brianmcc

No it doesn't. It comes from the Queen saying "We are not amused" to mean "I specifically am not amused".

I don't think anyone's saying unions can do that? They can protect workers and provide some balance in the power dynamics, but there absolutely are limits.

No it's more because things have gotten worse. When people's parents could get an X-bedroomed house on a single parent's income, which they grew up in and developed their sense of aspiration and normality, but they cannot do so with joint really high incomes, there's a very tangible sense of progress having not just stalled but gone backwards.

Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.

Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.

"Lots of the team knows Postgres really well, nobody knows Kafka at all yet" is also an underrated factor in making choices. "Kafka was the ideal technical choice but we screwed up the implementation through well-intentioned inexperience" being an all too plausible outcome.

The technologically inept get QR codes tattooed on their foreheads.

Perl CGI FTW! :-D

Sure I mean it's not a crime or anything, just highlighting you're highly unlikely to get anything like the perspective, wisdom, insight, that - for example - an 80 year old might share.

You could ask a 5 year old for opinions, they're not going to be very well informed.

Interesting choice of words in the original article and headline here - to "seal one's fate" feels quite pessimistic and doom-laden. Why not something like "secure its future"?

Sure, just that stories about "paying down tech debt" are an implicit admission of flaws and shortcuts and "doing it again because it wasn't done right initially".

Which is all true but the concept of making deliberate trade offs for speed and expedience invariably gets lost.

Stories about ongoing improvement - tech enhancement - just get seen as more positive. Plus that term covers both remediating original shortcut choices as well as new engineering improvements arising.

As something of an AI skeptic the thing that bothers me most is the wholesale gullibility and credulity of leaders. Incredible claims IMO require incredible levels of evidence, not just "tech bros with vested interests tell us this, it must be so!".

A level of general experimentation by companies and other organizations is clearly warranted, and it should be marked accordingly. This just isn't happening in a lot of places: "become 10x more productive or bye-bye" is just totally ludicrous stance to take.

So it's good to see some reports coming out where some attempt at actual measurement and assessment of efficacy has been made.

Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|

A total tangent but it's amazing how more palatable "tech enhancement" is in planning, management chats, etc., than anything involving the term "tech debt"

Sadly yes - "When America sneezes, the World catches cold"