Earw0rm

Nope, that's the EU farming subsidy simulator. The UK left the Common Agricultural Policy after Brexit.

(Although I doubt its home grown replacement is much better.)

Acquitted on a legal technicality, then, not in the court of accountability and consequences.

This.

Accountability.

I've worked for someone very like her.

It's worse than reckless. They make not-knowing part of their operating model.

And they make sure nobody else with power and influence does too much knowing either. Silos, stay in your lane, don't ask questions about how your department's KPIs mesh with the next one over, or what conclusions might be inferred.

This resonates with me. Hard.

I'm lucky though - as a hybrid engineer/manager, I've been able to lean away from the former and into the latter.

And I've come to notice that humans doing agentic work seem to need more emotional support per unit effort than those doing traditional engineering.

So there are opportunities there. I don't want to spend a second longer than I have to prompting machines - there is zero dopamine loop in that for me, I get more doing housework and at least that makes my wife happy - but I'm happy to support a few other humans engaged in that kind of work.

It's sad though. I used to love dreaming intricate machines into existence and then watching them come to "life", or at least actually start working. That dream seems dead for now, I hope it comes back but I won't hold my breath.

The heck kind of lights are you running that won't go all night on a battery that fits in your palm?

I'm too old and boring to go to cultural events that are likely to end in brawls.

And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.

Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.

Yep. Most "journalism" now is opinion columns.

Local journalism is dead, with unfortunate consequences for local politics that bleeds into national and international stuff.

National investigative journalism is hanging by a thread, with a TON of stuff (mostly corruption of various kinds) going uninvestigated which should be. Some of the slack has been picked up by academics of one kind or another making their work more accessible, but now they're in the firing line too.

They're doing this in the UK right now with security for cultural events.

Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.

A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.

It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).

It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack, and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in application support, which would likely have killed them.

It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would never have won out.

That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental to the process of making the product.

Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org structure which generated stupid requirements.

And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design outcomes.

Most people love to drive, but hate to be stuck in traffic. Or for the countryside to be all freeways and the city to be all parking lots.

It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.

Mostly in the past tense now, for better or worse.

The current El Niño hasn't really had time to affect NW Europe yet, there's quite some lag there AIUI.

Sheep and slow growing trees of course don't get along well, you have to choose one or the other at least while the trees establish, which for oaks is measured in decades.

In Wales and Ireland we have the opposite problem, the sheep strip everything bare, the old trees die and the forests cannot regenerate.