like almost all the changes they've made over the last few years. I like the new UI. I haven't felt the need to post anywhere about being roughly content with it.

The market share stats looked bad long before they started messing with the UI, no?

Well... the process of that seedling growing into the big tree over 40 years is what takes carbon out of the atmosphere. The carbon just goes into the tree's biomass. So - long term, if you have a steady state where the biomass of the trees you're talking about remains roughly constant (or dips but comes back to the same level) - it is carbon neutral. Even if you're cutting down big trees and planting seedlings.

Of course, you're right, there's nuance there. If you start with a mature forest, cut it all down, and replant it with seedlings, that's not a steady state (yet) - particularly when you take ecosystem effects into account, I suspect.

Pour qué no los dos?

I mostly agree in the long term, but in some ways analogously to the pandemic strategy of short term mitigation whilst long term solutions are put in place, I see few downsides to trying to stem the flow now by altering behaviour, in order to give us more time to fix the issue properly.

There's also a sliding scale - not all things people can do to reduce their footprint are really "austerity" but rather alternatives with a different set of tradeoffs. A sideways move that requires a culture shift.

I don't mean this to come across as an attack - I don't know your motivations and I'm guilty of this personally - but IMO most people I talk to who argue your position tend to be doing it as much as a rationalisation of their own behaviour than as a position they've come to from first principles.

Yeah, it's a genuinely different taste. I'm not a big fan of cheap chocolate from Europe or the US any more but I'm definitely more used to the Europe style than the US style. I also can't stand Kisses, they really do taste like they're a year past their best before date to me. All subjective though, isn't it.

It's a requirement to take the legal minimum (20 days), but most companies offer 25 or so so in practice you can usually carry over 5.

I believe it's in order to nullify the ability for a company to apply alternative pressures to stop people taking their entitled holiday.

I agree with elements of both sides here but I do think there's one important difference with function and variable names, which is that they have to match between definition and usage.

If you refactor a function or variable to do something different, often it becomes obvious at the calling/usage site that something isn't quite right any more and the name gets fixed. Just having more instances of it gives you more opportunities to realise you need to fix the name.

It's absolutely not foolproof, you can obviously still have them get out of sync. I do find it's rarer, though, personally.

TikTok lets you easily put your own video alongside an existing video, or reuse the audio from an existing video.

This basically gives you the tools to develop video memes. You'll often see a video or audio clip go viral and then see a bunch of different riffs on it that evolve over time, each a twist on the previous iteration, in exactly the same way you see image/text based memes evolve over time, get mixed together, adapted for a current news story, etc etc.

This sort of thing doesn't work quite as well on platforms like YouTube, the barrier to creation is too high.

Another component of the innovation is to mix lowering that barrier with a strong algorithm to surface the best content, since you now have so much of it.

I suspect it's the other way - they have his prints on file already from some previous arrest, and the image linked the incriminating EncroChat account to his real identity through the data already on file.

That's not the full image. The full image (https://twitter.com/MerseyPolice/status/1395783747115618306) has a lot of detail in the palm area - enough to get a match I'd assume, if they have his full palm print on file.

Even if it's not a super high probability match, it could have been enough to give them a name and find more evidence.

I don't buy that they'd make up the story _and then tweet proudly about it_, especially when the image they posted is so easy to be sceptical about because of the blur.

If you look at the full size image there's at the very least a large portion of palm print fairly visible. That's enough if you have a palm print, I assume.

This depends a lot on what sorts of things you do enjoy, I think.

There are many ways of enjoying and appreciating writing, fiction, art, etc. You can approach from so many angles.

For example, I love science fiction and fantasy, but I love it in a different way to some of my friends. For me, the real enjoyment is about strong characters, story arcs that wouldn't be possible in another genre, and to some extent about getting to the core of how humans relate to each other and what about them is "human" when you put them in a totally different context.

For some of my friends it is more about fantastical worlds that are self consistent but have different rules to our own. For others it is about prediction of the future through careful analysis of how a particular technological advance might play out. The narrative is simply a useful vehicle for that analysis.

Are there _any_ pieces of fiction that you have enjoyed? Or perhaps biographies or documentaries where the subjects were compelling characters? I would try to find the edges where these things blur a little into interests you already have. But I will admit I find it hard to relate to some extent - I've always loved stories.

Does differential tax rates on necessities Vs luxuries help here?

For example, in the UK, sales tax is discounted or not applied on many types of food, children's clothes, etc. - yes, you end up with strange arguments at the edges (a famous one being the lawsuit to decide whether Jaffa Cakes are legally cakes or biscuits) but I think it _could_ work.

Absolutely, it's not a perfect analogy but it's a surprisingly good one.

The value is in the sheer size of the ecosystem and the idea of everything being plug and play, even if the reality often necessitates actual code when you get past the happy demo path to your business's weird edge cases.

I currently don't own a car and I promised myself a while back that I wouldn't buy a non electric one. Just waiting to have either the on street infrastructure or driveway for it.

Fwiw, I can also usually do this and I would consider myself a world class dweller.

For me, it's about

- consistent bedtime

- doing as little as possible involving a screen in bed

- consistent bedtime routine

- consistent bedtime

Screwing any of these up can quite easily cause me to start worrying about things instead of falling asleep.

But I also think in part I'm just lucky and I can't really explain what causes it. I was always able to fall asleep in the car when I was younger, almost instantly. I can't fall asleep on public transport or planes at all though unless I'm really shattered.

You can absolutely hide it - it's in the settings, as mentioned in the article. The tradeoff is you won't be able to see anyone else's status.

I do agree I don't particularly like that it's on by default.

Pretty sure the cameras have some leeway built in, and in addition your speedometer will probably read a few mph under at 70, unless you're using one on a satnav. I do agree though, I tend to just try and find someone else who has cruise control and keep a steady distance behind them.

There's a few things that fall under the "smart motorway" umbrella. They also have systems to detect traffic flow and impose variable speed limits when approaching a queue, and usually regular speed cameras to enforce those limits.

This stopped car detection thing is indeed about the ones that can open the hard shoulder for traffic, though.

I think it's possibly a bit rich to say that they didn't listen to it just because they had a different opinion.

I found the same thing on first listen, because a few things were subtly "wrong" (different). On second or third listen I love the new version, the production and vocals are just that little bit more polished in a fair few ways and I've gotten used to the slightly different mix. The new bonus tracks are pretty decent and it's nice to rediscover one of my favourite albums again.

It wasn't at all dissimilar to the effect I get when trying new headphones - I hate them for a little while, invariably. Then I get used to the new tonal balance and I learn to love the sound (if they're good headphones)

They don't need to add value for the end user if they can control the scarce resource (content) by buying it up and providing more lucrative monetisation options for creators.

Their play is a hybrid of a streaming service and an adtech giant, and I imagine they're keeping their options open to see whether it pays to keep both sides of that model open or to pick one. Either way, one of the reasons I don't like what they're doing is because I can see it working.

Besides all that, there is some value to having all of your audio in one app.