smackay

The Economist definitely have a specific world-view and to be fair they would probably be the first to tell you that. I now read their articles with a certain amount of scepticism, particularly if it's topical but not necessarily current affairs.

There is still value to be gotten out of the magazine but if you're looking for accuracy or truth that can be relied on then I think that ship sailed a long time ago. "Thankfully" the internet has allowed everybody to finally realise that.

Doesn't the existence of blogs and Q&A sites like Stackoverflow indicate that current approaches to documentation are failing to deliver. I think there's more to the rise of cut & paste development than simply a lack of skill or a lack of time. The volume of state in some software systems is simply too great to put down in a linear document. Indeed the number of branches in state maybe too great to represent in any meaningful way or in any timeframe that's practical.

If you look at a framework like Django. The documentation is generally considered excellent. However now there is simply so much stuff that many complex things get only a cursory treatment. So everybody heads over to SO to find the question that is the closest fit to theirs.

I am not sure what would be better or indeed if there is any solution to this. The framework here layout a multidimensional approach with tutorials to get started and reference to follow up with. However creating documentation systems with that level of complexity is an enormous task and for anything of any quality, an enormous cost.

So what's the answer? I'm not sure there is one.

The effect of the Cold War extended over much of Europe. I grew up in a small town in the north of Scotland which had an airport that could support Vulcan bombers. There was the widespread feeling we were on the list of places that would get nuked if hostilities broke out with the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately humans like to eat predatory fish - salmon, tuna, etc. So although farming would be a way forward most farming needs large-scale industrial fishing to support it. The pet food industry also has the same problem.

Moving farming to vegetarian species like tilapia would solve this but it's going to take a monumental effort to change the attitudes of generations.

There is a gruesome death trap in Montana, https://www.hcn.org/issues/48.22/latest-thousands-of-snow-ge...

There's a lot of scepticism with regards to vaccines, which, in the current situation, the European Commission and national governments are keen not to encourage. There are also a couple of unfortunate incidents in recent memory which exacerbate the situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix

Here on the ground in Portugal I'd say the government's response is apparently competent but it's just not effective. Although the country is simply following what others are doing, the population is taking this very seriously. Mask wearing outside is pretty universal except if you're exercising, everybody is working from home where possible and the schools are closed (finally). But it's not enough. The problem is that family ties are very strong here. Relaxing the rules for 36 hours at Christmas and 24 hours at New Year was absolutely the wrong thing to do and that is why the death toll has doubled in the five weeks since then.

It's a long flight across the North Sea for migrating birds and the platforms have provided a rest stop and no doubt saved many birds from a watery grave - the gas flares have probably killed many more but that's another matter.

My brother was meteorologist out on the rigs for a while and he said that one morning after a storm he went outside and the heli-deck was completely packed with Golden Plovers (Pluvialis apricaria). There was not a square centimetre left exposed. Another time, in a force 12 gale, he watched a Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) just outside the control room window flying for 20 minutes without making any headway against the wind. Not sure if it made it onto the platform.

The article seems to focus on how to get "acceptable" candidates running for president and how, once there, they can be kept under control. However I think the real questions should be: how on earth did a candidate like Trump ever get to a position where they could win and what is the state of the country such that a candidate like Trump ever came forward?

If none of these are addressed then you might be storing up trouble and in four years time end up with a bigger problem than the one you just solved.

Really? That would be news to Ambassador George Mitchell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Mitchell

The Americans would never tolerate a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Too much time, effort and blood went into getting the Good Friday Agreement. The border with Northern Ireland still exists, only it got moved to the Irish Sea.

All of Craig's reasoning over the Skripal case were pretty well documented in his blogs. I'd definitely be interested in what parts required mental gymnastics.

How, in the new normal, do we ensure that reasoned posts like this and the recent one from the San Mateo Health Officer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341289 gain the prominence they deserve so we can avoid hyperbole and hysteria and take sensible steps to solve this type of problem?

Perhaps, software developers, being the reasonable and reasoning people we are need to think long and hard about whether contributing to the destructive patterns in social interaction that we currently experience is the correct course of action and instead consider our long term stature as a profession.

Having said that, it is my fervent wish that the main stream media becomes a permanent casualty of the pandemic. It really serves no useful purpose anymore.

