IneffablePigeon

To make a rubbish analogy, this is like arguing that making it illegal for teachers to do murders would make all the murderous teachers move. Great? We'll be left with the non murderous ones.

I don't think there's much that would wholesale get Facebook to withdraw from a huge market like the US but if they did then competitors that did obey the new laws would take their place, as long as the entire business model wasn't completely defunct.

It's even sooner than that in places. The UK has announced a ban on new ICE vehicles from 2030. To be seen how closely that's followed through on, we have a long way to go on charging infrastructure.

Ironically, as far as I'm concerned, excellent poetry _is_ about as close as writing gets to "pure ideas" (or at the very least pure emotion). Average poetry, maybe not so much.

I think, as usual, there's a lot of nuance here. I think emotion is inextricably linked to almost all forms of communication, and that there's not such a bright line between fiction and non fiction in that regard.

The books that have taught me the most are not necessarily the ones with the most information density or even the most clarity of thought (although both help). The ones that have really conveyed their points effectively to me have all had an element of weaving them into a narrative that I could engage with, examine from different angles, absorb and remember.

But I'm also pretty sympathetic to the idea of cutting fluff at all opportunities and getting to the root of what you want to say - that's the one thing that's improved my writing the most.

Thanks for the in depth answer - pretty much what I suspected. I think this sort of thing only even starts to work when you have a critical mass of people on this kind of tarriff (and more than that, willing to pay more and/or switch supplier for it). I wonder what actual proportion of the UK market is currently on a "100% renewable" plan.

This is an interesting topic - I agree with your interpretation, but to add another wrinkle, I live in the UK which has a decent but not amazing proportion of renewable energy now. I pay a little extra to my supplier to provide me with "100% renewable electricity" - meaning that for every customer on that tariff, they total up the power usage and buy at least that much renewable energy from the grid. I assume that this puts some upwards price pressure on renewable energy compared to non renewable, but how much? Presumably every extra watt I use doesn't result in a whole extra watt of renewable capacity being added, but what's the conversion - 5%? 50%? I don't even know where to start answering that question.

I don't really agree those are the only reasons. We keep as much of our logic on the server as possible - partly for the reasons you state, but also because

- as a team, we generally prefer working in C# to JS

- there's benefit to having all your business logic in one place. It's easier to concentrate it in the back end than in the front end

- minor: we can roll back our server instantly, rolling back our client requires a user page refresh

I've given up even wanting extra features, I just want them to fix the glaring bugs they've had for years.

My current favourites:

- if you sort a playlist you're playing, then click the album art to find the currently playing song, it will skip to the position of the track in the _unsorted_ list

- playlists over a certain length just won't play via Spotify Connect. There's a couple of playlists I just can't play on my Sonos speakers.

- playing a daily mix hides the shuffle button, and yet it still uses the shuffle state you had selected previously. If you want to turn shuffle off you have to play something else, toggle shuffle, then play the daily mix again

I've tried reporting these. They made me jump through a thousand standard troubleshooting hoops despite them all happening on every device I own. Then a few days later they came back and said it was "working as intended". Mind blowing.

Carrying out voter fraud is pointless unless you can do it without being detected. If you flood one precinct with enough votes to swing an entire election it becomes very obvious that something fishy went on there.

The only way to rig the election with voter fraud and get away with it is exactly the same - by spreading your fraudulent votes thinly so that no one area is too suspicious.

Sure, that's a nice perk. It's one I'm personally willing to give up for aesthetics and space on the desk. I'm aware it's not the most practical choice :)

Funnily most laptop keyboards get away with no spaces between any keys even when there might be space. Granted, there are more considerations there, but I think convention has a little to do with it too.

I don't know, but I'm also interested in the answer.

I would say this is one of the strengths of the culture at my company and we spend a lot of time trying to get that across to engineering candidates. I'd love to improve our messaging there if we can, though.

We talk about a culture of trust, that we hire good people and then trust them to do their jobs. We talk about avoiding hierarchy and beurocracy where it doesn't help us. We talk about engineers driving their own work forwards and we make it clear that we're looking for people who can do that.

I gave them up because I really, really like the look of a keyboard that is 100% keys with no gaps. I realise that's not a brilliant reason but that's why.

I don't want a numpad because getting my mouse closer to the center of my desk really helps with RSI for me. There weren't many options left at that point, especially since I wanted a UK layout and no unstandard key sizes (limits your options with keycaps).

But yeah, if I could get something that looked as nice and had F+arrow keys I'd probably go for it.

Fwiw I got used to the chords you need to access those pretty fast.

If that's internal meetings, absolutely, that's an issue. But I think a company that size that's trying to iterate on their offering should be booking a lot of meetings to talk with customers and potential customers, and that could easily take 15 mins a day in my experience.

I believe there's a setting somewhere in your account to turn this on, I think by default it just hides tracks that have been removed from the service. They stay there on the playlist (I guess in theory if the track comes back onto the service it'll reappear, but in practice I've found it's often a slightly different version that doesn't get matched up).

Well, a slightly flawed analogy is that you bought a Best Buy house and the only way to get a TV is to get it through Best Buy.

