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I expect first responders rarely have to deal with the level of depravity mentioned in this Wired article from 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/

You probably DO NOT want to read it.

There's a very good reason moderators are employed in far-away countries, where people are unlikely to have the resources to gain redress for the problems they have to deal with as a result.


Brown Pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) heads are white in the breeding season. Birds start breeding aged three to five. So technically the statement is correct but I wonder if Gemini didn't get its pelicans and cormorants in a muddle. The mainland European Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis) has a head that gets progressively whiter as birds age.


Technologists' very existence is based on the idea of improvement, and, as a result, making the lives of others better. Compared to other approaches, nothing has delivered quite on the same scale, though it's not without its costs.


Yep, and there's no stopping technological progress. Whoever thinks things will get worse is just being what internet investing lingo calls "gay bears" - waiting for the doom that can justify their constant state of depression and existential dread.

In fact people will get upset if you don't agree with them that the world is going to shit (and prove they are smart by predicting it).


Mostly. Sometimes people will do what's good for them, externalities be damned. I like leaded gasoline as an example. It wasn't an oopsie. We know it was bad from the day it was introduced and lead producers fought to keep it known as safe.


I am not sure about this, but it depends on definition of "technologist". Is Gates or Musk a "technologist"?

I think that social democratic movement in 20th century, and also Chinese communist government, made many people's lives better, by improving their material conditions. It often involved technology, true, but the technology is not much if it's not applied en masse. (Communist government of my home country, Czechoslovakia, had famously huge success in eradicating polio.)

And I am not convinced that free market dispersal of technology is more efficient in providing it en masse than government-directed dispersal. For a striking example, watch the ending of "scientific horror story" from Angela Collier: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?si=rrBJPb6bHASNrPEY&t=2991


What kinds of forests? For nature, or for lumber? If the latter, what is quality of the timber produced, or will it spark a new wave of power stations burning wood pellets. Lots of questions, with very little detail available in the article.


If you wear gloves, you'll always wear gloves - annec-data from the crew I used to go out with catching shorebirds, in Scotland, in the middle of winter. The glove wearers we unable to function within an hour of taking them off to band, measure and release the birds. The non-glove wearers were able to keep going for as long as it took.


For some people[1], when their body temperature drops below a certain point, circulation in hands and feet is reduced. This helps heat the body core, saving organs while potentially sacrificing hands or feet.

At first this feels like a burn, then like someone's putting needles into your hands, and then they just go numb. You can't do precise actions with your hand anymore and soon you'll lose most of the ability to move it at all. You might even lose the body part. All while the core of your body is still warm and you're still able to walk and talk.

But as said, not everyone experiences this. For some people, when they get cold, their body increases circulation in the hands, keeping them warm enough to continue working no matter what.

________________

1. In extreme cases, this is called white hands syndrome or reynauds syndrome and primarily affects women. It seems to have a hereditary component, but worsens permanently whenever the hands experience cold or vibration.


Do you have a citation for this ? I experience Reynaud's and it's more than a bit worrying.


Are you trying to say that wearing gloves is a bad thing? Because while yes, you can get used to cold hands if you have good circulation, there is a point where you cannot function without gloves. If the temp is -20F with 20mph winds, you are not going to be functional in bare hands. Although sure, if you are talking about +20F with little wind, some people can work in mild cold like that all day.


This is a re-run of the end of the first dot-com boom where the rest of the organisation got some payback against the pampered and coddled engineers who built the web sites in between foosball games. Except this time around when your engineers are able to create agents, what do you need the rest of the organisation for. Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started.


>Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started.

More like software is eating software now. I don't think anyone is prepared for the fact that practically all junior/midlevel SWE roles are going to be automated away in the next couple years. We'll look back at the last 20 years as a golden age similar to the 20th century postwar period of manufacturing jobs in the US.


It'd be easier to develop an MBA in a box, and exactly zero people are prepared for dealing with that landscape. We're entering an era where the traditional Labor --> Management --> Capital structure no longer needs to apply, and yet everyone thinks Labor is the unnecessary middleman.


Interesting to see from the press release that Right to Repair is being cracked down upon:

When a product is repaired and upgraded outside the original manufacturer’s control, the company or person that modified the product should be held liable.

Will we see companies sue repair shops or compatible component manufacturers in order to prevent potential injury to their customers. Interesting times.


EU has been pretty vocal about "Circular Economy" and also the right to repair for ages, so I do not expect a bona-fide repair job brings anybody in legal trouble.

But conversely: Should the original manufacturer be responsible if somebody installs hacked-up "performance" software in a car ?

Of course not!


Why would companies do that? They won't be held liable once it's modified.


So they have the monopoly on repairs


not true. if you make a repair, you're liable for it. if you do your job well, there's no reason that would mean more of a business risk than the OEM takes.

If, on the other hand, you do a rush job, then yes you're very much on the hook.

If anything, this makes repairs/reuse of devices more interesting to the consumer, since you know that some basic level of responsibility (read: liability) is taken care of.


The prices for housing, in any form, in the major metropolitan areas suggest this will not be successful.


This looks like is going to help increase the prices even more.


Indeed - people cannot live in money. Giving them more money will not help them get a place if there are not more places available to get. It would only drive up the price as the same people compete for the same housing with more money. Or, if they have some form of rent control - simply greater frustration all around.

Another possible consequence is greater inter-generational friction as young people with more money out-compete existing, older tenants/owners for those homes.


Horn tooting time...

I wrote, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds/, a template pack for Crispy Forms for regular, form-based, Django sites.

Matt's done a great job and it will certainly take out a lot, if not most of the pain in dealing with accessibility requirements, and in particular the audit process that gov.uk puts projects through to make sure everyone has access to the sites.


Oh nice! Have you considered submitting it to https://design-system.service.gov.uk/community/resources-and... ? There's no Django solution there at the moment


Thanks for that. I didn't realise that the community extended beyond the government departments.


Wikipedia always delivers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_citizen_voting

"As of 2020 a total of 141 countries grant expatriates the right to vote in elections in their countries of origin."


An interesting feature of people voting from abroad is that it is very easy to make it very easy or very hard for them to vote, and the choice between those two options tends to depend on how the current government thinks those people are likely to vote. So some countries allow expatriates to vote, but voters have to fill in a load of forms and then turn up with various document at the embassy at a particular time, while other countries proactively hunt down their expatriates and send them a form in the post with a prepaid envelope.


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