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I sometimes feel the world is slowly reinventing BusinessObjects

Agreed - I suspect recompilation and decompilation is an unusually good task for models for many reasons.

I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets and Excel.

Spreadsheets are good for ad-hoc tasks on small-to-medium amounts of data (let’s say the old 64k row limit) of medium-to-low complexity. In practice, that covers a lot of tasks.

The problem is that Excel is the only flexible tool many people have so they bend it to do everything in lieu of anything better.

Wonder if the reaction would be the same if Wine was conditional on buying a license to Windows.

In my experience, good mature organisations have clear review processes to ensure quality, improve collaboration and reduce errors and risk. This is regardless of field. It does slow you down - not 10x - but the benefits outweigh the downsides in the long run.

The worst places I’ve worked have a pattern where someone senior drives a major change without any oversight, review or understanding causing multiple ongoing issues. This problem then gets dumped onto more junior colleagues, at which point it becomes harder and more time consuming to fix (“technical debt”). The senior role then boasts about their successful agile delivery to their superiors who don’t have visibility of the issues, much to the eye-rolls of all the people dealing with the constant problems.

BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.

Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.

If this is the case, why are many other EU postal services still state-owned (e.g. Ireland, Poland, Cyprus, Greece)? The UK left the EU 5 years ago yet it’s still being used as cover for UK political decisions.

On a similar note, I’ve always liked the idea of being able to mark functions as pure (for some reasonable definition of pure).

The principle of reducing state changes and side-effects feels a good one.

That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.

It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.

I’m beginning to think my reluctance to shamelessly copy has held me back in life. It’s clearly more widespread than I naively assumed (and I say that without casting judgment).

I’m convinced a major reason Windows Phone failed is because Google didn’t support it for self-serving reasons. It rarely gets mentioned but no YouTube or Google Maps apps is a big deal and a major barrier to adoption. The tech giants don’t want competition.

If nothing else, it’s clear communication and shows they have seen the online discourse. We’ll see if they follow through.

There’s a certain logic to it too: they’ll be far more interested in upselling to existing Canva subscribers than selling Canva to the far smaller Affinity userbase.

My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.

Still somewhat shady.

The biggest problem with Bristol is how much of it has been taken over by upper and upper-middle class people moving from the South East.

Yes and no. Isn’t there an argument that Gmail and Outlook.com (combined with Microsoft 365/Exchange Online), while superficially interoperable, have enough market share that their actions make running other mail providers very difficult in practice?

Real-life stores do this as well - make individually profitable changes (local maximums) that eventually make the whole experience so miserable that you no-longer want to shop there. Direct upselling is the most obvious, along with constant messing about with pricing and offers, as well as constantly pushing lower quality expensive own-brand goods, but the one I notice most is various cynically high pricing of non-core impulse items around checkouts - it tends to stick in my mind as the shop being expensive.

I mentally group Flash, Visual Basic and Visual FoxPro together as dying because they were unfashionable in tech circles despite being highly productive and practical. They never got effectively replaced and we will very slowly end up with modern equivalents.

I wonder how many VPN providers are secretly government honeypots set up by security agencies. I suspect most of them.

Can you expand on “supply-side problems”, “economic reform” and “structural issues” without filtering it through euphemisms?

Stop making me feel old you insensitive clod.

I’d argue a major role of a manager is to make decisions and take responsibility for them - it’s not employees don’t “want to”, that’s usually not their job. Everyone unilaterally making their own decisions creates an inconsistent mess.

To me, it sounds like what they did is what good employees should do which is consider the problem and present it in a way that made the decision trivially easy for you. You can still overrule it if it’s not reasonable.

If you want to say “use your initiative if X” then fine, but the scope of that should be reasonably clear. It’s always a bit of a balancing act, of course.

When it comes to decision making, managers span from people who are too willing to make decisions without a full understanding the situation and detail, often to the detriment of their team and customers who they are distanced from, to those who outright refuse to make decisions. There are lots of bad managers.

There was a 3-part BBC TV series by the author called "How It Works" which convered essentially the same material which I far preferred to the book - I don't have a stream link, unfortunately.

I'm convinced the inability to easily play Blu-Rays and similar on computers is a major contributor as to why the format hasn't had the same traction as DVDs and may have accelerated the removal of disc drives from devices. Such a self-defeating move.

I agree there’s nothing inherently wrong with non-experts, typically journalists, expressing opinions, perspectives, and anecdotes in long-form, especially on topical subjects.

I just wish there was an easy way to find and separate it from actual and more rigorous scientific and expert-driven non-fiction. They often look similar at first glance but there’s a world of difference between, say, Kahneman and Gladwell.

This feels attempted shakedown of the console manufacturers to get them to pay for Unity for their licensees. Looks like Sony and Nintendo have coughed up while Microsoft have not. Not sure I can blame Microsoft for not wanting to pay.

The basic salary for a UK MP is £81,932, with additional pay for additional responsibilities (such as being a minister).

The median UK salary is around £30,000.

Couldn’t you say the same for most industries?

What software is generally used for this? Is there anything available for the average person that doesn’t require spending a small fortune?

I tried using Multi-Account Containers because I loved the idea but found the user interface rather clunkier and more manual than I hoped.

What I really want is for it to be optimised for the common use case with each domain automatically put in its own container, with some whitelisting of common grouped services (e.g. MS and Xbox Live, Facebook and Instagram).

It's very rare that I actually want to share any cookie info between sites as most of it is tracking. In the rare situation you do, the browser could let you disable containers or add them to a group.

I'd also like something that automatically opts out of tracking preferences, as well as something that periodically deletes cookies/localstorage (say every 14 days).

You could then set it all up and forget about it.

I read this book recently and don't remember Close suggesting that Pontecorvo was misled or blackmailed by the USSR into defecting.

Instead, Close's theory is that the USSR legitimately-but-wrongly believed the net was closing in on Pontecorvo and speculated his post-defection treatment and apparent lack of trust came from him not being totally co-operative as a spy.