It's the fact that not only are Apple providing a platform to sell the product, they're also the only distribution method for the product and are slowly clamping down on the loophole of providing a "free" app that requires a subscription bought elsewhere.

To continue the flawed analogy, the Best Buy houses are clearly the best houses in most other respects in the opinion of a lot of people and it's hard for the market to apply pressure about this one specific limitation. Whether that's fine or not is basically the philosophical argument being had.

As someone who screens a bunch of applications, absolutely I'll factor in a cover letter.

For me, the presence of a cover letter with half an attempt at customisation to the company and job ad demonstrates they actually care at least a little about this role at this company. And if it's well written then that demonstrates communication skills which I value highly in my colleagues.

It's really not often clear cut which one of two CVs is the "best qualified". The cover letter is just a bit more signal that will often swing my decision towards "let's take a punt".

I completely agree - I came into it against the centralised model on principle but after reading their whitepaper I actually think the benefits may slightly outweigh the negatives.

The app has to actually work for a high enough proportion fo cases, though.

The GDPR still applies and will continue to by default, as far as I know. After the transition period the UK would have the choice to repeal or change it but I'm not aware of any push to do so.

I love Monzo's tone of voice guide. We basically use it as our own, with a couple of small tweaks.

I agree - I think sleep is the only universal here. I find different things may help at different times, too, or become more important to counter different external stressors and anxieties.

I've never found exercise to be a particularly important part of my mental health, but in lockdown I've become utterly dependent on it. It provides routine, structure, control and a sense of progress - all of which I was getting more of in other places before but which I'm now lacking without the exercise.

As always, depends!

When I'm interviewing someone and they ask this, I try to answer honestly, although I think it's human nature to still try to put a positive spin on it because a) I work here and there's some element of post purchase rationalization, for want of a better term and b) if they're a good candidate I want to sell them on working with us.

However there are forces in the other direction - it's not in my interest to deceive a candidate into a role that doesn't fit them if they're going to leave when they inevitably find out, or if they're going to be demotivated as a result. I have a vested interest in this being a good fit from both sides.

I also want to give candidates a great experience - we're a small company and not many people have heard of us. Word of mouth is the most powerful recruitment tool we have, in many respects.

To some extent this only works because I genuinely love the place I work and so the bad things I talk about genuinely aren't that bad (I would call them tradeoffs rather than things everyone would consider super negative).

This is what I'm currently using but I'm not totally loving it.

I landed on it because the speed is unparalleled, but there's a few too many quirks (recent repositories never seems to work for me) and the UI is almost there but it's too hard to instantly see the status of things, particularly whether things are staged or not staged.

This is exactly how I use all of these tools. I've not found one that doesn't work well like this - just have it open next to a CLI. I use the GUI for staging, committing, and occasionally resetting branch pointers or cherry picking. Everything else I do with the CLI.

Do you ever "fully" trust any software before it's been released to its final environment and run under load? I don't.

The idea isn't that you release less-tested software because you have the canary as a safety net. The idea is that you put in place all of the other practices you would anyway to minimise the likelihood of bugs and mistakes, and then you add a canary rollout as one extra layer of protection to mitigate the damage of anything you missed.

I would look at it as 98% of the users getting an even more reliable experience than they would otherwise (per release; everyone benefits over time), rather than 2% being given a worse experience. The alternative is just that everyone is in the "canary" release and everyone has to immediately use the release you "don't fully trust".

I agree, I'd love a quick "add to to-do list" button or something as a quick and dirty fix to that. Or even just a mark as unread button.

Right now I resort to setting a slackbot reminder for an hour for any message I think I might forget to deal with.

Interesting, but I wouldn't really call it a myth.

It feels like quite a nitpick to say that zero air resistance is a valid simplification and that the gravity field can be assumed to be unidirectional and constant is not a valid simplification. Certainly when I was taught this I was aware we were making a bunch of assumptions that weren't exactly true.

Indeed, and in fact the pixel does exactly the same dark frame trick to identify hot pixels. I don't know that it takes as long though - perhaps it's hidden by the fact you can keep doing other things while the photo is processing.

Who isn't concerned about salary? Who is _only_ concerned about salary?

Like most software engineers in the UK, I could almost certainly make at least triple by moving to the US but I don't consider it worthwhile for me. Many people do - there's no right answer.

The majority of the time, no.

There are a couple of circumstances I often do, though.

The first is when fixing a bug - writing the (red) regression test first forces me to pin down the exact issue and adds confidence that my test works. Committing the red test and the fix to the test in two commits makes the bug and its fix easy to review.

The second is when I'm writing something high risk (particularly from a security standpoint). In this case I want to have a good idea of what I'm building before I start to make sure I've thought through all the cases, so there's less risk of rewriting all the tests later. There's also more benefit to having a thorough test suite, and I find doing that up front forces me to pin down all of the edge cases and think through all the implications before I get bogged down in the "how" too much.

All/most of the new stations on the Elizabeth line are going to have barriers afaik. It seems to me like all the new/refitted underground stations are getting the barriers these days too - I think it's a great improvement personally.

I'm a big fan of this one for getting to grips with the nitty gritty basics of JavaScript - in particular it's my go to when I forget how prototype inheritance and `this` work exactly for the umpteenth time.