Take a walk along the beach. A small proportion by volume but a large proportion by number, of the pieces of plastic you will find, will be the stems of Q-tips. If you're going to use them, get the paper kind and leave the ones with plastic on the shelf.

The island is also rat-free, which is utterly mind boggling given the terrain.

https://www.gov.gs/environment/eradication-projects/eradicat...

There is considerable scope for universities or any other organisation to ensure that assaults or even unwanted consensual activities are not taking place on their property.

This raises the interesting question - now prevention is more practical and thus enforceable are we likely to see a tightening of behavioural standards and social norms either because the technology allows it or because that's the easiest way to avoid the technology. In either case it seems that a relaxed attitude to social behaviour may be on the way out.

Look at what the hookpod people have achieved, https://www.hookpod.com/ It seems an utterly impractical problem but they have a solution that works, apparently really well.

With a will, some incentives and some clever thinking it seems that similar solutions could be found for mammals. In some ways it's an easier problem as cetaceans are generally known not to be dumb. Seals I'm not so sure of ;)

The skies here in Portugal are a beautiful blue colour. Before, because of the stable air created by the Azores high pressure weather system, they would criss-crossed by the contrails of all the passenger jets flying over.

This might be a simple explanation to the buffet problem. After you've taken your random walk to see what's on offer you now decide that one of the first three items was what you wanted after all. Now you have the difficult social problem (and logistical too if there are plates with food) of navigating against the tide of people who arrived after you.

UPDATE: I see this explanation is covered more thoroughly in other comments.

Years of downsizing of the British Navy and the reduction of the merchant fleet to cheaper flags of convenience left the UK with a very poor capability for a maritime invasion. The Task Force that sailed to the Falklands was a rag-tag group of various ships including supply vessels used in the North Sea. Had the Argentinians pilots that attacked the fleet had been a little more successful I seriously doubt the British would have had the capability to launch another one.

It seems that successive administrations have lost sight of the benefits of soft power and only go for the hard version instead. Having world-leading institutions with the ability to advise other goes a lot further, for a fraction of the cost.

Courtesy of Hollywood (more soft power, but with a more dubious pedigree) there is no situation where the CDC does not, absolutely, have it's shit together. For the price of a single aircraft carrier you could probably make that a reality.

4) It's not possible to express a thinking system sufficiently clearly in writing - after all we've been thinking for far longer than we've been writing.

5) (related) The assumption that all aspects of thinking are conscious. The eureka moment, sleeping on a problem or just taking a distracting shower suggest otherwise.

I grew up in a place with hyper-local news. Let's say, I'm not a fan.

Did several months on one of the more remote islands in the Falklands - population: 6 humans, several thousand penguins and several million petrels. Apart from a rotary phone and generators the only other tech experience was the International Space Station flying overhead one night.

The first couple of weeks were a little interesting but after a while you realise that if it was important then you'd hear about it eventually.

Ah, simpler times.

I tried it with "waders" which are either the things that you to put on your feet to go fishing or a category of birds (shorebirds or herons). The results after going for all the options were still exclusively stores wanting to sell me the former.

Garbage in, garbage out. I guess. Still I like the idea of something to side-step the SEO perhaps with more effort they can make it work but relying on Google or any major search engine for the base results is the wrong way to go.

So Agile Scrum is not working so what you really need is Value Scrum.

Since we are clearly in a post-agile world. There appears to be little added value in reiterating all the reasons people believe that the management of software development is not working. So what is going to replace it?

I wrote a django-crispy-forms template pack for the GOV.UK Design System. I was working on a project for Public Health England when the project got put on hold because of the lock-down and this was an itch that needed scratching. Hopefully this is going to speed things up when the project resumes.

https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds

https://design-system.service.gov.uk

It will be interesting to see how this finally plays out. Initially the BBC were downplaying the body count and there was little acknowledgement of the fatalities in care homes. Only the Sunday Times (?) was reporting a total, based on their own research, that was significantly higher than other media outlets. Now all the newspapers seem onboard with the idea that the final total will be much, much higher than officially reported. The BBC was somewhat late in arriving at this position.

Errol Morris' documentary on McNamara, The Fog of War is well worth your time to watch.

The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

This is the journey that everybody who likes music is expected to take. Just make sure that you don't travel too far and end up where you just assess the quality of the performance - a situation where the music itself is of secondary importance.

Music is technical and cultural. You can always be true to your roots and stick with the heavy metal.