18,120 karma · joined January 24, 2012
This is zero-evidence bullshit. On and after the age of 70, all UK drivers have to renew their licence every three years anyway - it's been like that since 1976. This new change just adds a requirement to get an eye test (which the government doesn't "make money" from) as well, rather than self-certifying.
Respectfully, I think that is a mistake.
Yes, he frequently exhibits an ego the size of Jupiter. But he is very smart†, and he writes well, and this stuff that theyre doing is at least interesting. I don't know if its physics or metaphysics or something else entirely, and it may be just empty tail-chasing, but I reckon its at least worth paying some attention to.
† and he's also built a long-term business making and selling extremely capable maths tooling, of all things, which I think is worth some respect
This is a Musk escapade, so my guess would be extraterritoriality and absence of jurisdiction.
If its no longer worth hiring junior devs, then fairly soon there'll be few mid-level devs. And after that almost no senior developers. Is that the plan?
Were you ever a junior developer? Ever work with, and learn from, people who once were?
Perhaps an indication that the code in that segment was hand-written in assembly language rather than C?
During roughly the same time period I worked for a company with similar practices. When a director realised what was going on, and the implications for personal liability, I was given the job of physically securing the MSDN CD binder, and tracking installations.
This resulted in everyone hating me, to the extent of my having stand-up, public arguments with people who felt they absolutely needed Visual J++, or whatever. Eventually I told the business that I wasn't prepared to be their gatekeeper anymore. I suspect practices lapsed back to what they'd been before, but its been a while.
With the decline in blogs, Twitter circling the toilet bowl, and facebook etc becoming a wasteland - I did wonder if some people have nowhere to post things. I don't support them using Ask, though, and I flag such posts - something I rarely do otherwise.
So if I turn my phone off and get onto a bus or train with a tracking tag, other passengers will get an alert?
Also, the wording indicates that the tag needs to be marked as lost. But could that be used as plausible deniability -- that someone had stolen it -- by a person engaged in illicit tracking?
Saved my sanity when the infrastructure team decided to set-up a rack mount server in my office "just for a few days, honestly" and I spent two weeks listening to the system fan spooling up every (count them) seventy five seconds. The sound quality is pretty good too.
This is a commonly held view - particularly among employers. And certainly some people can do it.
But the problem is that it takes time to build expertise and bargain that into something you can live on. And the more times you have to do that, the more you fall behind people who found a niche or a long-term role and stayed in it.
And you eventually find yourself in your late fifties, steamrollered by yet another wave of change, and you don't have the time or resources or energy, or just plain self-belief, to adapt again.
But even if it is, in fact, a thing - it's clearly not backed by "one particular moral judgement", as it is commonly portrayed. Lots of people face disapproval and punishment for a diversity of chosen moral stance, including people who could be categorised as "liberal" and who are typically considered to be those doing the "cancelling".
Supporers of the abolition of slavery or apartheid, or of human rights for minority communities, were for many years "cancelled" in the US, and in Europe, for example. Today, in the US, supporters of social equality and diversity are being "cancelled".
So I suspect that "cancel culture" is what you get when one moral/political group (of any persuasion) only sees part of the bigger picture, and uses that to manufacture a grievance.
We have to do the best we can to be kind and minimise suffering, while understanding that there will inevitably be a diversity of judgements on moral matters. And if those moral judgements have real-world effects, there will be moral judgements about that too.
The lack of moral universality is how it is, not a failure. And it never ends: there are no right answers, although there might very well be wrong ones. Its up to us.
> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.
Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.
Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
[1] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09
(Edit: url)
> Search engines still index blogs far better than social media posts.
For a lot of people, social media is the internet. They don't discover things on search engines, they are guided to them by engagement engines in walled gardens.
And increasingly what they're bwing guided to is commercial, mimetic slop. Most people are, unfortunately, not interested in the fairly high-minded content that the article's author is referring to. I wish it were otherwise.
I've had a blog for twenty five years. I try to do the right thing, and I get no views. Thats because blogging as an artesian activity is dead. Which is its great strength.