bogle

I've just had to script an earlier manual process and the last couple of steps couldn't be handled in code. The final log message, written to the console, says, "TODO: Now do this thing ...". So everything is under source control and there's a golden source of truth.

There's the Multi-Account Containers add-on.

The poor state of the UK railways is due to a massive lack of investment for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A huge wasted opportunity where the costs of the closures were never properly considered.

This is my hope, too. Already I can cycle almost anywhere in my city but it's harder for those who are less confident on the roads (or those who can't bounce when an accident does occur or can't face down some dangerous driver).

There are now ambitious plans for cycling, and micro-mobility, infrastructure in UK cities but they need our central government(s) to stop being so car-centric (still!) and make the proper investments.

I would like conversions to become more common and thus significantly reduce the price. As city-centre diesel bans come in, and the road tax increases, then converting an existing vehicle would be great. It would make a nice little industry spread out through the UK.

An example would be my VW T5 '08 campervan conversion. As it's converted to a camper it has more than twice the resale value of the van alone. Unfortunately the DIY conversion kit is currently in excess of UKP 10k. Add other costs and it's not, yet, worth tackling.

"More or Less" on BBC Radio 4 did an investigation of the supposed particulate pollution from wood burners. Basically, although data is thin (and misused by HM Gov), if you have a modern stove and properly dried wood you won't be a particulate polluter.

Even if they left some of it as binary blobs and cut off the older systems from the Sonos ecosystem I'd be happy with this solution.

I need the speakers to talk to each other so I can play throughout the house over wifi but as I have a Sonos Bridge to my old hi-fi I don't need them to talk to the internet themselves.

My Sonos system is bridged to the perfectly fine 1980's hi-fi setup in the lounge but that bridge is now out of support from Sonos. Feeling a bit ripped off here as I only bought the bridge four years ago.

Perhaps if we don't fly on private jets we are not respectable.

I like the iClever Wireless Folding Keyboard - mini version. It's tiny and easy to carry with a phone. You need to be a little more careful with where some keys are.

Also worth reading is "Beyond the Twelve-Factor App" (O’Reilly). It goes into the 12 factors and expands them to 15 for cloud-native apps. I believe I got a free e-book via Pivotal's content library.

> It's hard to take the clear disappointment from my bosses.

You should be brave and raise this with your bosses. You may have got the wrong idea!

Ask them how you are doing and trust them to be honest with you. You may be disappointed in yourself whilst they may take a view that you are fine or improving or they are happy to offer help.

Perhaps try to broach the subject with your team, too? They may be supportive if they recognise you are feeling down.

You'll take her by the fastest method appropriate. No one, said have to, that was just you.

It doesn't take much to imagine a situation where the nearest emergency room is a mile away and she can still go on the bike's child seat. Or a taxi.

If you live in a city your car, even if you have one, is not necessarily the quickest way to get around.

Tell you what, you do it and report back, eh?

While you are at it, check the traffic deaths due to motor vehicles. Do it for urban environments, which is the original topic.

Oh, and the improvements in life expectancy for those who take regular exercise by, for instance, cycling to work. Better offset those. I suggest using micromorts.

Married with 3 kids. I think the multiple errors in your assumption is due to poor thinking on at least two counts.

I live in the city, as my question may have suggested, and my family can cycle and walk and take the tram and bus and train everywhere we need to go in the city.

Also, we do have a vehicle, it's a campervan. We don't need it to do the shopping because we're walking distance to some small stores and get deliveries of groceries and fresh, organic vegetables (yum).

The reference to the safety of scooters may require you to provide some evidence. The children are required by myself to wear a helmet and their health is better.

The canals freeze. That's sea water, too.

Where they expect annual snow and have segregated bike lanes you simply plough those, too. I've seen this in Sweden in Uppsala. You bike across a hard pack of snow, just like the cars on the roads. The cars need studded snow tires but the bikes are okay without. In the melt when you can have ice patches then studded tires on your bike are possible.

And isn't it interesting that even though we've had driverless trains for decades many of them still require a driver?

In London the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) is fully automatic. In Tokyo the trains are computer controlled but a driver takes over outside of peak hours, apparently for practice.

So perhaps we'll never get past a self-driving car requiring a human operator at least pretending to pay attention (so no real change there, then).

I did mention taxis. The question would then be, why an SDC as opposed to a taxi? In the example you give a driver would be of more use.

What is stopping American cities from changing their infrastructure investment from automobiles to micromobility? Is there one, big, standout reason that could be addressed? It's a change that takes decades and it's fighting against incumbents with deep pockets but it could be done.

I think many will still have cars, although they'll have to be electric [0]. Will the driverless car be as cheap as the second hand Nissan Leaf? Also, perhaps the car isn't used to commute every day when the weather is good and you aren't battling through traffic.

In Europe cycling distance to work within a city is as quick as driving. If you aren't quite fit enough you can get an electric bike (very popular amongst the elderly).

I didn't consider the suburbs in my question but in a small to medium sized city (<0.5m) I'd suggest the average commute would be ~8km. That takes ~25mins on a bicycle. Now project a better micromobility infrastructure and cycling looks much more attractive. All those school runs just vanish.

So you'd have to rich and fat to still be driving. ;)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/amsterdam-ban-...

If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive?

Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and all the other cities, like London and New York, that are embarking on ambitious transformations to create friendlier streets for people.

If you don't need to drive why would you buy a driverless car? Also, why would I prefer a driverless taxi if an electric car with a human driver costs no more?

Note that I'm only asking about city travel, not intercity transportation.

No pricing info right now but it looks like it'd be fun to try out. As it's free that may help build up a user base.

"Gravitricity develops winch and hoist system to store energy at half the cost of lithium-ion batteries" - Gravitricity, an Edinburgh-based startup.

I think Edinburgh has a really good startup scene with a huge bio-quarter and even some space engineering like Skyrora. Skyscanner, a flight search engine, has been the most successful so far, sold to Ctrip for 1.4b UKP.

Tim Harford in "The Undercover Economist" has a neat description of how the market isn't rational and really can't be predictable. So I'm not worried about machines in the market as they can't really do any better, I believe.

As for the super-rich, they have asset managers who pool family funds. Even a small family fund will have millions invested and a small asset manager will have billions under management (pick your own major currency). Every millionaire will be doing the same thing so none of them get an advantage and going against the herd would be unlikely to pay off, short to mid-term (again, my reading of "The Undercover Economist").

Where I am at the moment, a UK bank's retail data analysis service, any ML projects are set up on a "learn as you go" basis whilst still doing your main job. No specialised practitioners are deemed required.

Whether or not this is a good idea is moot: this is in the bowels of the bank and not the bleeding edge of commerce.

Why would you do that? I take it this isn't an Agile team but are they working on software?

I also think the name is fabulous - quite surprised the domain name was available!

I would like to see an improvement in the culture, too, and I've seen organisations experiment with "Do Not Disturb" desks, with very limited success.

Every office I've been in has been open-plan. If it's full of developers it will mainly be quiet and conducive to work. Put just one person in there who needs to talk, especially Sales and Marketing, and it's all going to fall apart.

This is my experience of British management over the last quarter of a century. I am an expensive contract resource but I still get paid for turning up and not so much for providing working software.

When I am working remotely, due to the organisation's inability to measure productivity, fostered by their management's "bums on seats" culture, I can't demonstrate that remote work is a benefit to them.